Can Dustin Johnson write a comeback story for the ages at the PGA at Aronimink?

The last time Dustin Johnson played Aronimink Golf Club, he was the king of golf.

This time, he had to ask just to get into the tournament.

In 2018, at the BMW Championship, Johnson was No. 1. He ruled the golfing world, known everywhere as “DJ,” the John Wayne of pro golf: 6-foot-4 and 190 well-muscled pounds of swagger and power, one of the few golfers in history — maybe the only golfer in history — who could alley-oop dunk a basketball, two-handed, and backwards.

He’d won 10 tournaments in the previous three years, beginning with his first major, the 2016 U.S. Open. He’d known sympathy, first as a victim of rules-related misfortune at the 2010 PGA Championship, then as the victim of maintenance-related mismanagement at the 2015 U.S. Open, or he might have had three majors by the time he hit Newtown Square for the BMW.

Johnson has 24 total PGA Tour wins, his last the 2020 Masters. As he begins the PGA Championship this week, though, DJ is a very different player from the dominant 2018 version at Aronimink and the 2020 version at Augusta National.

Johnson entered this week ranked 471st, dead last among the tier of players that does not include the 20 club pros who qualified, faded past champions with automatic invitations like Jason Dufner and Shaun Micheel, or, say, Stewart Cink, the Senior PGA champion. To be fair, Johnson is 471st with an asterisk. He was ranked 801st this time last year.

That’s what playing on the LIV Tour can do to you.

If Phil Mickelson is the whipping boy for defections to the rival LIV Tour, then Johnson is the poster child for its deficiencies. Johnson was ranked 12th in June of 2022, when he recanted on a springtime pledge to stay with the PGA Tour, but he’d been No. 1 less than a year prior. He was still a stud and still a star.

However, Johnson’s resignation from the PGA Tour and the ban from the PGA Tour that came with it meant Johnson could only accrue rankings points from the four majors. They still welcomed him, but LIV events did not carry ranking points until this season. When DJ teed off at the British Open last year, he was 969th.

When the new PGA season began in 2026, since his five-year exemption from the Masters had run out, he was not eligible to play in the PGA Championship. In fact, he wasn’t eligible last year, either.

Both times, he wrote a letter to the PGA of America, asking for a special invitation. Both times, they said yes. Both times, they saved Johnson’s 18-year streak of qualifying to play in majors, which now stands at 69. Nice.

But ... seriously?

The PGA of America claims it has the “best field in golf,” as CEO Terry Clark repeatedly said Wednesday (sometimes it does). Why, then, would it want Johnson in the field? Why would the championship’s committee bother with a 41-year-old who has won just once — an LIV event in 2022 — since the 2020 Masters?

“The Committee looked at his overall career record — 24 wins, two majors, and $75 million in career earnings — and deemed him worthy,” Kerry Haigh, the PGA’s chief of championships, told The Inquirer.

Johnson also is 12-9-0 in five appearances on U.S. Ryder Cup teams, which the PGA of America administers. He twice went undefeated, including his last trip, in 2021. He is a PGA of America darling.

Nevertheless, the PGA didn’t notify Johnson until a week before practice rounds began. He remembers the second his phone rang.

“They were doing their last round of invites last Monday ...and so, you know, obviously we were still being considered,” Johnson said Monday as he left the practice green, twirling his putter. “So, yeah, it was definitely a nice surprise to get the call to say I was in.”

Cool.

Johnson is one of 11 LIV players in the field but the only one who didn’t meet qualifying criteria on his own or, as a player inside the top 100, receive a special invite.

But he is Dustin Johnson. He inherited the torch of long-ball Southerner from John Daly and Bubba Watson. He left the Tour in the second half of 2014 due to a third positive drug test, according to Golf Magazine, but came back stronger. He’s Wayne Gretzky’s son-in-law, for God’s sake.

And he’s not just good for golf. He would be a timely champion.

It would be a comeback story for the ages. It would be a movie-script bridge between tottering LIV and the PGA Tour as the latter contemplates how to best reintegrate the best players from the former. It would be everything golf needs right now.

Is it even remotely realistic?

Maybe.

DJ will be 42 next month, but four players older than him have won PGA titles: Mickelson at 50 in 2021, Julius Boros at 48 in 1968, Jerry Barber at 45 in 1961, and Lee Trevino at 44 in 1984.

For the moment, he’s best at what he’ll need the most this week.

Johnson ranks second on LIV in putting, 14th in average driving distance, and 18th in scrambling. These all are areas of immense importance at Aronimink, a Donald Ross course that welcomes big drives but defends itself with diabolical greens and the shaved areas that surround them.

“I feel like the game’s really good right now. It’s just, you know, I just need to score a little bit better,” said Johnson, who has just one top-10 in seven LIV events. “Everything’s in place. I’m doing all the right things. So still feel like I can compete with anybody out here.”

That’s hard to tell. Both the level of competition and the level of golf course on LIV is inferior to that of the PGA Tour, and often that of the DP World (European) Tour and the PGA Tour’s minor-league entity, the Korn Ferry Tour. Even with its revamped formatting — for example, with an eye to qualifying for OWGR points, they now play 72 holes instead of 54 — preparing for majors without access to elite events like The Players Championship or the Arnold Palmer Invitational.

From 2015 until his departure from the PGA Tour in the middle of 2022, Johnson finished in the top 10 in 15 of the 29 majors in which he competed, with two wins and just six missed cuts. In his 15 majors since, he’s finished in the top 10 twice — a sixth and a 10th — and he’s missed the cut in six of the last 10.

Can he change that trend at Aronimink?

He tied for 24th at 11-under here at the BMW in 2018. He made the cut and finished tied for 33rd at the Masters in April. A top-15 finish this weekend would guarantee another PGA start next season.

In the bigger picture, with the future of LIV in doubt, a strong week here might affect whatever parameters the PGA Tour sets for a return for him, considering the arbitrary nature of the Tour’s requirements so far. He’d just shaken hands on the practice green with Brooks Koepka, another LIV defector, who is in the middle of a moderately punitive comeback path designed only for LIV’s biggest names: Koepka, Rahm, Patrick Reed, and Bryson DeChambeau.

Can DJ become a big name again?

“This week, I’m just focused on here,” he said, executing the unique weight shift that makes it look like his hip’s coming out of its socket. “I’m happy with where things are. Who knows what that looks like in six months? Your guess is as good as mine.”

He was a lithe, clean-shaven rock star with an unlined face when he left the practice green here eight years ago. Now, with a wife and two sons, he has worry lines around his eyes, a full beard flecked with gray, but a lot of rubber left on his tires.

“I still got a lot of lot of good years in me,” he said.

Maybe so.