PGA Championship 2026: Alex Smalley’s incredible resilience sets up the chance of a lifetime

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Alex Smalley started Saturday tied for the lead at Aronimink with, perhaps expectations and pressure of his own, but not necessarily from anyone watching either in person or on television.

That’s not to be disrespectful. But Smalley, the 29-year-old from North Carolina who played college golf at Duke, is playing in only his fifth major championship. He did not qualify for the Masters. The last one he played was the PGA Championship last year at Quail Hollow. He has one top-10 finish in 12 starts this season on the PGA Tour.

So when Smalley bogeyed three of the first four holes Saturday to drop, that was it. He was no longer in the lead, out of his element and going to be an afterthought by the end of the week, right?

Nope.

Smalley regrouped and birdied seven of the last 12 holes, including four of the last six, to shoot 68 and take a two-shot lead into the final round. He’s the only man to record three sub-70 rounds and will play with Germany’s Matti Schmid in the final pairing. The likes of Jon Rahm, Rory McIlroy and Xander Schauffele are not far behind.

“I had watched the coverage this morning before I arrived on property and saw there were scores out there, certainly at the beginning part of the golf course,” Smalley said. “Saw a lot of birdies being made. Then by the time that I teed off, the wind had picked up, and it became very difficult to hit a fairway, hit a green, even make a three- or four-footer.

“Hit a couple wayward shots early, didn’t make it easy on myself.”

In fact, when Smalley bogeyed the first two holes, his caddie came over to talk to him, settle him down.

“I told him I didn’t want to hear about it,” Smalley told Golf Channel. “I hope he didn’t take it the wrong way. I just didn’t want to hear it at that point.”

Guessing the caddie is just fine. His man went on an epic run with the golf world watching and is 18 holes away from putting his signature on an underdog story. Smalley is only the 10th player in the last 30 years to hold the third-round lead of a major without ever winning a PGA Tour event. Of the nine others to do so, only Louis Oosthuizen in the 2019 British Open went on to win.

RELATED: Alex Smalley was my college teammate. Here’s what I learned from him

That, however, is to worry about later. First, Smalley has a golf tournament to try to win. A big one.

“Anybody who wants to play golf for a living dreams of winning on the PGA Tour when they’re younger. I recognize that I have an opportunity to do that tomorrow,” he said. “I recognize that it’s on a stage that’s a little bit larger than most other tour events. I’m trying to downplay that as much as I possibly can just to make it seem like any other golf tournament, because essentially that’s all it really is.

“So, yeah, I obviously dreamed of this as a kid, and it’s funny, it’s the Wanamaker Trophy, and when I was in college, I stayed in the Wanamaker dorm for three years. So my parents and I have been joking that maybe this would be a tournament that I would win just because of that kind of fact. That’s just kind of something that we’ve joked about even before I made it out here.

“It would be pretty cool to actually pull it out tomorrow.”

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This article was originally published on golfdigest.com