Two gloves, zero theatrics, one unforgettable Major for Aaron Rai

Later, when the engraver is probably still scratching your name on historic silver, you stand and shuffle and wait to be called up. It’s a wonderful moment, for it’s the only time all day you look slightly tentative. You’ve practised swings all your life, but who prepares for victory ceremonies at a Major? The field of play is empty, players gone home or to the locker room, and it’s only you now.

Aaron Rai. PGA Championship winner. A golfer apart.

Do you, 31 and English, wake up and know this is going to be your day? How can you? Are you going to print out the leaderboard and frame it? You must. T2: Jon Rahm; T4: Justin Thomas; T7: Cameron Smith, Rory McIlroy, Xander Schauffele; T10: Justin Rose, Patrick Reed. Fifteen Majors between them, imagine, yet at No. 1 is you, the relatively unknown English son of immigrants from Kenya and India.

In 1919, Edgar Rice Burroughs publishes Jungle Tales Of Tarzan, and the last Englishman wins the PGA title. Jim Barnes is a tall fellow, of whom the Hall of Fame writes, he “often kept a sprig of clover or grass clamped tightly between his teeth”. You just grit yours. Quietly, undramatically, consistently. Even when you roll in a bending 68-foot putt at the 17th, you don’t let out a whoop. You’re not a showman, just eventually a showstopper.

You’d won once on the US PGA Tour, but this is a Major and everyone feels its suffocation on Sunday. Don’t think of the outcome, sports psychologists insist, but the leaderboard tells you you’re close, in trophy-touching distance. So how do you not consider winning? How do you not think of the only thing you’ve come here for? But you’re a study in control.

The possibility of a life altering on a single day is unnerving and from it mistakes leak out. The great shot glitters on the highlight reel, but it’s the ordinary error, little crumbs of mistakes, which mostly separates the field. Errors in speed, judgment, swing, decision-making. Rahm gesticulates as a putt breaks the wrong way. McIlroy winces as a drive settles in ligament-testing rough.

Is this luck, fortune, the gods? No, this is sport, its mysteries so profound that even a crystal ball gazer can’t read them. This is also golf and its wonderful democracy, where so many people have a chance at Majors, as Brian Harman discovered and J.J. Spaun and Gary Woodland. This isn’t head-to-head tennis, with Jannik Sinner waiting to absorb your talent and floor you with his, this is an open field, no one to impede you but yourself, so go find your best. In the end, McIlroy turns out to be human and you super.

Rocky, that soppy, rugged movie, was set in these parts, in Pennsylvania. Legend has it that Sylvester Stallone wrote his improbable script in three-and-a-half days. You write yours across four. He lost his fight against Apollo Creed, of course, you win yours against the world. You may need to sit down to digest that.

Your face speaks of nothing all day but focus, till you bury it in your wife’s embrace later. She, Gaurika Bishnoi, is an accomplished golfer, too, and she knows what this took. Not 72 holes but a lifetime of grind. And so this isn’t about the US$3.69 million (S$4.72 million) you win, it’s about your family who supports you, it’s about your dad who cleaned the grooves on your irons with a pin and taught you the value of things, it’s about hard days at ranges, it’s about belief held on to (you’ve had a troublesome back and neck lately), it’s about love for a teasing game.

You earned this.

“Humble” is the first word people direct at you. It’s precisely that characteristic which two journalists, who’ve interacted with you, mention to me after your win. Humble is perhaps what keeps you grounded all day, even when you have three bogeys in the first eight holes, even when you make one eagle and four birdies in your last 10.

Now the Ryder Cup captain will call. Lifetime exemptions to the PGA Championship have been secured and five-year ones to the other Majors. Interview requests will mount. The immigration officer back home may grin. Your face is in the headlines and your name on a trophy. Introductions will now begin with “Major winner...”. Humility is going to be the perfect armour in this new life.

Every golfer wants this day to come but not everyone is ready when it does. The weight of opportunity is unsettling. And yet you don’t flinch. You find fairways and hit greens, all those simple, everyday things which become exponentially difficult as the holes run out. 

People talk a lot about the two gloves you wear. It was a habit apparently developed to keep your hands warm in the English winter, but maybe you were also just getting ready for this day. When chance came and you didn’t fumble. Just held it tightly and firmly and majestically in your talented grip.