Best bets
Ever since it switched from matchplay in the late 1950s, the USPGA has been regarded as the most minor of the Majors but this week we have a heavyweight clash between the two greatest golfers of our time, a one-time great, Jordan Spieth, trying to “do a Rory” and complete a career Grand Slam, McIlroy himself dreaming of a unique same-year Slam, and LIV renegades ready to shoot from the hip on ‘Green Mile’ monster Quail Hollow at Charlotte, North Carolina.
What’s minor about that? And with the betting centred almost to the exclusion of anyone else on the mouth-watering clash between world No. 1 Scottie Scheffler, fresh from a 31-under annihilation of the Byron Nelson opposition, and the hottest golfer on the planet itching to add to a sensational 2025 with a second Major to regain the top spot, there’s plenty of juicy each-way value around for punters who don’t believe it to be a two-horse race.
With acres of course form available thanks to Quail Hollow having not only been the home of the Wells Fargo Championship for many years but also the venue for the 2017 USPGA and 2022 Presidents Cup, there’s every encouragement to have a decent bet.
Let’s deal with the two principals first. Fitzdares can’t split Scheffler and McIlroy – they are both 4/1 – but shouldn’t Rory be clear favourite on a course Jordan Spieth jocularly refers to as the “Rory McIlroy Country Club”? That’s because Rory is a four-time winner, three of those victories by massive margins, four, five and seven shots.
Spieth is referencing the 36-year-old Northern Irishman’s enduring love affair with this long 7626-yard par 71, a grand traditional (1961) course restructured in 1997 when the Green Mile label was coined for its fearsome trilogy of closing holes and now, after more recent modifications, bending even more to being bullied by Rory’s extravagant driving which can take fairway bunkers at 320 yards out of play.
It was after all where McIlroy won for the first time on US soil as a curly-topped kid far removed from the powerful, honed athlete he is today. It is a relatively uncomplicated course where he could simply let rip, then spin the ball to a stop on receptive greens which held no fears for him with putter in hand. It has remained that way since with further triumphs in 2015, 2021 and 2024 and one near miss when a Rickie Fowler birdie edged him in a 2012 playoff.
He doesn’t always win there of course, missing the cut in his 2011 title defence and only 22nd and over par when the course was toughened up for the 2017 PGA in the years when what was then played as the final Major in August and Justin Thomas’s winning score was only eight under.
Yes, he’s been defeated ten times there, but the wins-to-runs ratio is still phenomenal and now he has finally achieved the Slam goal that bugged him for 11 years, he is, as he says, “home free” with a mindset geared to mopping up a good few more Majors before he hangs up his boots.
Scheffler is just as hungry for Majors, but he’s never bothered with Quail Hollow until he had to, in the Presidents Cup, where he had a stinker, winning only half a point out of four and losing in the singles to Sebastian Munoz. That wasn’t the Scottie we put on a pedestal after nine wins last year. After a delayed start to this campaign when he cut his hand on a broken wine glass when making ravioli at Christmas, he suffered eight defeats before getting off the mark last time out in Texas, a victory that could hardly have been better timed or more needed.
Of the two, Rory has the superior credentials as a course specialist and surely, whoever you back, it’s pretty obvious McIlroy has to be on the team too. Yet I’ll take them both on with Thomas who won the first of his two USPGAs at Quail Hollow and is in a rich vein of form, having ended a drought dating back to 2022 with victory at Hilton Head and going close on Sunday when he couldn’t quite catch Sepp Straka, the 40/1 winner of the Truist Championship in Philadelphia. That was JT’s third time as a runner-up in a year that gets better and better now that he’s cured the putting problems which plagued him for 18 months.
At 309 yards, he’s right up there off the tee too and has already proved this is a good course for him. It must boost his confidence that both his Major victories have come at the PGA. If he can’t win, JT will be rooting for his great pal Spieth who arrived at Quail Hollow eight years ago having just won our Open and only one Major short of completing the set.
Nothing has changed. He could do no better than T28 that week and has not won a Major since. There have been signs he is still a force to be reckoned with at top level but then he’ll do something stupid and we’ll all say “ah, that’s good old Jordan for you”. Once the most gifted golfer in the world, now the most frustrating. I would be delighted to see him join McIlroy as a career Slammer but will believe it when I see it.
