2026 PGA Championship Recap: Aaron Rai, Aronimink, and a bunched field under the microscope
5/18/20261 hr 49 min
A eventful, punchy, spicy PGA Championship week has come and gone so Brendan and Andy provide a full debrief following Aaron Rai’s win at Aronimink. Andy did show up and there are flowers to be given to Rai, whose story and Sunday are worthy of ample praise. They discuss the Sunday overall, and whether it fell flat or was an appropriate cap to what both considered a strong week for the PGA. That trends into a course and setup discussion, which was more of a hot topic than anything this week, and whether it delivered an appropriate major week testing the full range of skills. They are joined by KVV and Joseph LaMagna as well, and run through a Regret Index for players who came close, but could not put a major on the resume, such as Rory, Rahm, JT, Scottie, Ludvig, and a host of others in what was a condensed and chaotic weekend. They have some thoughts on the PGA’s future, upcoming venues, and the superstars as we roll towards Shinnecock and the U.S. Open. They close with a few amusing odds and ends and one big takeaway from what became a very memorable PGA.
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Clips
Transcript preview
First 90 secondsSpeaker 10:00
Now, the shotgun start in golf is full of mathematics. Um, there's a lot of, a lot of setup work that we have to do in order to make a tournament work. So I'm gonna demonstrate to you just exactly how we do a shotgun start here.
Speaker 20:13
And here we go.
Andy Johnson· Host0:16
All right, all right, all right.
Speaker 20:19
Gentlemen, start your engines.
Brendan Porath· Host0:28
[upbeat music] Greetings and welcome to a Sunday edition of the Shotgun Start. It is May 17th. Andy, how we doing?
Andy Johnson· Host0:46
Brendan, I'm doing fantastic, I gotta say. It's just, uh, it's nice. I'm a, I'm a new member of, uh, the Aaron Rai fan club, The Rai Guys, and, uh, I'm just [laughs] ready to talk about our guys' big W today.
Brendan Porath· Host1:02
[laughs] The Rai Guys, is that what we're going with? I thought there'd be some bad puns about, you know, Philly cheese steak on rye and all these things. Um, Aronomink, there was some of that stuff going on. Uh, I think you need to explain yourself. Are you an intellectual fraud, hypocrite, when you suggested you would not show up for this podcast on our Saturday night edition. Believe you called Aaron Rai worst case [laughs] scenario.