What a PGA Championship would mean to Sunday’s contenders

A win at TPC Harding Park on Sunday would be career-changing for the top contenders

Winning a major championship can change a golfer’s career. For how many missed cuts, wayward shots, and long stretches of struggle they experience afterward, they could always say for one week, one brief moment in time, they beat the best players in the world.

Someone is going to join the illustrious group of major champions on Sunday at the PGA Championship. Seventeen players head into the final round within four shots of the lead and one solid round away from lifting the 27-pound Wanamaker Trophy over their heads. They’re all chasing a career-defining victory, but winning the PGA Championship would mean different things to all of them.

For overnight leader Dustin Johnson, a win would cement his status as a Hall of Famer. Johnson is tied with Tiger Woods for most PGA Tour titles since 2008 with 21. But the knock against him has always been his failure to come through in the sport’s biggest events. For all his colossal talent and success, Johnson has just one major, the U.S. Open in 2016.

This week at TPC Harding Park is the fourth time Johnson has led a major through 54 holes. He’s 0-for-3 in his previous attempts. There’s something different about Johnson this week, though. Perhaps it’s the absence of large galleries that alleviates some of the pressure, but Johnson is playing as well as ever so far this week. He leads the field in strokes gained: putting and is currently on pace for his best week on the greens of his career, major or non-major. He set a new career-high on Saturday with eight birdies in a major championship round, shooting a five-under 65 despite a double-bogey on his card.

Dustin Johnson has a chance to win another major, but some big names are chasing him

One major is nice. Two would elevate him to another level. And all that he has to do is keep playing as he did on Saturday.

“I’ve been in the hunt a bunch of times in a major,” Johnson said. “I’ve got one major, so having that experience is definitely going to be beneficial. All I can do is go out and play my game and shoot the best number I can…If I can do that tomorrow, I’m going to have a good chance coming down the stretch on the back nine.”

Chasing Johnson and two shots behind going into the final round is his fellow ‘Bash Brother,” Brooks Koepka. Koepka saves his best golf for the biggest moments. Of his seven career PGA Tour wins, four of them have come in majors.

A win on Sunday would elevate Koepka to another stratosphere and into the realm of an all-time great. He would be the fastest golfer in history to reach five majors. At 30, he would be the fourth-youngest behind only Tiger Woods, Jack Nicklaus, and Bobby Jones, as heady company as you can get in the annals of golf.

A fifth major would equal the careers of Phil Mickelson and Seve Ballesteros. Only 11 golfers in the last 100 years have won more than five. And Koepka would join Walter Hagen as the only golfers in the 104-year history of the PGA Championship to win three straight titles. No one has won any major three straight times since Peter Thomson at the Open Championship in the 1950s.

It’s that experience that Koepka believes gives him an edge. “Just play solid golf. Just do what I’ve been doing,” he said on Saturday. “I’m right there. Just need a solid round. A lot of the guys on the leaderboard I don’t think have won. I guess DJ’s only won one. A lot of experience is what I can bring to it now that I’ve been in this position quite a few times over the last couple of years.”

Johnson and Koepka are the established names in contention. But there is another group of players for whom winning on Sunday would alter the trajectories of their careers.

Scottie Scheffler was playing the Korn Ferry Tour a year ago. A former top amateur, he won the Korn Ferry Tour finals in 2019 and earned Korn Ferry Tour Player of the Year. The 24-year-old is just one shot back of Johnson, a position he’s never been in his career. His best finish in a major is a tie for 27th at the 2017 U.S. Open, where he was low amateur. He’s never won on the PGA Tour but does have two third-place finishes so far this year, at the Bermuda Championship and The American Express. Scheffler would become the first player to win in his PGA Championship debut since Keegan Bradley in 2011; no American has made a major his first PGA Tour win since Shaun Micheel won the PGA Championship in 2003.

Tied with Scheffler in second place is a player who has had star power written all over him since he joined the tour in 2018. Cameron Champ is a bomber. For all the attention Bryson DeChambeau gets for his long drives, Champ is right there with him, averaging more than 320 yards per drive. He leads the field this week at TPC Harding Park. Champ has a go-for-broke style. He already has two PGA Tour wins but only two other top-10s.

A victory on Sunday would fulfill the promise he showed when he won for the first time at the Sanderson Farms Championship in 2018. It would also be a personal tribute to his grandfather. Mack Champ passed away last October at the age of 78. He picked up golf while serving overseas in the Air Force and passed on his love of the game to his grandson. Mack experienced racism throughout his life and was prevented from playing some courses. But he never let it deter him. His favorite saying was “It’s not where you come from, it’s where you’re going”; his grandson had it stamped on his wedges. Champ would be only the second African-American to win a major.

For Bryson DeChambeau, winning the PGA Championship would revolutionize the game. It would prove his unorthodox methods work on the game’s biggest stages. The analytical DeChambeau made the scientific determination that the best way to succeed on the modern PGA Tour was to hit it as far as you can. So he hit the gym and protein shakes, adding 40 pounds of solid muscle to his frame and more than 20 yards off the tee. He’s never finished better than 15th in a major despite six wins on tour over the last three seasons, but adding the Wanamaker Trophy to his collection would be a game-changing moment.

The other players packed in near the top of the leaderboard have their own motivations heading into Sunday. Like Johnson, former World No. 1 Justin Rose also has only one major in his stellar career. Tommy Fleetwood is still chasing his first win on American soil despite three top-five finishes in majors. Collin Morikawa, at the age of 23, would establish himself as the best young player in the game today. Veteran Englishman Paul Casey hasn’t been this close to winning a major in 16 years; he’s made the most starts in majors, 64, since 2002 without winning.

One of their lives will change on Sunday. All that stands before them and their date with destiny is the thick rough and narrow fairways of TPC Harding Park, and, of course, the other players all chasing the same dream.