The PGA Championship will bring in golf‘s biggest stars to the Aronimink Golf Club this week. Defending champion Scottie Scheffler has arrived early. With only one trophy away from a career grand slam(the U.S. Open), he will be willing to get into that winning momentum from now on.
Rory McIlroy will join in later this week after ironing out some driving issues. But, among these pros, a rookie will also be trying to make a name for himself.
Canadian golfer Sudarshan Yellamaraju has secured the last remaining spot at the major. Kristoffer Reitan, who won the Truist championship on Sunday, got a definite spot at the tournament, therefore opening up the way for the 24-year-old’s major debut.
Yellamaraju claimed the spotlight this year at the Players Championship through his final round surge. He finished tied for fifth after carding 68, which included six birdies, with a final score of 9-under par.
Sudarshan Yellamaraju’s Early Days
GettySudarshan Yellamaraju is set to make his debut at the majors.
Yellamaraju’s path to this point has been unusual. He was born in Visakhapatnam, India and moved to Canada with his family when he was four. His father’s office overlooked a golf course and golf became part of the family routine through television before Yellamaraju ever had a real set of clubs in his hands.
He began playing a few years later in Winnipeg, where much of his early practice came at the Golf Dome, an indoor facility that allowed him to work on his game through long Canadian winters.
Yellamaraju never followed the conventional route through junior academies and full-time coaching. Instead, he and his father studied swings on television and on YouTube, comparing Yellamaraju’s own motion with the moves of Tiger Woods, Rory McIlroy and others.
In a phone interview with The Fried Egg, he said, “We would take my video and put it side by side and try to see if we could do what they were doing…or my dad would sometimes send me videos and see what I think. It was a lot of trial and error, but I guess now we’re here.”
From Self-Taught to PGA Tour Rookie
GettySudarshan Yellamaraju and his dad together learned to play golf.
At 16, Yellamaraju won the Ontario Men’s Amateur Championship, an early sign that the self-taught method could carry him beyond the indoor range and the family living room.
He turned professional in 2021 at 19 and spent time on the PGA Tour Canada and then the Korn Ferry Tour, where the climb was not immediate. He later confessed he needed to play well quickly because his parents could not keep financing the journey forever.
The breakthrough arrived in 2025 at The Bahamas Great Abaco Classic, where he won by five shots at 25-under par for his first professional victory. That result helped propel him to 19th on the Korn Ferry Tour points list, enough to earn PGA Tour status for 2026.
In the 13 events he has played this year, Yellamaraju has made the cut 12 times. He has recorded one top-five finish and one top-10 finish, earning more than $2 million in prize money already. Now, a strong performance at Aronimink would only do wonders for him.
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