Scottie Scheffler does not, by his own admission, get off to good starts in 2026. The world No. 1 had let the leader board slip away in the first 36 holes at every event he has played this calendar year — including a second-place finish at Cadillac after starting four shots back. On Thursday at Aronimink Golf Club, that pattern flipped. Scheffler ran the back nine in 32, signed for a 3-under 67, and walked into Friday sharing the Round 1 lead at the 108th PGA Championship.
For all the majors he has played, it was the first time he had taken a share of the outright lead after Round 1 of a major.
"Yeah, I mean, I think the emphasis would be share of the lead," Scheffler said. "I think there's like six or seven guys up there and it's a really tight leaderboard. So at this moment it's anybody's tournament."
The 67 looked nothing like the player who has been doing damage control on Thursdays through April. Scheffler hit 13 of 14 fairways at a course built around precision off the tee, found the green he needed, and dragged a putter that has been quiet for months into double figures of feel.
"Definitely the best start I've gotten off to this year, maybe besides American Express maybe," Scheffler said. "Going into the weekend, when you look at the Masters and Hilton Head and Cadillac, finishing second was probably not all that bad from where I was starting the weekend. So definitely nice to get off to a better start this week."
Aronimink's defence sits on the greens, not the tee box, and Scheffler clocked early that scoring would be a balance of finding fairways and accepting that the pins on Aronimink's Donald Ross putting surfaces leave little forgiveness.
"I think around this golf course there's a lot of runups on the greens and they put the pins on some of the high points," Scheffler said. "So your scores are definitely going to be lower if you hit the ball in the fairway. But it's still really, really difficult to make birdies. You hit some really nice iron shots in there to 10, 15 feet and then you got putts with a ton of break on them. The golf course, especially on the greens, is quite challenging."
"There's a ton of slope on the greens and that putt in particular on 14, it was like the pin was on the very highest point of the green," Scheffler said. "I just watched Fitzy's putt break right to left and he missed it on the left side, and so I played at what I felt was right centre, and it broke pretty severely to the right. So there's just not much you can do there other than laugh. That's part of the game. Sometimes you get good and bad breaks, and I holed a couple long putts today. Anytime you're able to do something like that, you take it. You gotta take the good with the bad."
He also took it well from the gallery. Aronimink sits 25 minutes from Philadelphia, and a major championship pulling a Philly Eagles-soaked crowd was always going to test the loyalties of an avowed Dallas Cowboys fan. Scheffler, who has spoken about his Cowboys fandom in pressers for years, got the full Philly experience on Thursday.
"I got chirped a lot more than I expected for being a Cowboys fan," Scheffler said. "But it was all in good fun. I got a kick out of it. The fans were quite funny today. Philly is definitely a sports city."
He is now in the unfamiliar position of leading rather than chasing. Scheffler sits at -3 alongside Aldrich Potgieter, Min Woo Lee, Stephan Jaeger, Justin Thomas, Martin Kaymer and Ryo Hisatsune in the early co-lead group at Aronimink. With Friday's wave switch sending him out into the worst of the forecast wind, the test now is whether his rhythm survives a course expected to firm up across the weekend.
For one round, it has. And for one round, the player who has been scratching to a Sunday-only level all year has the start he has been chasing since January.
"It's nice to get off to a good start," Scheffler said. "Get some rest tonight and wake up and do more of the same tomorrow."