Aaron Rai (-18) has won the Wyndham Championship, his first victory on the PGA Tour. However, it’s not a surprising fact. This Englishman of Indian (on his father’s side) and Kenyan (on his mother’s side) origin, the boy with the two gloves, may keep a low profile, not a word louder than another, not a crazy race notable for victory in a major (at least for now), but he arrived at Wyndham as the World Number 48, let’s not forget, and he came from being second in the Rocket Mortgage, seventh in the John Deere and fourth in the Scottish Open. Tomorrow he will climb a few places in the world ranking, which almost allows us to assure that next year he will finally be able to debut in the Masters, the only Major he had left to play.
Rai has been the most stable of the candidates in the long Sunday marathon of 36 holes with which the tournament has closed, with only one bogey in these two rounds and a final card of 64 strokes. And that precisely, stability, is what Max Greyserman (-16) has lacked, who was putting from the street on hole 13 for eagle and with five holes left had the tournament in his hand, with a four-stroke lead, and yet he was going out of bounds on the 14th and ended up signing a crushing quadruple bogey that brought excitement back to the final stretch. Later, on the 16th, par 3, he added up to four putts for double bogey, missing two very short putts, and handed the victory to Rai on a platter.
Aaron Rai arrived very young and like a whirlwind on the European circuit in 2017, after winning three times in eleven attempts in his second season on the Challenge Tour, but in reality all his subsequent success has been based on a progressive evolution, very worked. Let’s say that very few spend more time than him on the practice court. And on the putting green. And in the short game practice area. He is a workaholic who has been slow-cooked, but at the same time always getting good returns from his game. He doesn’t usually count in the pools beforehand, but none of his professional colleagues are surprised when they see him regularly up there. We all know that sooner or later he will be there on a Major Sunday, as if it were nothing, in a threatening second line… Another thing is whether he wins it.
And by the way: where do we place him in the pools of the European Ryder team, now that the qualifying year opens in just a few weeks? Well, it might be reckless to consider him a clear candidate, but it wouldn’t be a surprise if he’s there, messing around. For now, with this victory he has already guaranteed his presence in the designated tournaments of the PGA Tour 2025, which grant many points. Aaron Rai has been slow-cooking his top 50 world, but he still has room for improvement.
Jorge Campillo (-4) has closed the tournament with a card of 68 strokes, although he has not been able to recover too much in the last round after the severe correction he suffered in the third round with those chained triple bogeys. He finishes the season in 134th place in the Fedex Cup and now he has to decide if he is willing to improve such a position in the autumn tournaments, because his first plan was to focus on the European circuit in this last third of the season. There will be time to take stock of this first great adventure of his on the PGA Tour, where he really hasn’t shone because of details.
