More than any other sport, golf seems to generate a certain type of story: the kind in which a minor, nearly undetectable detail from a person’s past unexpectedly reappears in the room twenty years later, fully grown, and inquiring. This weekend at Aronimink, Alex Smalley is living one of those stories, and oddly, he has known it was coming for a long time. His parents made jokes about it. He made a joke about it. And now, at the age of 29, he’s on the verge of something that most golfers spend their entire lives chasing, following a collegiate career that subtly broke records and a professional one that has developed in slow, methodical layers.
The story’s college section keeps coming up, in part because it’s so remarkably tidy. Smalley lived in Wanamaker Quad, which students refer to as Wanny, during his three years at Duke. The dorm bears the same name, give or take a letter, as the 34-pound silver trophy awarded to the PGA Championship winner. It sounds like a made-up coincidence. In 1916, Rodman Wanamaker, a Philadelphia department store heir who never played the game, donated the trophy that still bears his name and contributed the majority of the prize money for the inaugural PGA. John Wanamaker, his great-grandson, is apparently going to the final round on Sunday. It’s still unclear if he ends up giving anything to anyone.
However, that is the simple part of the narrative. The more intriguing and challenging aspect is how Smalley got here in the first place. He was raised in Wake Forest, North Carolina, completed four AP classes in high school, and earned a 4.71 GPA. These figures point to a child who approached golf the way some children approach physics problems. His decision was likely influenced more by his mother’s PhD from Duke than by any recruiting pitch. He wasn’t exactly a phenomenon when he arrived in Durham as the 36th-ranked recruit in his class, but he went on to accomplish something subtly amazing. By the time he departed, his senior-season average of 70.35 was the lowest in Duke’s history, and his career stroke average of 71.32 had shattered a long-standing school record.
There were times along the way that, only in retrospect, appear to be foreshadowing. He made it to the 2017 U.S. Open as a sophomore. He defeated Scottie Scheffler—yes, that Scottie Scheffler—in a 5-and-4 game at the 2018 NCAA championship. He became the first person since Rickie Fowler to win the Sunnehanna Amateur in consecutive summers. He participated in the Walker Cup. His environmental science degree, which he earned in 2019, is not the resume of someone preparing a backup plan. After that, he became a professional and began the arduous ascent that everyone must undertake.
The striking thing about Smalley’s career path is how unassuming it has been. A time in the LocaliQ Series. Finals of the Korn Ferry Tour. a rookie who finished second at the Corales Puntacana. In 2023, he finished second in the John Deere Classic, two shots behind Sepp Straka. Before a 76 dropped him to a tie for 14th, he was ranked third going into the 2025 Players Championship final round. The question of whether this week is the breakthrough or just another near miss with a better story attached is raised by the pattern there, which is close but not quite, present but not yet centered.
After 54 holes at Aronimink, he is two strokes ahead, which is his first 54-hole lead in a tournament that affects world ranking points. “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,” he remarked, alluding to the Wanny relationship. “It would be pretty cool to actually pull it out tomorrow.” It’s difficult to ignore the slight smile that lies behind that statement; it’s the same kind of smile that a 19-year-old freshman might have had as he passed his dorm sign on the way to practice, never realizing the potential consequences of the joke.
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