Cameron Young may still be (ignore the pun, for the moment) younger than you think.
This is the sort of illusion that comes from having a big-time rookie season on the PGA Tour; you become part of the furniture right away. Other things make Young seem Old, too: the thick beard, the multiple kids, the preference for silence over social media presence. This doesn’t really matter, of course. Age is just a number, especially in golf, where players’ primes come at different vintages. But when you remember that Young is just 28, that this is just his fourth season on Tour, his big-time breakthrough win soon feels like the start of something bigger.
By now, the PGA Tour world has rolled on to Memphis. To the playoffs. But my mind is still on what happened at Greensboro last week, where Young rid himself of a tiresome line of questioning — when are you finally going to win — and now can move on with his career. And while his blowout victory was impressive from start to finish, I was most intrigued by how he explained it. This wasn’t just a matter of the roulette wheel landing on his number, a simple combination of chance and time. Young has been in the lab. He’s been tinkering. And he made four fascinating changes en route to a breakthrough.
Let’s dive in.
(Note: I wrote about Young’s Ryder Cup dilemma — and these changes — in the Monday Finish earlier this week.)
1. He changed caddies.
Young’s caddie history is intriguing, to say the least; one of his closest college friends looped for him on the Korn Ferry Tour and the beginning of his Rookie-of-the-Year PGA Tour campaign, but he’s bounced between several more established figures in the years since. This summer, though, he seemed to land on something special when he hired his college teammate, fellow Wake Forest Demon Deacon Kyle Sterbinsky, ahead of the Truist Championship in May. They found something right away, finishing T7 that first week, adding T4s at the RBC Canadian Open and U.S. Open and then teaming up for the win at Wyndham.
“Some of it is just grinding through tougher times and finding better ones. He’s one of my best friends, a college teammate. He’s great at reading greens,” Young said.
That last bit is particularly notable: Young has gained strokes putting in seven of nine starts since their partnership began and he led the Wyndham in strokes gained putting. These three months have been by far the best putting performance of his pro career.
DataGolf’s excellent imagery shows Cameron Young’s putting improvement this summer.DataGolf
2. He changed golf balls.
Young put a new ball into play ahead of the Wyndham: a mysterious Titleist ProV1x prototype, “something we’ve worked on over the last nine, 10 months,” he said. Young has always been a high-spin player; it’s fair to assume this new ball helps reduce spin.
“It’s very, very similar to what I was playing before, it’s just a tiny bit different,” Young said. “I think it definitely contributed to some of the good play this week, so I’m excited about the next few weeks.”
3. He changed ball flights.
This one is a testament to trusting your swing DNA — and also encouraging news for any drawers of the golf ball out there who feel like the fade has taken over. Young said that about 10 days ago, he went back to hitting draws, something he’d done far more often when he first turned pro.
“In trying to learn some more shots, I kind of went the other way,” he said. In other words, in chasing a more neutral ball flight, he felt like he lost some of his swing identity and some of his repeatability. In Greensboro, he committed to hitting draws everywhere.
“I’m sure there’s a couple you could go back to some right pins where conventional wisdom says don’t start it right of the right fringe, but I told myself I was going to do it and stuck to it all week,” he said. He talked about not having to “start over” ahead of each shot. “I think it might be difficult in some spots, but right now it seems like maybe part of the answer, who knows,” he shrugged. He felt that helped him go on several runs, stacking up one birdie look after another as he got in the zone with his tight draws. It’ll be interesting to see if he keeps it moving the same way.
4. He changed mindsets.
This one may be a bit more abstract; the prior three changes were concrete and tangible, while this one’s harder to put your finger on. But I’d categorize Young’s attitude as direct and determined, while he’s also kept a big-picture focus.
It was interesting that on Friday, two days before his win, still well outside anybody’s Ryder Cup picture, Young declared his bold intentions: He wanted to be at Bethpage as part of that U.S. team.
“For me it’s not necessarily about this week. I’ve got a goal,” he said. “In the middle of September I’d like to be in New York playing on that Ryder Cup team. I’ve kind of tried to look at that. If I can achieve that, I can achieve a lot of things over these next four weeks.”
He still has that opportunity; Young is up to No. 21 in the world, No. 16 in the FedEx Cup, No. 15 in the U.S. Ryder Cup ranking. It’s impossible to know which of these changes — if any — got him over the line at Wyndham. It’s also impossible to know if this was a high-water mark for Young. Thomas Detry’s seven-shot win in Phoenix, for instance, feels like ancient history; he hasn’t finished better than T18 in 17 starts since. But for Young, this feels like the start of something big. He proved something on Sunday, and now he has the chance to keep proving it.
