PGA Championship 2026: The tree controversy is a very PGA thing, and also entirely missing the point

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. For a century, those trees were the ballast, keeping the elite ball-strikers honest. Without them, what remains is a masterpiece that is gorgeous to look at, meticulously restored, and quite possibly ready to be dismantled by a field that hits it 340 yards and hasn't feared a tight tee shot in years.

"It's basically bash driver down there and then figure it out," McIlroy said. "When these traditional golf courses take a lot of trees out, it makes strategy not as much of a concern off the tee. I think about Oak Hill in 2023, here—same kind of thing." Schauffele was more pointed. "When I hear certain designers say they're restoring a course to 1915, I'm like, 'It probably takes a hundred years for a nice tree to grow—and now you're pulling it out just to say it was there before,'" he said. "People keep talking about distance, but just put trees on a course."

2275357173

Icon Sportswire

They're not wrong. The trees served a purpose, and their absence is a real architectural concession to a game that already asks too little of its best players off the tee. That critique deserves to be taken seriously ... and then separated from what this week actually is.

The trees-as-storyline development is a very PGA Championship thing. This is the major that has produced more genuine oddities than the other three combined. We needn't travel far back to recall a certain World No. 1 departing a golf course in handcuffs. Strange things happen here, and the strangeness tends to stick. So yes, panic about 20-under winning scores is entirely real this week, the collective anxiety already forming before a single shot has been struck. To that, the appropriate response is: relax. Low scoring is a symptom, not a disease, and the PGA Championship has survived weirder.