Aaron Rai has always been the nice guy in two gloves. Now he’s the nice guy in two gloves with a PGA Championship win
By Dana O’Neil, CNN
Newtown Square, Pennsylvania (CNN) — After he signed his card, the one that made official his in-the-clubhouse best 9-under for the PGA Championship, Aaron Rai grabbed the hand of his wife, Gaurika Bishnoi.
The two ambled around the metal gates that keep out the people who don’t belong in the official areas, circled around the paved walkway and made their way toward the Aronimink clubhouse.
As they walked, his right hand in her left, their arms swung back and forth casually as if they were out for an ordinary Sunday evening stroll – happily oblivious to the two cameramen walking backward in front of them, the phalanx of photographers trailing them, the guy dangling a boom mic and the Goodyear blimp hovering nearby.
As if any of this was normal. In the course of one afternoon, Rai eagled nine, sunk an absurd 50-odd foot putt at 17, mastered a course that seemed unconquerable, kept at bay a pack of baying wolves that included Jon Rahm, Justin Thomas, Cameron Smith, Rory McIlroy and Xander Schauffele, and won the PGA Championship, his first major and only second PGA Tour win of his career.
All that while putting to bed an Englishman’s hex on this particular tournament. The list of past English champions begins with Jim Barnes, winner in 1916 and 1919. It’s now bookended with Rai.
And yet – as his putting, driving and shot making is assessed in the search for the secret sauce of Aaron Rai – it is that very walk with his wife that makes clear why he, ranked 44th in the world coming into suburban Philadelphia, leaves as the champion.
“It’s such an amazing journey to get to this point,’’ Rai said. “There’s so much that goes into it. It’s still hard for me to get my head around it because I also think what’s required to perform in a tournament like this, it is very different. … Having a larger view of things, a larger perspective on the journey to this point, you have to stay extremely present, extremely focused on what’s in front of you. But to try and reflect on it, it’s absolutely incredible.”
Mr. Nice Guy becomes a major champion
Aronimink put the world’s best golfers in a vice this week and squeezed the whines right out of them. Difficult pin placements. Impossible greens. Too little strategy off the tee. Protected scoring. Too much bunching on the leaderboard. Mrs. Lincoln had better reviews about the play than the golfers had about the course here.
Rai just put his head down and played golf. It is what he does. It is how he was raised. It is how he exists. Simple, true, straight as an arrow, impossibly hard to rattle, equally hard to impress, Rai is universally referred to as Mr. Nice Guy on the Tour.
That can sound damning with faint praise, with his lack of wins, but people actually mean it. He is nice.
He is a man with no social media footprint, who tries hard not to fist pump after a good shot, lest his peers think he’s trying to show them up. He does not drink, does not smoke, does not party. He met his wife when her brother served as his volunteer at an event and his mom lined up a meet-cute.
In his 14 years on the Tour, he has afforded himself one splurge – a right-hand driving Honda Integra sports car straight out of “Fast and Furious” and imported from England to his Jacksonville, Florida, home.
It all adds up to the one thing Aronimink demanded that no one else seemed to master here: Calm. While Rahm inadvertently tossed rough at a volunteer and McIlroy doubled over his club after errant shots, Rai put his head down and took the tournament one hole at a time – even as his round gained momentum, the crowds around him swelled, the Goodyear blimp parked itself overhead and drones started zipping above him.
Yet for someone with no muscle memory for this sort of fame, Rai seemed entirely unfazed. When he drained that ridiculous putt on 17th, a putt meriting a fist pump, Rai stayed true to himself. Admittedly dazed that the ball found the bottom of the cup, he nonetheless did little more than wave casually at the crowd.
“He’s very good at staying in his own little bubble,’’ Rai’s caddie, Jason Timmis, told CNN Sports. “He knows what’s going on around him, but there’s no emotion. He doesn’t get angry or mad. He’s very, very relaxed.’’
The one with the gloves
Rai comes off as an overnight success story, as if the Cinderella Carl Spackler walked out of “Caddyshack” and onto the green.
