2025 Masters: Could this smiling assassin be cloaked in green come Sunday?

Aaron Rai heads to Augusta National as one of 21 rookies.

Climbing mountains, world record chats, and dinner with Luke Donald… Why this is the biggest year of Aaron Rai’s career.

Aaron Rai still struggles to get his head around how much his life has changed since winning for the first time on the PGA Tour. One moment he was fighting for his future, the next he was booking practice rounds at Augusta National ahead of his first-ever visit to the Masters.

There are still pangs of disbelief as he recalls the moment he opened a picture of his invite, which was sent to his mum’s address in England. “It was actually my brother who sent me a picture of the invite and the information packets that come with it,” he tells TG.

“I was walking back into the house after practice, and I think I just stopped for a few seconds and started smiling. The first one of anything is always extremely special, but it is truly a dream come true to be playing there.

“I’m actually going there in a couple of weeks with my dad and trainer to play two practice rounds. So that’s really exciting. When I spoke to the guys at Augusta National, I was just smiling for most of the phone call because it felt like a dream come true to even be arranging a practice round and speaking about it.”

Rai, who hails from Wolverhampton, had been knocking on the door of golf’s elite for a while, but he finally broke through it with a come-from-behind victory at the Wyndham Championship last August. Lost amid the celebrations were the rewards that come from being a PGA Tour winner. It wasn’t until several hours later, when he was back in his hotel room, that it finally dawned on him that he doesn’t have to worry about keeping his card for the next two seasons, nor does he have to concern himself with qualifying for this year’s Majors or Signature events.

“Realising what it meant for the Masters and the other Majors, that was a huge thing,” he admits. “Just getting to the PGA Tour is incredibly difficult, and I think it’s only getting harder with the changes they’re making to the rules. To then go and win an event is extremely special. I think putting aside all of the things that come with it, that truly is a bonus. But that achievement in isolation, and the journey that goes into it, with it being such a long one, is just amazing and something I’ll always remember.”

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Rai isn’t usually this excitable, but then the Masters tends to have that effect on most people. One of his earliest memories as a kid was watching Tiger Woods win the Masters in 2001. He can still remember the putt on 18. And the fist pump that accompanied it. “I went to the golf course the following day, and I asked my dad if I’d had that putt on 18, did he think that I would have made it? He said, ‘Yes’. And that has always stuck with me.”

The Rais’ father-son relationship is a special thing, but that theirs was forged on the golf course happened almost by chance. As a toddler, Rai admits he was more interested in playing with his brother’s hockey stick, which inevitably left him covered in bruises. “To stop me from doing it again, my mum went to buy a plastic stick, which turned out to be a plastic golf club, and I was just obsessed with it,” he laughs.

The enthusiasm for sports ran in the family. His father, Amrik, was an accomplished tennis player but after recognising that his son’s forehand was more suited to a golf swing, he started taking him to the golf course instead and reading books on how best to coach him. It paid off in a big way.

Rai won the very first golf tournament he entered at the age of five. His achievements even caught the eye of a BBC reporter, who was just as taken aback when Rai cheekily revealed that he wanted to become a racing driver rather than a golfer. “I used to dress in Ferrari shirts and Ferrari shoes when I went out to play golf,” he remembers. “But from an early age, I think my mum and dad could see I might have something for the game.”

It didn’t take long for Rai to justify their faith in him. He famously set a new Guinness World Record after holing 207 consecutive putts from 10ft in under 90 minutes. “The previous record was something like 136, so I beat it by a long way,” says Rai, who was only 15 at the time. He turned pro two years later and though he lost his playing rights two years in a row on the EuroPro, he won it back every time at Q-School. His persistence was eventually rewarded with a first victory and a Challenge Tour card for the 2016 season, where he narrowly missed out on a back-to-back promotion to Thomas Detry in the end-of-season rankings. But he wasn’t to be denied for long.

On his first tournament back in 2017, his mother, Dalvir, accompanied him on the flight to Kenya on her first visit to her birthplace since leaving as a teenager. It proved to be a memorable one. She was waiting beside the 18th green with the country’s president when Rai won, the first of three titles in four months which earned him a one-way ticket to the big leagues. It’s where he stayed for the next four years, winning twice on the DP World Tour, before leaving for the bright lights of America in 2022.

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“I really started to follow the PGA Tour in my teens, but at that time it was so far away from me that it truly was a dream to even compete at that level. After turning pro, my focus was largely in Europe and the PGA Tour wasn’t really on my radar. Luckily, it kind of happened when maybe I was ready for it to happen.”

Despite missing his first three cuts as a rookie, Rai recovered to finish 93rd in the FedEx Cup standings – good enough to keep his card, but not enough to qualify for any of the four Majors. The second season was better, with three top 10s and only 10 missed cuts from 32 starts. It set him up for the best season of his career last year. He had double the number of top 10s, including four in five starts during a golden stretch last summer. “Certainly that period, culminating with the win at the Wyndham (Championship), was probably the best golf I’ve played overall,” he says. “It was pretty consistent in all parts of my game.”

FOLLOWING THE PROCESS

Rai talks a lot about the process and adjustment that saw him leave his family behind and relocate to Florida full-time. Though he didn’t want to admit it before, the winless run was scratching away at his subconscious. As the close calls started to stack up, the doubts began to grow.

