Scottie Scheffler is the headliner, but don’t forget about compelling underdogs chasing him at PGA Championship

CHARLOTTE, N.C. – Scottie Scheffler will be the story of the final round at the PGA Championship – and rightfully so.

Scheffler is the top-ranked player in the world searching for his third major championship, and first outside of Augusta National. A win would set up a fascinating duel for Player of the Year between him about Rory McIlroy, a clash of the game’s two biggest stars with a pair of major venues upcoming that fit them to a tee.

The leader by three shots, Scheffler will take up much of the oxygen on the television broadcast and among the golf punditry in the lead-up. He’ll likely carry with him the biggest galleries, the loudest cheers and the grandest expectations.

The world will be watching Scottie Scheffler. But hopefully they don’t ignore the underdogs around him.

The stories of the chasers may not be as historically consequential as the crowning of Scheffler at Quail Hollow. They don’t carry the same gravitas, buried behind the emergence of a once-in-a-generation player, but they are compelling just the same.

Scheffler has a 77.3% chance to win the PGA Championship on Sunday, per DataGolf. As distant as a different reality feels, here are the stories that make up the other 22.7%.

Let’s start with Scheffler’s final round playing partner, Alex Noren. The 42-year-old Swede has two top-10s in 39 major championship starts and very nearly didn’t make his 40th this week. Noren spent the last six months rehabbing a severe tear in his right hamstring that had rendered him unable to swing a club, jump or run. Doctors found his right hamstring was 90% torn through, an important distinction in his rehab timetable. Had he fully torn it, he would still be out. Instead, he returned for last week’s Truist and now he’s playing in the final pairing on Sunday of a major championship for the first time in his career.

The forced exit from the game gave him a fresh dose of perspective. He coached his daughter’s softball team, despite knowing very little about the sport when he took on the role. He halted his rigorous travel schedule for the first time in his 20-year pro career.

Noren turned it on late in Saturday’s third round to push himself up the leaderboard. He birdied the gettable 14th and 15th holes, then added birdies on 17 and 18 – the two hardest holes of the week.

“It was a lot easier to have this break when I'm 42 than when I was younger,” Noren said. “As soon as I kind of could play, I thought I was in sort of the same form I was in before I got injured. But I'm still extremely – not surprised, but I'm fortunate to be in this position this early.”

In the second-to-last pairing is Davis Riley, who, a few months ago, was struggling just to break par.

Riley shot 80 at The Sentry, an underratedly difficult feat on a course that yielded a winning score of 35-under. He withdrew ahead of the Sony Open in Hawaii and then shot 80 in his next start at The American Express, another tournament known for its low scores.

In the aftermath of the blow-up in the desert, he told PGATOUR.COM, “Golf is just hard and sometimes it's just not nice to you back."

In reality, there was more going on. Riley spent the offseason trying to straighten out his ball flight. A natural drawer of the golf ball, he became “obsessive about neutral,” committed to hitting straight shots, or even cuts, with his irons. It was wholly unnatural. And after the struggles on the West Coast, he pivoted back to what he knew and embraced his innate feels.

“It's so easy to get caught up in the off-season saying I've got to be perfect, that when the year starts, I need to be perfect, instead of doing the same things and being – enjoying the mundane of things and just getting back to that DNA,” Riley said.

After missing his first four cuts of the season, Riley has missed just one since. He’s added a pair of top-10s in that span, though none that would match the quality of one this week. Riley is known to get hot without much notice. He stared down Scheffler in the final pairing of last year’s Charles Schwab Challenge to earn his second PGA TOUR victory. Riley will go for No. 3, and his biggest, on Sunday.

At 6-under, five shots back, sits a pair of Internationals looking for the biggest moment in the second acts of their careers – Jhonattan Vegas and Si Woo Kim.

Vegas’ back story is worth repeating. His family moved from Venezuela to the United States in 2003 after his father’s business was taken from him because he signed a declaration to denounce then-president Hugo Chavez. At 17, Vegas arrived in the U.S. with very little knowledge of English, but with a talent for golf. Within less than a year of relocating to the U.S., Vegas successfully open qualified for the 2003 Texas Children's Houston Open and made his PGA TOUR debut as an 18-year-old amateur.

Vegas turned pro in 2008 and joined the PGA TOUR full-time in 2011, winning the Bob Hope Classic in his debut season. He added back-to-back RBC Canadian Open victories in 2016 and 2017, then went winless until last year’s 3M Open, battling a series of injuries. Doctors told him he would never heal fully after a piece of bone in his elbow broke off and lodged into his elbow joint in 2022. He still deals with pain associated with the injury.

Then there’s Kim, who hasn’t fully lived up to the stardom that he showed when he became the youngest winner of THE PLAYERS Championship in 2017 as a 19-year-old. Kim has remained competitive since, qualifying for the FedExCup Playoffs in every following year but only making the TOUR Championship once.

His major championship history has been disappointing given his talent, with zero top-10s in 29 appearances. Sunday represents Kim’s best chance to change that and rewrite his career as more than just a golfer who got hot at the right time to win THE PLAYERS.

In all likelihood, Kim will fall short. As will, Vegas, Riley, Noren and the rest of the field that’s staring up at Scheffler, who looks determined to capture major No. 3. But that’s why we play 72 holes.

The last 18 may deliver a surprise, and there’s plenty of good stories lurking.