Who, besides Rory McIlroy, would continue golf’s resurgence with a win at the Truist Championship?

It’s as if the PGA Tour’s public relations wing scripted a series of winners to amplify the product.

First, Rory McIlroy, the most popular player on the planet since Tiger’s demise, became the first golfer since Woods in 2000 and the sixth golfer in history to complete the career Grand Slam. That also ended an 11-year run without a major win. McIlroy did it at the Masters, the most famous course and the most famous tournament on the planet and the site of his greatest collapse.

The next week Justin Thomas, the former No. 1 who’d just reentered the world top 10 in February, ended a nearly three-year victory drought when he sank a 21-foot birdie putt in a playoff to win the RBC Heritage.

Two weeks after that Scottie Scheffler, the best golfer on the planet for the last three years, tied the PGA Tour’s 72-hole scoring record with a 253 at the CJ Cup Byron Nelson in his backyard outside of Dallas.

Things hardly could have gone better for the PGA Tour, as it continues to negotiate some sort of partnership with the rival LIV Tour and struggles to attract bodies and eyes to a product diluted by defection and shadowed by issues largely out of its control.

Fans have loved it. TV ratings are soaring: Rory’s final round at Augusta was up 33% over last year’s Sunday finale.

“Rory winning the Grand Slam was huge,” Thomas said Wednesday. “To have your top guys or guys that are maybe a little bit more of the needle, if you will, playing well on some of the biggest stages like Rory and Scottie did, I would assume that it is helpful.”

The question this week at the Truist Championship at the Philadelphia Cricket Club:

Who would best enhance the script by winning this signature event in a top-five media market a week ahead of the PGA Championship, the season’s second major?

Well, Rory, of course.

Winning the Truist would give him five wins in his last 13 starts worldwide.

It would set up a Scottie-Rory-Bryson DeChambeau showdown the following week at Quail Hollow in Charlotte, N.C., where the Truist (formerly the Wells Fargo) normally is played. The tour bans LIV golfers from regular tour events, so DeChambeau only plays the majors. He finished second at the PGA Championship last year.

It would give McIlroy the chance to unseat Scheffler in the official world golf rankings, where Scheffler has sat for 138 consecutive weeks, the longest run on top since Tiger’s five-year, 281-week run that ended in 2010 and the third-longest run in history (Tiger also had a 264-week run).

Rory was the first to be acclaimed as the Next Tiger, at least until his major drought, and the buildup in advance of what could turn into the first Grand Slam sweep in the same year in the modern major era, since the Masters (then called the August National Invitational Tournament) began in 1934.

Rory’s the easy answer. Who else could enhance the storyline?

There are a few characters who fit the role.

He’s a PGA Championship away from following McIlroy into the career Grand Slam club, with a win at each of the other majors: the 2015 Masters and U.S. Open and the 2017 British Open. With McIlroy off the schneid, it’s Spieth’s turn to be the subject of the “major drought” questions, but then, he’s also in a regular drought. He hasn’t won in three years, when he won the RBC Heritage, the same tournament his buddy Thomas won last month. He’s ranked 46th and hasn’t been inside the top 10 in almost two full years, so it’s hard to remember that he spent 26 total weeks as the No. 1 golfer in the world.

After finishing the 2024 season 80th in the FedEx Cup points race, Spieth only made the field at the Truist on a sponsor’s exemption. He’s a natural for this tournament in particular: Spieth is a Dallas native but his father, Shawn, was raised in Bethlehem, Pa., and played basketball at Lehigh University. His mother, Chris, played at Moravian College. Spieth also donated a $250,000 junior putting green to Cobbs Creek Golf Club, where Woods and golf architect Gil Hanse are helping to renovate the first public course in Philadelphia.

Spieth, now a 31-year-old married man and twice a father, nevertheless has retained his image of boyish exuberance and connects with crowds the way Phil Mickelson used to do. He has finished in the top 20 in his last four starts. A win from Spieth this week would have all the feels.

He’s been more consistent than Spieth, with higher lows, but at his peak, Thomas was a darling of golf purists. Why? Because he plays like he’s wearing a tam o’shanter, plus fours, and metal spikes. He hits all manner of shots, drops bombs on the greens, and is feral when the bit is in his mouth. Any time J.T. is in contention, it’s good for golf.

He fired his caddie after they got run down at the Arnold Palmer Invitational in March. After the loss, he not only refused to speak to the press, he told them two days later that “I don’t owe anyone anything,” which drew the ire of old-school pro golfers … then he doubled down on those comments the next day.

Golf needs an elite villain — yes, he’s still elite, ranked No. 4 in the world with a win and two runner-up finishes in his last nine starts — and now that DeChambeau has rehabilitated his combative image on YouTube, Morikawa can serve that role for a while.