Aaron Rai is not the PGA Championship winner you expected. And that's OK!

NEWTOWN SQUARE, Pa. – The beauty of it all, at the end of the day and at the end of this 108th PGA Championship, is that AI can't touch it. Along those same lines, you can spend all the money you want on advertising, you can do whatever you want on Instagram and X, and you can YouTube yourself until you're blue in the face.

But on Sunday night in the big time, as this cross country has proven time and time again, guns are guns, points are points, lies are lies, weather is weather – and nothing is for sale. Live golf is a place where speculation markets can go to waste. How cool is that?

This PGA Championship was not won by Jon Rahm, Cameron Smith, Rory McIlroy, Xander Schauffele, Justin Rose, Patrick Reed, Matt Fitzpatrick, Scott Scheffler, Jordan Spieth or 54-year-old Padraig Harrington, to give you a full list of major winners who finished under the category here. It was won by Aaron Rai, a hard-working 31-year-old Englishman of Indian descent who plays on the PGA Tour and lives in Jacksonville, Fla. He earned the right to lift the Wanamaker Trophy the old fashioned way. He ignored it.

Rai won by three over Rahm, also 31. In next year's European Ryder Cup team rankings, no one gets between these two guys. Appearance and style is another thing. Rahm's beard alone is worth a half shot on any Sunday, just as Rory McIlroy's down-the-fairway strut is worth something. Rai, with his slender body and dignified manner, with a golf glove in his left and right hand, will not make other professionals tremble on their way from the first to the first green. But Rai's rounds at Aronimink were 70, 69, 67 and 65. This lesson by Donald Ross played. hardfour days straight. He played solid golf.

“It definitely feels like a journey,” says Rai triumphantly, in a British manner pointing to his long journey from the working-class suburbs of Birmingham, England, to this leafy suburb of Philadelphia. “Everyone in this industry has a journey to share, and I'm no different.” What a selfless and modest thing to say. One thing this man is not, for sure, is the national team brakeman.

This victory did not come out of nowhere. (Except maybe in this sense: Rai played in the third-to-last group of the day, not the two most likely to produce a winner. Then again, when the leaders are stacked like sardines in a can for three rounds, as they were here, winners can come from almost any first time.) Rai turned pro at age 17 and has spent 14 years playing the world and getting better over the years and miles.

Gary Player, the great South African golfer who won the 1962 PGA Championship here, also turned 17. The actor is now 90 years old and was at the awards ceremony on Sunday night, wearing a blood red blazer and smiling like a grandfather. The player always celebrates the game of the world and the unexpected ways to go public. He welcomed Aaron Rai to the golf course with a standing ovation.

Maybe you didn't have a Rai in your office pool. Maybe you weren't talking about him at the bar on Saturday night. That's not his fault. The opposite of that. That is what we celebrate here. The Masters was won by Belfast's career-class son. McIlroy has a well-known journey in the game, but every golfer, professional or amateur, has a journey story to share. You can always ask other golfers about their starts. It will always produce an interesting answer. Aaron Rai started on the par-3 course near his family home. His parents would take him there.

For the better part of 100 years, male major prize winners were exclusively white. Then came Vijay Singh, Tiger Woods, Michael Campbell, JJ Spaun, now Aaron Rai. One day and not too long from now this will be nothing at all. Until then, it's worth noting, because this game is better when people from every possible background, and from every corner of the world, have access to it. You won't win big points if you don't have a place to start playing. Aaron Rai started playing at 3 Hammers Golf Complex. He succeeded in Aronimink.

He was at the awards ceremony with his wife, Gaurika Bishnoi, who was also a professional golfer. If his Indian name does not offend your tongue, you can always practice it. That's up to you. On Saturday night, as it got dark, Rai was rehearsing alone at the short theater here. No caddy, no bag, no entourage. Just one golfer wearing two gloves playing pitch shot after pitch with one club.

Maybe Rai will win more majors, maybe not. We can promise you this: He's not a fluke winner. He is not a flash in the pan. He just wasn't the guy you expected to win.

His manner is charming. In victory, he spoke about his wife, shaking. He talked about his parents and siblings and their sacrifices for his golf. He talked about his sponsor – not a company but a real person, a man named Shabir Randereenot, a sort of second father to Rai. He talked about the game and his approach to it. If you're looking for a new golf hero, without a sense of entitlement, we point you to this new name in the Wanamaker Trophy.

“There's a lot of hard work and discipline that goes into getting the skills to get better,” said the winner of the 108th PGA Championship Sunday night. “Nothing is a given in this game.”

He talked about the focus golf requires, the attention it requires, the lessons in humility it provides. Humility, Aaron Rai said, was one of golf's core values, and at the core of his life, too.

Michael Bamberger welcomes your comments at [email protected]