PONTE VEDRA BEACH, Fla. — Days (and likely months) before Cameron Young arrived on the 18th green with a chance to win the Players Championship, new PGA Tour CEO Brian Rolapp envisioned a grand finale unlike any in tournament history.
“I’m very excited,” Rolapp told NBC Saturday. “We’re going to drop the ropes on 18 when the final group comes up so the fans can actually experience that championship moment with the leader, and hopefully, with the eventual champion. It’s a tradition I’ve heard a lot of fans want back, so we’re going to do it this weekend.”
It was only fitting that Rolapp’s dream of a winner’s spotlight was foiled by Young — a character whose very essence repels the spotlight like a cockroach to a high beam. If Rolapp were to draft the antithesis of a star golfer under the Tour’s new, high-flying vision of consequence, significance and showmanship, Young might be the golfer he drew — a low-key, low-profile introvert who treats fame with a wariness bordering on neurosis.
Young, after all, is the golfer whose press conference was briefly interrupted on Friday afternoon when he spoke so quietly that reporters standing less than five feet from him could not make out his answer. He is the golfer who wouldn’t dare attend (or worse, pontificate upon) Rolapp’s porcelein state-of-the-state presser from PGA Tour headquarters on Wednesday. And he is the golfer who could be found repeatedly at TPC Sawgrass in one of the places PGA Tour players are loath to visit: The large hill to the aft side of the course’s enormous clubhouse, where he spent time after multiple rounds chasing after his three children (two boys and girl) in endless pursuit of a large rubber golf ball.
So who better to claim the title in Rolapp’s first go-around at the biggest event of the Tour season than Young? And how better for Young to capture the biggest win of his life than in the penultimate group, in a tournament he did not lead until his ball found the bottom of the 72nd hole, and with a reaction that evoked less of Rory McIlroy’s jubilant exhale on the 18th at Augusta National and more of Rory McIlroy’s otherwise pedestrian par on the last at TPC Sawgrass more than four hours before the leaders appeared on the closing stretch?
“I was really, really good until I had to make the eight-inch putt on the last hole, and I just about fell apart,” Young said with a grin after it was over. “I couldn’t get my line to point anywhere near the hole, and I went and hit it anyway, which maybe I shouldn’t have. But it went in, so all is well.”
And indeed all is well. Without pomp and circumstance. With no grand coronation. And even with a bit of a surprise from the NBC broadcast crew, which scurried to set the scene for his victory on the 18th after spending much of the afternoon preparing to anoint the tournament’s other two contenders, Matthew Fitzpatrick or 54-hole leader Ludvig Aberg.
And yet it was all oddly perfect. Sunday the Players Championship was better than most could have imagined when the day began with Aberg as a three-shot leader and an unheralded group of chasers — and Young was a better champion than anyone at Tour HQ could have fathomed to start the week … and for none of the reasons they imagined.
“I mean, I love my life, I love my family, I love my job,” Young said Sunday, capturing the essence of his appeal to regular golf fans with trademark brevity. “I couldn’t ask for much more.”
In the end, Young’s awkwardness in moments of great consequence and his skill for trapping his emotions before they escape from his body did nothing to quell the excitement or the story on Sunday. As he approached the famed closing stretch at TPC Sawgrass locked in a battle for his career’s biggest triumph, those same “weaknesses” might have even served as strengths. With Young in the fray, it was the Bethpage Ryder Cup hero against one of the Ryder Cup villains. It was the American versus the European. It was the noble, quiet good guy versus the (also noble, fairly staid) bad guy.
“My expression doesn’t tend to change that much, except for when I’m very upset,” he said. “I feel like that’s about the only thing you’ll get out of me out there. I’m never going to be real smiley, never going to be outwardly super positive.”
What Young’s words and actions couldn’t say, his golf did. He did not need an explosive reaction to know he was in hell when he followed up a pained caddie conversation with Kyle Sterbinsky on the 16th hole and smother-hooked his approach into the trees, leaving a 50-yard shot from a plugged-lie. He did not need a furious fist-pump when he braved the flagstick-side of the 17th hole, nor a protracted celebration after his 10-footer for birdie fell on the island green, to know he might have just delivered the shots of his life. He did not need a bicep-flex after a 375-yard drive into the broom-closet 18th fairway, the longest recorded drive on the hole in the ShotLink era, to know he might have corralled control of the tournament for good. At every turn, Young’s golf told the story.
“I mean, the stadium atmosphere out there is unbelievable,” he said. “The way everything is raised, you just know all eyes are right there on you. So there’s nowhere to hide, and I feel like I stepped up really well and hit a bunch of good shots those last couple holes, so I’m very proud of that.”
In some cases, the crowd helped the drama, shouting furious chants of “USA” as they tilted their volume heavily in his direction. (“That was literally child’s play compared to Bethpage,” Fitzpatrick quipped later.) In others, Fitzpatrick raised the temperature, navigating the tournament pressure with a handful of spine-tingling shots that pushed the stress back onto Young. And when those two characters couldn’t create all the drama themselves? Young stepped to the fore with his golf, which showed Sunday it belongs in a very small group of peers when it is at its best.
“I think a lot of people that are good at what they do expect a lot of themselves,” Young said. “I kind of am starting to learn to maybe let go of them a little bit, and like I said, kind of just focus on where my feet are.”
In the end, the winning moment was delightfully awkward, and Young was not the champion or the “golf evangelist” Rolapp will spend his tenure at the Tour canvassing to find. But golf is not always a game of television ratings and Meltwater Mentions; it is often a game of how well you know yourself.
At the Players Championship, Young won as his truest self — right down to the celebration. It wasn’t the finale Brian Rolapp or the PGA Tour pictured — but goodness, it was grand.
You can reach the author at james.colgan@golf.com.
