Aaron Rai: The kid who wanted to be a racing driver and became a major winner - via dinosaur crazy golf

The 3 Hammers Golf Complex, four miles north of the city of Wolverhampton in England’s West Midlands, is an unlikely spot to go in search of the sport’s newest major champion.

It has an indoor academy, a state-of-the-art driving range, 15 par-3 holes and, for the past three years, Jurassic Creek, a dinosaur-themed family attraction built on what used to be its 16th, 17th and 18th holes.

It is a far cry from the plush surrounds of Aronimink Golf Club, near Philadelphia in Pennsylvania, where Aaron Rai just became the first Englishman to win the U.S. PGA Championship since 1919, but the next time he returns home to the UK, it is likely he will while away a few hours here — keeping his game in order on the indoor putting green or relaxing with wife and fellow professional player Gaurika Bishnoi alongside the Tyrannosaurus rex and the Stegosaurus, where they have been known to try their luck at crazy golf.

Rob Bluck, the venue’s golf academy director and head professional, watched on television on Sunday evening as a player he first met as an unknown teenager made his own slice of major history.

“Aaron started here as a youngster — about three or four years of age, I think,” Bluck tells The Athletic, the morning after Rai’s three-shot victory. “He used to practice out there on the short course — he was very much part of the junior golf academy here.

“Aaron lives in the U.S. now, because he plays on the PGA Tour but every time he comes back, he spends most of his time here on the putting green. He likes to come back to his roots, and this is where it all started for him.

“He’s the most humble, grateful guy you could wish to meet. He’ll speak to anybody, and when he does come here, everyone knows who he is. He’s got time for everybody.

“He came at the back end of 2024 and did the most incredible Q&A for our junior academy here. We had 100 kids in attendance, he answered their questions and then did a clinic out on the range, which was just majestic.

“He left lots of children and parents in awe, then we identified a handful of very able children and we got the kids to challenge him over the little course, and he spent the whole afternoon with them, until it got dark.

“Everyone (else) went home and, typical Aaron, he was then practising in the dark out on the little course. So to watch him do what he’s done is not surprising at all.

“I am just thrilled to bits that someone who’s so close to home, and someone I actually say is my mate, is now a major champion.”

While 3 Hammers played a key part in Rai’s childhood, his golfing journey actually began in even more humble surroundings.

Born in Wolverhampton — a working-class city in the Black Country, an area of the UK renowned for its industrial heritage — Rai was raised in the modern but modest village of Perton, around four miles west of the city.

He had barely begun to walk when his mother Dalvir, an immigrant from Kenya and a mental-health nurse, bought him plastic golf clubs to avoid a repeat of an earlier injury he had suffered from a wooden hockey stick.

Not that he always had his heart set on a career in golf. Interviewed by the BBC in 2000, the five-year-old Rai said his ambition was to become a racing driver. Meanwhile, his father Amrik, a community worker originally from India, hoped his son would share his keen interest in tennis.

His shots in that sport looked more like a golf swing, however, so Amrik took him to two council-run pitch-and-putt courses on the outskirts of Wolverhampton. Neither of these, at the city’s East Park and Bantock Park, remain in use — at Bantock, the bunkers are now more commonly used as sandpits by local youngsters — but both venues, owned and operated by the local authority, played a vital role in Rai’s journey.

“As a family, we’ve always been very humble,” Amrik told the Express and Star, Wolverhampton’s local newspaper, in 2021. “I don’t think we would have fitted in at some of the traditional clubs.

“When we used to go to Bantock Park, Aaron would hit shot after shot on the same hole, keep going until he’d got it right. You wouldn’t be able to do that at a ‘proper’ golf club. I can see some of the shots Aaron played at a young age in the shots he plays now in tournaments. He could have been easily stifled if he’d gone straight into a golf club.”

When his talent became clear, Rai moved on to 3 Hammers and eventually to the nearby Patshull Park, a course which has also fallen into disrepair since the Covid-19 pandemic and is no longer in use.

Ian Bonser owned 3 Hammers until a year ago and met Rai when he first visited, at the age of four. He now owns Patshull Park and is attempting to restore the grounds to their former glory, although he admits that the parkland golf course where Rai honed his skills is “beyond repair”.

“Funnily enough, I looked at an honors board at Patshull Park yesterday and took a photograph of it and I will send it to Aaron, because he was their Order of Merit champion as an amateur in 2010,” he tells The Athletic.

“So he’s gone from being an Order of Merit champion at a local golf club to a major champion in 16 years, which is just a fantastic achievement and we’re all very proud of him and his family.

“They’re (the family) such a lovely group of people. It’s the kind of thing that dreams and fairy tales are made of.”

Rai has been a professional since he turned 17, working his way through the EuroPro tour, Challenge Tour and the European-based DP World Tour, where he won four titles, before deciding to spend most of his time in the United States, relocating to Florida. He won the 2024 Wyndham Championship tour event, but his previous highest finish at a major was joint-19th (at the 2024 U.S. Open and last year’s PGA Championship).

To say his victory at Aronimink yesterday was unexpected would be an understatement, and it will now propel him to a whole new level of stardom. The fact that he is the first British-Asian player to win a major is also significant.

Those who have known Rai longest do not expect him to forget his roots.

Piers Ward and Andy Proudman, founders of the popular Me and My Golf online coaching business, founded the 3 Hammers Academy before leaving in 2012 (handing over to Bluck and his colleagues) and continue to offer advice to Rai.

There are even reminders of his West Midlands upbringing in his appearance, most obviously his unconventional use of two gloves and of head covers on his irons.

The extra glove is a hangover from practicing outdoors in the cold and damp West Midlands winters, while the iron covers are an ongoing reminder of his origin story.

“It started from the age of four years old, when my dad used to pay for my equipment,” Rai told Golf Monthly. “He paid for my membership, paid for my entry fees. It wasn’t money that we really had, to be honest, but he’d always buy me the best clubs.

“When we used to go out and practice, he used to clean every single groove afterwards with a pin and baby oil, and, to protect the golf clubs, he thought it would be good to put iron covers on them, and I’ve pretty much had iron covers on all my sets ever since, just to kind of appreciate the value of what I have.”

The quirks make Rai — whose wife Gaurika is a professional golfer from India — a relative outlier on the PGA Tour, as does his slightly old-fashioned game. He is not among the sport’s longest hitters and instead claimed his major title by plotting his way around Aronimink, finding fairways and hitting greens in regulation.

It was not flashy, but it worked — perfectly in keeping with a man whose understated class make him a universally popular figure on the PGA Tour.

As for those who know him from his West Midlands days, there is just pride, mingled with joyous incredulity.

“I met Aaron and his father at the Masters last year,” Bonser recalls. “His father said to me, ‘Ian, I had a little tear in my eye as I drove past 3 Hammers this year, because I was driving to Manchester Airport to watch my son play in the Masters’. He said it made him remember him to the 3 Hammers for the very first time.

“The next time he drives past 3 Hammers, he’ll probably be sobbing after what Aaron’s achieved!”

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