At various points during the Sirius XM broadcast, announcers mistakenly called him Allen and earlier in the week, more than a few people pondered the proper pronunciation of his last name – as in Ray or Rye (it’s rye).
Except Rai’s overnight has been a lifetime in the making.
Raised in Wolverhampton, in the section of England the Brits refer to as the Midlands, Rai’s dad was a serious tennis player but took one look at his son’s swing and realized he had a golfer on his hands. Rather than try to force his son to follow his passion, Amrik Singh started reading books about golf, and father and son would dial up Tiger Woods tapes on the old VHS as a way of instruction.
Rai’s mom, Dalvir, worked at a hospital as a mental health nurse and picked up extra cash as an aerobics instructor, all to help fund their son’s newfound and rather expensive hobby. A set of Titleist clubs purchased for the 7-year-old golfer was way beyond the family’s means, so they made sure to keep them pristine. Singh would clean the grooves with a pin and rub baby oil on the face of the clubs.
His dad also put covers on the irons.
As Timmis carried his bag off the 18th, the irons were covered like always. Those covers and his two golf gloves, were, up until about 6:30 Sunday night, about the only two things Rai was known for.
“’Oh, you’re the one with the gloves,’ that’s what we’d hear,” Bishnoi said.
That each has roots in his upbringing only fortifies just who Rai is and why he just won. Back when they were trying to piecemeal together a career, the family reached out to local newspapers to get the word out about Rai’s burgeoning career. A local man offered up a pair of all-weather gloves, perfect for the less than balmy conditions of English golf.
Rai slid two on his hands and never stopped.
Climbing a mountain he never meant to summit
His unorthodoxy did not make life easy. Sticking out is never easy, especially in a sport like golf, where most prodigies are fed their daily dose of lessons with a silver spoon.
Rai didn’t mix with a lot of junior golfers coming up and by the time he was ready for club golf, he was so comfortable in his own skin that it never dawned on him to change.
“I felt I was strong enough in why I did certain things to be able to continue to move that forward,” he said. “I knew the reasons why I do them I believe in the reasons why I do them.”
There is something to be said for conviction. Golf is a merciless sport, requiring a goldfish’s memory and a bull’s stubbornness. Rai twice had to earn back his card through Q school. He didn’t win his first event of any kind until 2015 or land his first PGA Tour victory until 2024. There were more often reasons to stop than continue forward.
And yet he had this weird gift of belief. It wasn’t something he said out loud. Early in their relationship, Bishnoi questioned why he never spoke about winning a tournament, let alone a major. She wondered if he stopped believing.
“He just didn’t want to put that pressure on himself,’’ Bishoi said.
She respected it, but she also thought a little positive affirmation wouldn’t hurt. She started telling him that good things would happen, that his stoic belief and her optimism were going to manifest themselves.
On Saturday night, after Rai moved into a tie for second, Rai and Bishnoi sat in their car together before moving into their hotel. He said out loud what worried him, that if he won, things would change. His quirkiness would no longer just be quirky; it would be out there for public consumption. The fame he never craved would suddenly come his way.
She assured him that they would still be themselves no matter what happened. That they would return to the same house and live the same life and be the same people.
Twenty-four hours later, Bishnoi walked out of the clubhouse with her husband, still hand in hand, and onto the 18th green. With the entire circumference surrounded by a sea of humanity, Bishnoi hung back, her hands clasped in front of her mouth, while Rai went and lofted the Wanamaker Trophy above his head.
She followed him into the news conference, quietly filming video while he spoke. Asked how he intended to celebrate, Rai paused, unsure how to answer. From her seat at the front of the press conference, Bishnoi said, “He’ll probably have Chipotle.’’
Rai nodded. “Yeah, I do like Chipotle on the road.’’
When the presser ended, the two walked out. He grabbed her hand.
Everything had changed, but nothing was different.
The-CNN-Wire
™ & © 2026 Cable News Network, Inc., a Warner Bros. Discovery Company. All rights reserved.
