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![\"Aaron](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/05\/aaronrai1.jpg\")
<\/a><\/p>\n Aaron Rai isn\u2019t the PGA Championship winner you expected. And that\u2019s OK!<\/a><\/p>\n By:<\/p>\n The Thomases are a golf family. Mike is a lifetime club professional and still tutors his son. His father, Paul, was a lifetime pro, too, and was one of Justin\u2019s favorite people in the world. They\u2019ve sat on clubhouse leads before. Hell, JT won his last major, the 2022 PGA Championship, after waiting nearly an hour for a playoff. The Thomas clan knew what JT knew, which would take a long time for everyone else to know: They weren\u2019t out of it. But his lone bogey on the front nine was glaring at them. And Mother Nature needed to get involved.\u00a0<\/p>\n \u201cI\u2019m hoping to see the wind just start to blow,\u201d Justin said during a 12-minute press conference with reporters. \u201cI need some wind. I need a little help.\u201d<\/p>\n He had the clubhouse lead, which felt good. But he also had something slightly better: the rental\u2013house lead.\u00a0<\/p>\n The Thomases snagged a rental home close to the course this week \u2014 in posh Newtown Square \u2014 and probably paid a pretty penny to do so. There\u2019s a swing set in the backyard JT and his daughter, Molly, played on throughout the week. The Aronimink clubhouse is a massive, gorgeous mess of wood and stone, but it doesn\u2019t compare to the living room with your family. So around 3:49, Justin left the golf course with a bright red duffel slung over his shoulder, driven away in a white courtesy car by Jillian. When would we see him again?\u00a0Might we see them again, like winners do with their partners?<\/p>\n As they drove off, Padraig Harrington<\/a> gave Thomas no chance. \u201c[The lead is] not going to stay at five under, unfortunately for Justin Thomas,\u201d Harrington said. \u201cSomebody is going to get to seven or eight under. Especially as he\u2019s posted that score. They already know what they have to beat.\u201d<\/p>\n That\u2019s the whole deal, right? Most often, pros rip around a course and jockey for position on a leaderboard, well out of eyesight of each other. They can learn a little from the roars of the crowd, but they can learn everything by glancing at the digital leaderboards throughout the property. Thomas didn\u2019t look at a leaderboard until he was in the interview tent.<\/p>\n When Thomas grabbed his first glimpse, he was thinking a cliche that doubled as a coping mechanism: you just never know.<\/p>\n Sam Burns knows. He finished his Sunday at even par and about 90 minutes into JT\u2019s holding pattern. \u201cI had to wait like this when I won Colonial,\u201d Burns said. It was whipping that day, in Fort Worth, much like the wind whipped all week in Philadelphia. Burns began that day seven back and said he waited for three hours that afternoon, ultimately beating Scottie Scheffler in a playoff<\/a> by sinking a 38-footer.<\/p>\n A lot of pros have been through a long wait before a playoff, but three hours is practically unheard of. So much that Burns, it turns out, was fooled by his own memory. Burns barely waited two hours after his round at Colonial, playoff-included. The wait always feels longer than it really is.\u00a0<\/p>\n If Thomas opened Instagram at any point during the final stretch, he would have seen that part of his press conference had started coursing through the internet. He was asked if there\u2019s an art to waiting on the clubhouse lead. And no, there\u2019s no art, he said, but there\u2019s definitely a wrong way of doing it. At the 2016 Travelers Championship, Thomas went out early and posted a 62 for a 12 under total. Thinking he was out of the running, he had sent his caddie to catch a train. He invited his buddy into the clubhouse for lunch, and then proceeded to have four or five beers and watch as a windy afternoon launched him up the leaderboard.\u00a0<\/p>\n \u201cI\u2019ve never not wanted to be in a playoff before,\u201d he said Sunday. \u201cBut I kind of didn\u2019t want to be in a playoff then. That wouldn\u2019t have been a good situation. So I\u2019m not going to [repeat] that, I promise you that.\u201d<\/p>\n Back in Philly, Thomas watched with his family while his caddie, Matt Minister, found his. Minister spent about 45 minutes with a cousin who lives nearby. Then he sat in caddie dining for the next hour of play, at times all by himself.\u00a0<\/p>\n \u201cIt\u2019s so out of your control, it\u2019s actually not really nerve-wracking,\u201d Minister said. True as that may be, Minister had never endured a wait like this in his decades of looping service. He exchanged texts with Thomas throughout, a few hilly miles between them, while everyone in the field took leaps forward and steps back. At 5 p.m., Aaron Rai surprised everyone and eagled his way into a one-shot lead. Minister left caddie dining and found the leather recliners inside the Champions corner of the players locker room.\u00a0<\/p>\n One might think, for how much the entire golf world fixates on these major championships, that the players and caddies at the center of it all might sit around and watch all the horses finish the race. But no. They\u2019re onto whatever is next. Another race. Scottie Scheffler kindly tipped the locker room staff, packed up his trackman and gifted some signed gear to the local policeman who walked with him as security all week. Then he drove off with a big smile. His next tournament starts Thursday.\u00a0<\/p>\n I caught Minister on the edge of the parking lot just as things were getting real. He held a drawstring bag of his belongings, readying to go but obligated to stay just a bit longer. He talked like a caddie, counting up the shots Rai would have to hit to become the next clubhouse leader. Rai was at seven under thru 15 and two clear of Thomas. If he just got through the first two shots on 16, it would be easy from there. (And it was.<\/a>) Thomas had committed to returning when the final few groups reached the 14th hole, and before long he was back at Aronimink, same pink pants, same white top, same red duffel in tow.\u00a0He was ready to warmup.<\/p>\n How were the last three hours?\u00a0I asked Thomas around 6:30 p.m. He had showered and changed into all black, dragging a suitcase toward his courtesy car.<\/p>\n \u201cIt was weird, man,\u201d he began. How could it not be? So close and so far, on the leaderboard and in the neighborhood. Rooting for wind that isn\u2019t in the forecast. <\/p>\n In the end, Thomas\u2019 three-hour wait ended in transit. The rental home was just a few minutes from the golf course, but it\u2019s amazing how much can happen in a few minutes at a major championship. The rental home was just far enough away.<\/p>\n \u201cThe time between leaving my [rental home] and when I got here,\u201d Thomas said, \u201cAaron had gone birdie-birdie.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cI was like, Oh, wow. It really is over now.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"NEWTOWN SQUARE, Pa. \u2014 Justin Thomas has competed in hundreds of pro golf tournaments, which means his father,…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":650444,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[71],"tags":[427,99],"class_list":["post-650443","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-golf","tag-golf","tag-sports"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/650443","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=650443"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/650443\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/650444"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=650443"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=650443"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=650443"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
\n Michael Bamberger <\/a><\/p>\n