The third round of the 108th PGA Championship finished on Saturday evening at Aronimink with a leaderboard whose top line was, for the first time all week, not a shared one. Alex Smalley, the twenty-nine-year-old American who came into the week without a PGA Tour win and with a best major finish of T23, signed for a one-under 68 in the late wave and walked off the eighteenth green at six under for the championship. Matti Schmid, the German who has been on Smalley’s shoulder since the first round, sat two shots back at four under. Jon Rahm, Ludvig Aberg, Nick Taylor and Aaron Rai shared the third-place line on the same number, two shots back of the lead, and the rest of the leaderboard, in a way the course has more or less insisted upon all week, was as crowded as it has been at any major in recent memory. Twenty-two players sat within four shots of the lead heading into Sunday. Twenty-six were within two shots of the cut line at one over. The shape was the shape Aronimink has been producing on every page of its scorecard for four days.
The round Smalley played
The number on Smalley’s card on Saturday looks tidier than the round was. He started the day as a co-leader with Maverick McNealy and bogeyed three of his first four holes. A player without a Tour win, in the company of a player without a major win, with the world’s longer names creeping up the leaderboard on the front nine, would have been forgiven for treating the next thirteen holes as a long apology. He did not. He played his last fourteen holes in four under, with four birdies to one bogey, and produced the kind of even-tempered back nine on Moving Day that the course had not been giving to many of the players who had a more obvious claim to it. McNealy, the player he had been sharing the lead with on the first tee, played the same fourteen holes in two over and signed for a 73. The two scorecards, side by side, are the cleanest example of what the course has been asking of the player at the top of the board.
The number Smalley brings to Sunday is not, on its own, the most interesting number on his page. The strokes-gained figures over the first three rounds put him at the top of the field in approach play and inside the top ten in putting. The driver, on a course that has been punishing the slightly errant tee shot, has been the part of the bag he has trusted least and used most. He has missed fewer fairways than half the field. He has played for the safer side of the green on most of the approach shots that asked the question. The round, taken as a whole, is the round of a player whose game travels better than the rankings suggest. The current Official World Golf Ranking has him outside the top hundred. The performance through three rounds at a major has him, by every metric the broadcast cares about, inside the top three.
What the course has been doing
The story Aronimink will be remembered for is the story of the pin sheet and the wind. The greens have firmed up, in the predictable way that greens of this construction do across four days of a major, and the pin positions on Saturday were placed to make the firm greens an actively dangerous proposition. Several of them, on the third, the ninth, the twelfth and the fifteenth, were set on the shoulder of a slope the player could see from the fairway and could not, in the conditions, hold a shot near. The wind, which had sat in single figures on Thursday and had given the morning wave on Friday a soft window in which to play, came up to gusts in the high teens by lunchtime on Saturday and bedded itself in for the afternoon. The combination produced a leaderboard on which players with the cleanest ball-striking and the coolest temperament made up most of the top twenty, and the long hitters, who had had Thursday on their side, found themselves spending Saturday’s back nine in places the architecture had reserved for the lesser play.
Rory McIlroy posted a four-under 66, the second-lowest round of the day, and pulled himself back from the round-two position the blister and the wind had left him in. He sits at three under, three back, and is in the kind of position from which he has, in his career, both walked off with the trophy and walked off the eighteenth wondering what else could have gone wrong. Scottie Scheffler started Saturday on the periphery of the leaderboard, played his middle nine at two under with the putter doing as much as the iron play, and pushed himself back into a four-back position by the close of the round. Xander Schauffele, who spent the week of the press conferences answering questions about confidence rather than form, played a clean 70 and sits three back. Jon Rahm produced the most controlled round of the day at four-under 66 and is the most obvious of the players two shots back to lift the trophy on Sunday.
The pattern the course will close on
The pattern Aronimink has produced is the pattern most demanding-major courses produce in their first week back on the rotation. The leaderboard does not crystallise. The cut line sits at or near level par. The Saturday round produces a dense top twenty rather than a small breakaway group. The winning score, on these conditions, sits in the high single digits under par. Six under, the number Smalley walked off the eighteenth with, is the kind of number that on a typical PGA Tour course is the leader’s number on a Friday afternoon. On this one, on this week, it is the number the field has been trying to chase down for three days and has, by the close of Saturday, been able to put more than four shots in red of only six players.
The version of Sunday in which Smalley walks off the eighteenth green with the Wanamaker Trophy is a version of Sunday that has happened more often in the last decade of the PGA Championship than the betting market would suggest. Three of the last seven winners came into the week ranked outside the top thirty and were not, on a Wednesday press conference, considered serious threats. The version of Sunday in which one of the players two shots back catches him on the front nine is the version the broadcast will be expecting from the moment the leader’s tee shot finds the fairway on the first. The version in which the player at three or four back posts a low number early and forces the lead to play to that number is the version Aronimink, on the evidence of the first three days, has been setting itself up to produce.
What this week has actually been about
The simpler reading of the week, the one the broadcast has, in fairness, mostly been resisting, is that the week has been about the course. The Donald Ross design at Aronimink, in its first major since the 1962 PGA, has set itself up to produce the kind of leaderboard a major should produce. The right players are near the top. The right courses of action have been rewarded. The wrong miss has been punished. The position the leader sits in, at twenty-nine, without a Tour win and without a top-fifteen major to his name, is a position the course has earned for him. The position the field sits in, with twenty-two players within four shots of a single-stroke lead, is the position the course has earned for them. The trophy that will be lifted on Sunday will be lifted by the player who plays the next eighteen holes the way the architect has been quietly asking the field to play it for the previous seventy-two.
The next eighteen holes are the part of the championship the previous fifty-four were a setup for. The Sunday at a major has, in nearly every modern iteration, been the round on which the winner is the player whose three previous rounds resemble most closely the kind of round he can produce on the closing nine. The three rounds Smalley has produced are not the rounds the broadcast was expecting. They are, on the evidence of Saturday’s back nine, exactly the kind of rounds that travel.