PGA Championship 2024: Scottie Scheffler, Brooks Koepka, Rory McIlroy enter riding simultaneous heaters

The second major championship on the golf calendar is here and the stories heading into the 2024 PGA Championship are plentiful. What’s most interesting about this year’s tournament is how different the sport’s landscape looks just a month after the 2024 Masters kicked off the major championship campaign.

Brooks Koepka is once again in the spotlight. Scottie Scheffler is going for something historic. Rory McIlroy joins the two men as a trio of golfers entering the PGA, each having won their last two matches. And there’s also this young man – maybe you’ve heard of him, Ludvig Åberg. Turns out he’s also pretty good at major championship golf.

Add McIlroy’s quest for a career grand slam, Tiger Woods and Phil Mickelson playing in, but probably not playing in, Jordan Spieth’s rollercoaster ride. Suddenly, we have the ingredients for a special week in the 106th edition of this tournament.

2024 PGA Championship Stories

1. Scottie Scam: It still seems a little incomprehensible that, given the way modern golf is structured and how competitive the sport has become, a grand slam could be on the cards. But that’s how well Scheffler has played so far in 2024. He’s won four of his last five starts and is the heavy favorite to make it five of six. Why not? The only mark against Scheffler is that he didn’t play in the Wells Fargo Championship last week, but he has been so dominant every time he he has played that it seems irresponsible not to at least mention the possibility of a true annual grand slam.

Perhaps even more impressive than their winning streak this year is their astonishing record in the majors. In his last 15 attempts – since the beginning of 2020 – he has missed a cut. Everything else was in the top 25, and 10 of them were in the top 10 (including two wins). Here are the top five in strokes gained in majors since the start of 2020 (minimum 20 rounds).

2. Six pack for Brooks? The stratosphere that Koepka, 34, is trying to enter with a second consecutive PGA Championship is dizzying. There are several different ways to look at what Koepka is trying to accomplish, but here’s one that best illuminates what’s at stake for the five-time champion: Since 1980, only one golfer has won six majors by age 34. also one of three golfers to have won the PGA Championship four or more times, another club Koepka is trying to join. You might know that golfer’s name: Tiger Woods.

3. Rory’s mission: McIlroy is chasing his own performance at the 2014 PGA Championship at Valhalla, which remains the last major he won, and Koepka, who captured last year’s PGA Championship to pull one major ahead in his career. Rory was far from playing his best golf this year, but appears to have turned it around over the last month. First, he got it right in the Zurich Classic, teaming with friend Shane Lowry to claim a 25th career victory in New Orleans. And then last week, McIlroy nailed his game at the Wells Fargo Championship, climbing the leaderboard over the weekend and shooting a 65 on Sunday — powered by two eagles on his back nine — to claim his 26th exhibition victory. confines of Quail Hollow in Charlotte.

Further reinforcing McIlroy’s confidence should be this return to the site of one of his four big victories. Combining that with the realization that he is no longer the most decorated golf great of his generation could provide a mental edge. Whether this results in his first big win in a decade will likely depend on a straightened (especially short) iron game.

4. The Swede: Ludvig quickly became a prominent player in men’s professional football. Åberg’s debut at Augusta National was so good that it made us wonder if he could play well now, with real major championship rounds under his belt. He has all the gifts, but you never know how a mega talent will react with the lights on until they are actually on. He has surpassed all expectations so far and has now become a top five favorite.

5. What’s up with Jon Rahm? It was clear at Augusta National that something was wrong. It could be that he signed with LIV Golf thinking he could turn the tide and marry the best in men’s professional football. Since that doesn’t happen – and it still seems very far away – he’s probably feeling unfamiliar emotions that are difficult to reconcile (even with all that money). Is this affecting his game? Hard to say. He has been solid on the LIV Golf Tour, although he played poorly at the Masters. The next courses will be a better test. There are ups and downs, of course. Rahm’s two big wins sandwich a 2022 in which he hasn’t finished in the top 10 at a single major tournament. I have a lot of confidence that he will figure everything out in the long term, but I don’t go into this week thinking that he will certainly compete in what would be his third major in the last four years.

