Rai holds the Wanamaker, McIlroy has back-to-back green jackets, and Rahm has a score to settle. Europe arrives at Shinnecock Hills with serious intent.
The 2026 major season is two down, two to go. And if the PGA Championship at Aronimink told us anything, it is that European golf is very much here. Aaron Rai’s victory — the first by an English-born player since 1919 — was not an upset so much as a statement. The next examination arrives on 18 June at Shinnecock Hills Golf Club in Southampton, New York, for the 126th US Open. (USGA)
The Venue Makes the Tournament
Shinnecock Hills is one of the oldest clubs in American golf and among its most respected courses. Set on Long Island’s exposed South Fork, it plays firm, fast, and wind-affected — conditions that reward precision over power and patience over instinct. It is, in other words, a course that thinks like a European links. Players who have spent formative years on the Atlantic-facing layouts of Portugal and the British Isles tend to arrive at Shinnecock better equipped than the odds would suggest. (Shinnecock Hills Golf Club)
The Europeans to Watch
Jon Rahm arrives at Shinnecock with a score to settle. Runner-up at Augusta, runner-up at Aronimink — the Spaniard has been the nearly man of the 2026 major season, and a player of his calibre will not stay in second place indefinitely. His ball-striking in links-adjacent conditions is among the finest in the world. The wind off Peconic Bay will not trouble him.
Aaron Rai arrives as reigning PGA Champion — newly exempt, freshly confident, and carrying the kind of momentum that only a first major can generate. Tommy Fleetwood and Shane Lowry, both proven performers on exposed coastal terrain, complete what is shaping up to be a genuinely formidable European contingent. Viktor Hovland and Ludvig Åberg add Scandinavian precision to the mix. Robert MacIntyre, who grew up playing into Scottish headwinds, will be entirely at home. (Golf Digest)
Rory McIlroy arrives as back-to-back Masters champion — the first player to defend the green jacket since Tiger Woods in 2002. A near-miss at Aronimink, where he finished five back of Rai, does nothing to diminish what has been the most sustained period of major-championship golf of his career. The bookmakers have him second only to Scheffler. A US Open title in June would give him two of the year’s first three majors and a second at a tournament he last won at Congressional in 2011.
What Shinnecock Demands
The US Open’s reputation as the most punishing major is earned rather than manufactured. The USGA controls the pace and firmness of the course across four days to make the margin between brilliance and disaster uncomfortably thin. Players who survive tend to be those who accept the conditions rather than fight them. European golf, by and large, produces exactly that temperament.
The Links Connection
Portugal’s northwest coast is better preparation for Shinnecock Hills than it is usually given credit for. Estela Golf Club — three kilometres of Atlantic dune golf north of Porto — has hosted the Portuguese Open and drawn favourable comparisons with the links of Scotland and Ireland. A few kilometres south, Miramar Golf Club has been testing players against the nortada since 1932, its nine holes running alongside the beaches of Espinho on a layout originally designed by Mackenzie Ross. These are not resort courses. They are the kind of places that find out what a player is made of.
Players shaped by this kind of golf — exposed, wind-dependent, unforgiving of anything loose — tend to handle a US Open better than the rankings alone would suggest. If the European contingent makes its case at Shinnecock in June, the conditions will feel less foreign than outsiders might assume.
The courses that built that temperament are, in the meantime, available to the rest of us. Explore Porto golf holidays with Tee Times.
