Scheffler leads PGA Championship after brutal Aronimink opening round
Aronimink swallowed most of the field, but Scottie Scheffler turned a punishing par 70 into a 67 and took a share of the PGA Championship lead.
Aronimink Golf Club made the first round look like a survival test, not a shootout, and Scottie Scheffler was one of the few players who came away in control. On a course stretched to 7,394 yards, with thick rough and sloping greens built to reward precision and nerve, only 32 of the 156 players finished under par after the opening round of the 108th PGA Championship.
That separation mattered as much as the leaderboard itself. Scheffler’s 3-under 67 left the defending PGA Championship winner in a seven-way tie for first with Aldrich Potgieter, Stephan Jaeger, Min Woo Lee, Ryo Hisatsune, Martin Kaymer and Alex Smalley. He posted five birdies and two bogeys, a tidy card on a layout that repeatedly punished the kind of small mistakes elite players usually expect to survive. For Scheffler, it was the first time he had led or shared the lead after the first round of a major championship.
That is the larger story Aronimink posed on day one: the course separated those who could stay patient from those who unraveled. The restored Donald Ross design asked for disciplined placement off the tee and a measured touch into greens that tilted away from the player. The difficulty was evident almost immediately as many of the world’s best struggled to adapt to the shape of the golf course, the rough and the pace of the putting surfaces. Scheffler, whose game has often been defined by relentless precision, handled the challenge better than almost anyone.
He now has a chance to become the first player since Brooks Koepka in 2019 to successfully defend the Wanamaker Trophy, a task made more difficult by the championship’s setting. Aronimink is hosting the PGA Championship for the first time since 1962 and only the second time in its history, and the course has already shown it can expose elite players. In 2018, when Aronimink hosted the KPMG Women’s PGA Championship, Brittany Lincicome and Kelly Tan shared the first-round lead at 3-under 67 in windy conditions.
The interest around the Philadelphia region has matched the tension on the course. The PGA of America said coverage stretched across CBS Sports, ESPN, ESPN+, CBS Sports HQ and GOLF Channel, while Championship+ grounds tickets for Thursday through Sunday were already sold out. On a day when Aronimink did most of the talking, Scheffler answered with the sort of round that suggested poise can still travel farther than raw power when a major championship turns severe.
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