PGA Championship 2026: The tree controversy is a very PGA thing, and also entirely missing the point
This major has produced genuine oddities. The trees-as-a-storyline is not a surprise. But relax, the PGA Championship has survived weirder.
NEWTOWN SQUARE, Pa. — Aronimink is beautiful. Pastoral, bucolic, a Donald Ross design that sits on 300 acres of rolling Pennsylvania countryside as though the land willed it into existence.
The kind of place where you post up under some old trees to let the real world recede, and feel the noise beyond the gates go quiet. Metaphorically, that is, because the trees are largely gone now. Cleared over two decades of work amid a trend of Golden Age architecture rebirth, the argument that Ross never intended them to be there, that the canopy that defined the place was a postwar imposition.
However, there's been a vocal counter this week about what that decision will cost. Rory McIlroy said there's no strategy off the tee. Xander Schauffele and Jon Rahm echoed the sentiment, both pointing to the property's aggressive tree removal as having left the course naked and exposed.
The prevailing conversation among players and caddies this week isn't about the rough or the greens or the bunkers. It's about width and how open the corridors are. How forgiving a layout becomes when the trees that once compressed it have been cleared away.
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