6. The LIV Boys: There are 16 LIV Golf players in this year’s tournament. And while only a few have a legitimate shot at winning, they will receive attention as a whole – particularly because of Talor Gooch’s ridiculous (and now infamous) comments earlier this year: “If Rory McIlroy completes his Grand Slam without some of the best players in the world, there will only be one asterisk”, Gooch told Australian Golf Digest. “It’s just reality. I think everyone wins whenever the majors figure out a way to get the best players in the world there.”

Gooch finally received an invite, and as one of Data Golf’s top 40 players, he deserved it. A big deal was made with this invitation – Gooch and other LIV golfers were also welcomed a year ago – and perhaps not enough was made about how poorly he played in the majors (no top 10 out of 11 starts). On the other hand, not enough attention has been paid to how good Patrick Reed has been in the majors since the start of 2018. He ranks 10th over that span in terms of strokes gained in the four biggest events.

Of course, LIV Golf also boasts heavyweights like Rahm and Koepka. So there is something good and bad about that. Overall, the spotlight will shine on this group, perhaps more than it has in the past, amid Gooch’s comments earlier this year and his first major championship game since winning it.

7. A PGA type? The PGA Championship has in recent years surpassed the US Open as golf’s biggest and strongest test. See the locations: Bethpage, Oak Hill and now Valhalla. Monstrous and difficult courses where driving forever is a skill in which there is a lot of value (some would say also a lot of value). What the PGA of America does with the gross will be interesting, but I suspect it will be similar to last year and several previous iterations. They will have grown up and this will force a kind of pump and pull mentality that, while it may produce a big winner, probably won’t produce the prettiest golf.

8. Passing of the torch? Valhalla is the site of one of the greatest torch relays in modern sporting history. Jack Nicklaus, in his last PGA Championship, played the first two rounds with Tiger Woods, who was on the verge of winning his third consecutive major. “I knew I was getting to where I couldn’t compete, [and] This was brought to me very abruptly, in 2000, at Valhalla, when I played with Tiger”, Nicklaus recently said. “I’ve noticed this before, but this was… boom! Right in your face. Thirty-six holes of playing with him and seeing how well he played, how he just dominated what was going on. I’ve done this before, but I don’t don’t do that now.”

Woods, 48, isn’t at the stage of his career now that Nicklaus was when he started at age 60, but Tiger isn’t that far off. There won’t be any literal passing of the torch like there was in 2000 (or nearly literal, see photos below), but we can look at this week as a metaphorical week if Scheffler is able to grab his second major of the year and continue to roll toward at least some of Tiger’s records.

9. Is Wyndham Clark real? It’s one thing to go out and win some big events and win your first major. It’s quite another to do two of the four majors at the same time. That’s what Clark will try to do. For some reason, he doesn’t get the same respect or attention as some of his peers, but the season following his US Open victory a year ago was excellent. If it weren’t for Scheffler, he would have had 2-3 more wins. Clark should thrive on this golf course due to his ball speed, and a second big win in his last four starts – before heading to Pinehurst looking to defend his US Open title – would be a historic revelation.

10. Jordan Spieth Scam: This is a different kind of slam than the one Scheffler is attempting, but Spieth has one in play as he will try to join Woods, Nicklaus, Gary Player, Ben Hogan and Gene Sarazen as the only golfers to win all four majors at the same time. throughout their careers. Here’s a spoiler as it pertains to Spieth: That’s not going to happen. He’s been mediocre at the PGAs (arguably his worst specialty) and downright bad on the PGA Tour lately. It’s such a huge and important potential feat that it requires coverage, but the chances of it actually happening are too high to give it much weight throughout the week.