Overdue a Major is Patrick Cantlay, a much longer hitter than his silky-smooth swing might suggest and showing his best form of the year when a fast-finishing fourth in Philly. I expect him to be in the mix along with Ludvig Aberg who has a game tailor-made for Quail Hollow plus a victory under his belt at the Genesis and a real Major mentality – the young Swede has played in only five but finished second, seventh and 12th in three of them.
Xander Schauffele is the defending champion beating DeChambeau in a thriller but lost eight weeks of 2025 because of a rib injury. He was runner-up in the last two Wells Fargos so is a strong contender on course form as well as winner of two of the last three Majors but I don’t get the impression he is quite happy enough with his game since his comeback to fancy his chances.
Golfers who have won this year merit serious consideration and that puts the likes of Straka, Min Woo Lee and Viktor Hovland in the frame. Norwegian star Hovland, second and third in the last two PGAs, is of particular interest as his Valspar triumph came out of the blue following a long spell where he was messing about with his swing and going backwards at a rate of knots.
A good showing since at the Heritage indicated Valspar was no one-off and we know he handles the course as he was only two behind McIlroy when third there four years ago. At 40/1 he’s well worth chancing. There’s also the M factor – Collin Morikawa and Hideki Matsuyama – to consider and great names like Cammie Smith and Sergio Garcia are tempting at three-figure odds but we can’t back them all.
If there was a sour taste in Bryson DeChambeau’s mouth after his meek surrender to McIlroy at Augusta it didn’t show as he battered his way to victory in the latest LIV outing in Korea. As a two-time US Open champion and runner-up in last year’s PGA, he is a clearly a big-occasion player and hard to leave out on a course that’s sure to suit.
With Jon Rahm and Tyrrell Hatton stalling a bit, Bryson and Joaquin Niemann rate the pick of the LIV brigade but I will be much poorer in my pocket if the breakaway group provides the winner on a weekend that will be hot (up to 30C) but cloudy with rain likely to turn into thunderstorms on Saturday. Here’s hoping JT gets hot too, though the heart and the fans want Rory to carry on winning.
PGA SPECIALS
While some big names who defected to LIV may be regretting the move despite coining magnificent signing-on fees because it has deprived them of competing on the best golf tour in the world except for the Majors, Cinderella man Richard Bland is loving every moment of it.
And why not when he’s picking up fat cheque every week and enjoying a standard of living for his family beyond their wildest dreams in his days as a European journeyman who took 478 tournaments to register his one and only victory.
Moving across to LIV at the age of 49 was the best thing he ever did as playing against giants of the game like Rahm, DeChambeau and Koepka on a weekly basis forced him to improve his game, with the happy outcome that last year he ran off with two Majors, albeit at Champions Tour level.
The grizzled veteran from Burton-on-Trent is now 52 but churning out top 15s almost on a monthly basis with LIV – sometimes better than that, last time out he was seventh to DeChambeau in Korea – has given him an air of confidence that says “I’ve proved my right to be here”.
Although he won’t be long enough to contend at Quail Hollow, he’s still fair value at 6/4 to win Top Senior where Padraig Harrington and the unpredictable genius Phil Mickelson are the only two possible dangers.
Mickelson won the PGA as recently as 2022 when almost 51, a phenomenal achievement, but is only very occasionally playing near that level while Harrington is also in decline, missing the cuts when venturing on to the main tour and not being top dog on his own over-50s circuit anymore.
Brooks Koepka has won as many Majors as Rory McIlroy, three of them PGA Championships, but he’s not living up to his reputation these days and is reportedly unhappy at LIV and yearning to play the PGA Tour again.
He had his chance to do so at the Masters but missed the cut and his last three LIV performances have been sub-standard so take him on with Jordan Spieth in Fitzdares’ 10/11 your-pick match-up. Quail Hollow has happy memories for Spieth as he was man of the match at the 2022 Presidents Cup with five wins out of five, four of them with best pal Justin Thomas. A recent fourth at the CJ Cup suggests his game is trending for this career Slam bid.
In other match-ups Thomas looks overpriced at 7/5 against Bryson DeChambeau in what is a genuine 10/11 each contest to my eye. Both are massively in form, both hit it a long way, but while JT was winning the 2017 PGA on this week’s course, Bryson could manage no better than T33. It might be much closer this time, but the value lies with Thomas.
