Aaron Rai agrees with PGA about playing without preferred lies

The English scores 67 in his first round at Quail Hollow in the PGA Championship 2025

Aaron Ry is with us now at the 107th PJ Championship. Aaron, a solid start for you today. How would you summarize your first round? Yeah, very solid. Um, drove it extremely well, which which I think is crucial around this course. Um, hit a lot of nice iron shots and the shots we missed felt like we put them in good spots um to at least have opportunities to have looks at pars. Um, and bogeies are not going to be bad scores around this place. So, um, yeah, I think just keeping the round nicely ticking over, um, making some nice par saves and just having a lot of opportunities, I think was key to playing a good round today. That’s great. Thanks. We’ll take some questions. Starting with Jim. Erin, the first thing I see is a circle on your score at 16. How does one birdie? How’d you birdie that hole? Uh, got really fortunate there. Um, didn’t hit the best of second shots. had a really great lie um out of the right hand rough um I think was just hoping to hit a good chip probably with inside 10 ft um and just was very fortunate for it to go in. Um yeah, definitely a bonus on that hole. Over to Mike 6. And I mean over the course of your last, you know, 10 years, it’s been just like an incredibly steady subtle progression each year. I feel like when you look at strokes and all that, I mean, how would you go through these last 10 years of just kind of like how you’ve been able to keep chipping away to kind of get where you are right now? It’s a good question. Um, I think everyone is always trying to improve and you have to. The game always keeps moving forwards. The standard always keeps getting better year on year. Um, but I think what we’ve tried to do as as a team is to always try and underline all of the good things that are already there in the first place and keep trying to build and try and build in the easiest way possible through the most minimal amount of change possible um and to keep trying to add bits to the game um during the season at the end of the seasons. Um, and I think that incrementally over a period of time has amounted to to just improvement, which which has been great. Um, obviously I don’t know what the future looks like, but um, yeah, hopefully uh, I’ll try and stay on the same path moving forwards. You you said before that, you know, you turned pro at 17 and you you didn’t know if you were actually ready for that looking back, I guess. What was it about that time that kind of made you realize like, hey, I might not be ready? A little bit of everything really. Um, I’d just come out of school, so I think the life of a touring professional was incredibly different to school first and foremost. Um, I wasn’t particularly long. Um, wasn’t the best at kind of scoring and kind of getting getting my way around the course. So, it just felt I was short in a lot of areas. Um, and I would have started on a tour called the Euro Pro Tour, which was two tours beneath the DP World. Um, and that standard felt incredibly strong at the time. and it just felt like there’s an extremely long way to go to be competitive on that tour and then to keep trying to move forwards past that. So, uh yeah, it felt it felt like I had a long way to a long way to go at that point. Maybe anytime from 17 to 22, I don’t know where like what where you’re at right now, you know, in contention for Ryder Cup teams, in contentions for major championships that that seemed out of reach. Yeah, definitely. Definitely. um because it’s such it’s such a long way away. Um I think being competitive on those satellite tours in the first place felt like a couple of steps away and obviously then to make it to the DP World to make it to the PGA Tour again is is a lot further in the horizon. So um yeah, I tried not to really focus on um steps which were so far ahead of me just because they were not even in in the question at that time. um and just tried to to do my best at the level that I was playing at at the time. Mike seven, Aaron, there were a few guys in here earlier today talking about the impact of mud balls given the soft conditions. I was curious your perspective on that and the decision to play play the ball down today. Yeah. Um I think the the PGA tour and the the PGA of America referees know what they’re doing. They know a lot more than than us as players. So, um, that decision would have been based on the right reasons. Um, there were a couple of spots that were that were pretty wet on the fairways. Um, but that’s to be expected with just how much rain that we’ve had. Um, but I think it’s extremely dry around the greens and the runoffs um are extremely tight. So, I think without playing preferred lies, it brought in the challenge of of the short game a little bit more, which I think is an important part of the course. Um, so yeah, I thought the I thought the decision was was good and the course plays played great overall. Erin, one of the things we heard earlier this week was that this is just going to be a bombers paradise and and all the big hitters are are going to have such a significant advantage and yet at least through one day it doesn’t look like that’s necessarily the case. Any theories as to why that hasn’t necessarily materialized? I think the course definitely played differently today compared to what it did Monday to Wednesday. Um, we had a lot of rain. There was no roll on the fairways. Um, the tea boxes in practice were at the very at the very back. Um, and the greens are extremely firm as well, even though we had a lot of rain. So, um, judging by how practice went the last three days, it seemed like that would be the case. Um, but today was a lot warmer. The ball was definitely traveling. Um, I think if you hit some T- shots on some lower flights, you could get a little bit of chase out of them, maybe 10, 15 yards. Um, so I think between those two things, it kind of gave you an opportunity for some of the more average guys. Instead of hitting five woods and three woods, you were suddenly hitting hybrids and five irons. Um, so it definitely played a little differently today compared to practice. Thanks for your time, Aaron. We appreciate it. Thank you. Cheers.