“I was wary that it had been quite a while,” he concedes. “Four years is a long time and that has probably been the longest period as a professional without winning an event. Obviously, I’ve been playing against the best in the world, so you can’t expect to win as often as you’d like, but it was something I was definitely aware of. But I think the experiences of being close on a few occasions probably helped me.”

Aside from improving his short game and increasing the height of his ball flight to suit US courses, the fundamentals of Rai’s game are still very much in place thanks to the work he’s done with Piers Ward and Andy Proudman, from Me and My Golf. They try to meet once a month at tournaments, but it is a unique arrangement. Other than two or three training camps a year, most of their interactions are done over the phone. They are proof that long-distance relationships do work.

Going off stats alone, he was the most accurate driver of a golf ball on the PGA Tour in 2024. He ranked ninth for greens in regulation, sixth for total strokes gained, and 11th for scoring average out of 186 players. Such consistency across the board leads me to question whether his results last season were not necessarily reflective of the quality of his performances. He disagrees.

“I don’t think there’s not much to feel disappointed about there,” he says, in response. “Personally, I think strokes gained and those statistics give a good representation of what my strengths and weaknesses are, but at the same time your strokes gained are only comparative to the events that you’re playing. I didn’t play in any of the Signature events last year. There were a number of tournaments where Scottie Scheffler, Rory (McIlroy) or Xander (Schauffele), to name just a few, wouldn’t have been there, so it’s not an exact reflection of where you stand in the broader sphere of things. It wasn’t really a surprise to me that I was sixth in (total) strokes gained but a little bit lower in the FedEx Cup ranking (23rd). Obviously, on paper, those stats are great, but they are a little bit slanted.”

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Those close to Rai will tell you he is not the type of player to get too caught up in his own hype. With so many idiosyncrasies, he could be a marketer’s dream if he was at all interested in chasing the spotlight as one of only three players of Indian descent competing on the PGA Tour. His answers to my questions are long and considered, so much so that I wonder whether he has lost phone signal on more than one occasion. He credits his support system and faith for keeping him grounded and refuses to be swayed by talk of a Major breakthrough as the next step on his journey.

“That’s not something I try and get so involved in,” he admits. “I’ve always had ambitions of playing and playing well in the biggest events, but at the same time you’ve got to focus on the steps ahead of you. That has pretty much always been my focus, rather than getting caught up in the dreams and getting too far away from the present and what I need to improve on to make these things possible.

“Saying that, I do think there are a lot of positives I can take from the US Open last year and playing in a few of the Majors before that. Although I haven’t competed right at the very top of those events, I’ve still done enough in a few of them to be competitive. So that’s nice to see that my game can stand up to some of the hardest courses that we’ll face, and some of the highest pressure that a golfer will face. Those are definitely good signs, and that gives me confidence to take into the future.”

DINNER WITH DONALD

Six months removed from the Ryder Cup, Rai is currently the 10th highest European in the Official World Golf Ranking. That may not mean as much any more, but it still reflects well on the World No.24. His performances have already caught the eye of Luke Donald, who had dinner with him last September. He was called up to represent GB&I in the Team Cup in January and came close to winning the Mexico Open on his fifth start in 2025, before two late bogeys stunted his charge. Rai is naturally cautious about getting too far ahead of himself, particularly as he is now entering new territory with so many big tournaments on the horizon.

“There are a lot of amazing opportunities in front of me this season, but I’m still not 100% sure on how I’m going to deal with them,” he says. “Managing my preparation and schedule around the Majors is going to be really important. You want to play enough in the run up to them, but without getting to a point where the energy starts to fall. That’s a slightly different challenge this year, especially with me being in the Signature events.

“It’s an amazing opportunity, but it creates a tricky dynamic with scheduling. You end up playing two events in a row and then if you want to play three, three becomes four because there’s another Signature event… and then there’s another Major around the corner. It’s a position I haven’t been in before. It’s a little bit of a hypothetical, figuring out what works best, what might not work best.”

It’s hard to determine whether Rai is exceeding expectations or blossoming into them, but it’s clear his victory last summer was no fluke, but rather the result of hard graft and a new-found consistency. He is already benefitting from having a guaranteed spot in every Signature event and Major this season, so how does he feel about his chances of earning enough Ryder Cup points to force his way into Luke Donald’s team?

“I’m trying not to focus on how good or bad my chances are,” he says with his trademark restraint. “There’s so much golf that needs to be played and trying to stay on top of your game, Thursday through to Sunday in every tournament, is a bit like climbing a mountain every single week. And I think if your eyes are always gazing at the top, it’s very easy to miss the small steps that you have to make.

“I know it’s going to be a year full of learning, whether that’s through success, average performances or some poor performances. And I think there’s always a bigger picture in mind and knowing that this year won’t define me. It’s all about looking at the long term. As long as I continue to learn from my successes and failures, hopefully I will continue to improve and become a more well-rounded player and person. And I think if you do that for long enough, you give yourself good opportunities to achieve some pretty big things in the future.”

They say good guys never win, but Aaron Rai has already proven that is not the case. You fancy he would be a popular member of the Ryder Cup dressing room if he is able to build on the form that has elevated him from mid-carder to contender. The Masters would be a good place to start.

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