And Patrick Cantlay, brilliant in that Presidents Cup encounter and buoyed by his best showing of the year when fourth at Wissahickon on Sunday, should have the edge over Tyrrell Hatton who has been disappointingly mid-division with LIV since a belting start to the year in the Dubai Desert Classic.
Canada is producing some cracking golfers, none better than that great fairways-finder Corey Conners. He’s 6/4 for Top Canadian but deserves to be that short on current form.
A solid 11th at the Truist on Sunday was his sixth top-12 from 12 starts in 2025 and two of them came in the rarefied company of the Players Championship and the Masters. This is a similarly tough assignment, but we are not asking him to win the tournament – winning is not something that comes easily to him. All he has to do is fend off the attentions of Mackenzie Hughes, who bogeyed the last to blow the minor-league Myrtle Beach Classic at the weekend, and compatriots Taylor Pendrith, Adam Hadwin and Nick Taylor are not in comparable form.
THURSDAY’S THREEBALLS
The 97th PGA Championship tees off with a mega-bang as the world’s top three golfers, Scottie Scheffler, Rory McIlroy and Xander Schauffele, get up-close and competitive in the same Thursday morning threeball at 8.22am local time (1:22 here).
Who’s going to draw first blood? Will it be world No. 1 Scheffler who opened with a 61 in his last tournament and virtually ended it with three days to spare? Or McIlroy, riding the crest of the wave on a course he adores? Fitzdares make them 7/5 joint favourites with defending champion Schauffele, coming into form after a stop-start injury-interrupted year, inevitably the outsider at 31/10.
Threeballs are just about the hardest way of making money in golf and I try to avoid those where a cogent case can be made for all three players – like this one. Find instead games where at least one of the trio is out of form or those which include one of the 20 club pros likely to be punching above their weight on a massive course made even longer by heavy early-week rain.
One of the snags with threeballs is that they are not playing against each other at this stage but against the course. Some concentrate on their own score and may not even be fully aware of what the others are doing.
To get better than 3/1 about a man who has won two of the last four Majors and was runner-up in the last two Wells Fargos at Quail Hollow is tempting as that might be the only time this year, you’ll get Schauffele at such a price. The temptation can be resisted so it’s a no-bet and zoom in instead on Japanese superstar Hideki Matsuyama in his 6.36 encounter with Wyndham Clark and the bubbly South Korean Tom Kim.
Clark isn’t playing at the level that took him to a course victory two years ago while Kim has gone right off the boil and will probably find the course too long for him. Matsuyama has superior current form to both after starting the year with a 35-under-par demolition job at Kapalua in January. He has been very solid since, was a good fifth in Major conditions at Quail Hollow in the 2017 PGA there and needs backing at 23/20.
With Matt Fitzpatrick a shadow of the golfer who won the US Open a few years back, he’s easy to eliminate in the 1pm game with Jon Rahm and Patrick Cantlay. If Cantlay’s hot putting streak carries over from Wissahickon to Quail Hollow, Rahm will be in difficulties as he’s been missing a few short ones on the LIV circuit and plays as if short of confidence.
There are some cracking pairings late in the day: Justin Thomas-Collin Morikawa-Dustin Johnson at 6.14, Jordan Spieth with his old Ryder Cup partner Patrick Reed and Sweden’s shining star Ludvig Åberg at 6.25 and Mr Box Office himself Bryson DeChambeau flexing his muscles in company with Viktor Hovland and Gary Woodland late in the day at 6.47.
All games probably to watch rather than bet on though I have a sneaking fancy for the rejuvenated Hovland to spring a minor upset.
We should be on firmer ground with big-hitting Indian Open winner Eugenio Chacarra in his 2.17 game with the moderate Justin Lower and club pro Rupe Taylor, and Tom Hoge at 8/5 at 6.31 against the struggling Matthieu Pavon and Canada’s Taylor Pendrith .
The last-named will have an important length advantage over the steady Hoge but has not been using his power to best advantage as he has missed four of his last eight cuts and finished almost last in his latest outing at the Truist.
Hoge is a canny operator though and will be hitting more fairways. He enjoyed a purple patch in March and April when he was third in the Players, fifth in Texas, 14th at the Masters and 18th at Heritage. Brain may prevail over brawn.
Best bets
4pts Matsuyama @ 23/20 (6.36)
2pts Cantlay @ 8/5 (1.00)
2pts Chacarra @ 5/6 (2.17)
1pt Hoge @ 8/5 (6.31)
1pt accumulator all 4
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