Jack Nicklaus sent a handwritten letter to him. The British royal family tweeted at him.<\/p>\n
\u201cI couldn\u2019t quite believe that when I saw it,\u201d Aaron Rai said Tuesday, recalling the correspondence he received two months ago after winning the PGA Championship in Pennsylvania in May.<\/p>\n
And the return to Europe by the 31-year-old Englishman has shown him just what the victory meant back home. Imagine the reaction he would receive should he win the British Open, which begins Thursday at Royal Birkdale in Southport, England.<\/p>\n
The Wolverhampton native stayed in the United States to compete on the PGA Tour for six weeks after claiming his first major victory May 14 at Aronimink Golf Club. He has been back across the pond for just two weeks.<\/p>\n
Journalists from Wolverhampton, India — where his parents and his wife, Guarika, were born — and elsewhere swooned over him during a pre-tournament news conference Tuesday at Royal Birkdale.<\/p>\n
\u201cPeople sent me articles and got a feel of how it was received in England, which was great and a lot warmer than what I would have ever expected and more widespread than I would have thought,\u201d Rai said. \u201cBut in terms of purely the local area, I think because I was so far away with being in Florida and playing a lot of events, I didn\u2019t really get a sense of how that felt or the magnitude of it in that respect.\u201d<\/p>\n
Rai would have no such trouble understanding the magnitude if he were to win the British Open.<\/p>\n
When he was a teenager, he and his father attended an Open practice round at Muirfield — but Rai started paying attention to the British Open much sooner.<\/p>\n
\u201cThey used to show highlights on BBC in the evenings,\u201d Rai said. \u201cWe used to watch it from 5-6 years old. I remember David Duval winning (in 2001 at Royal Lytham and St. Annes). I used to support Tiger Woods a lot. It was great to see David win, but I was supporting Tiger. That\u2019s what sticks out, that Tiger didn\u2019t win that one\u2026<\/p>\n
\u201cObviously I\u2019m British, and this is a home Open, so very, very special tournament.\u201d<\/p>\n
As soon as Rai arrived back in England, he took a spin around Royal Birkdale. When he missed the cut last week at the Scottish Open, he returned to the British Open course Saturday to get a jump on this week\u2019s preparation.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt\u2019s definitely changed quite a bit in the last two weeks,\u201d Rai said. \u201cIt was quite green. It was quite lush when I came here and relatively soft as well, fairways and greens. So it was quite a surprise playing a few holes on Sunday, seeing it as brown as what it was in the space of, I think, 10 days. I think it plays phenomenally. It\u2019s a great layout. Obviously a huge amount of history at Birkdale. It\u2019s a real iconic Open venue.\u201d<\/p>\n
At some point, though, every conversation about the British Open with a talented English golfer turns to the fact the last Englishman to win the Open was Nick Faldo in 1992. His victory at Muirfield that year was his third British Open title.<\/p>\n
Does Rai, regarded by DraftKings as a 70-1 shot to win the Claret Jug, feel any homegrown pressure that seems like it compounds each year the streak goes unbroken?<\/p>\n
\u201cFirstly, there\u2019s always pressure every single week no matter what tournament it is. I think most of that is self-imposed,\u201d Rai said. \u201cSome of it is where you\u2019re playing and what event that it is. Obviously this is a major championship. It\u2019s a huge event in its own right. So there\u2019s always that element of pressure that is there.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Jack Nicklaus sent a handwritten letter to him. The British royal family tweeted at him. \u201cI couldn\u2019t quite…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":58413,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[38],"tags":[415],"class_list":["post-58412","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-aaron-rai","tag-aaron-rai"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/golf\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/58412","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/golf\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/golf\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/golf\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/golf\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=58412"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/golf\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/58412\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/golf\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/58413"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/golf\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=58412"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/golf\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=58412"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/golf\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=58412"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}