Peace with shortfalls propels Young

After seven second-place showings on the PGA Tour, Cameron Young finally finishes on top. Johnnie Izquierdo, Getty Images

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GREENSBORO, NORTH CAROLINA | A moment after Cameron Young had finished off his six-stroke victory in the Wyndham Championship, obliterating the “when will he finally win?” question, he needed some help.

“What do I do now?” Young asked an acquaintance in the crowd around him.

Young figured it out quickly, immersing himself in the overdue reality of being a PGA Tour winner. There was a television interview, a trophy presentation, a photo session, a press conference and another series of photos with the trophy in front of the elaborate sponsor-centric sand castles that decorate the fan zone at Sedgefield Country Club.

“It feels like a long time coming,” Young said after earning the distinction of becoming the 1,000th unique winner in PGA Tour history.

Until Sunday, Young seemed to have everything but a trophy.

Some saw him as the master of the near-miss, having accumulated seven runner-up finishes without a win, the most on tour since 1983. But the numbers obscured the reality.

It’s not as if Young piled up those seven runner-up finishes by stumbling in on Sundays. He shot 65 in the final round of the 2022 Open Championship at the Old Course to push Cam Smith to beat him.

Young shot 70 in the final round of the Genesis Invitational at Riviera in 2022, signed for 66 on Sunday at the ’22 Wells Fargo Championship and 68 on Sunday in the Rocket Mortgage Classic that same year.

Each time, one player was a little bit better. It eased the sting but didn’t eliminate it.

Over time, Young made peace with his prolonged chase to land a championship.

“It’s not like a burden that I hadn’t won, it’s just something that I hadn’t done and I’d like to. At times it hurts to have played some really good golf and not had that happen, but in all those cases there were really no times that I had it in my hands and lost,” Young said.

“So it’s different I think than having a burden. It wasn’t really like that. It was more just, you know, when is it going to be my time here because it just felt like a lot of those tournaments weren’t.”

Young put his heavy-handed stamp on the Wyndham Championship in the first two rounds, shooting 63-62 to force everyone else to chase him. By Saturday evening, Young led by five and a sense of inevitability had settled over Sedgefield.

“I mean, he’s already played a Presidents Cup, he almost made a Ryder Cup in Rome. And I think he has a very high ceiling. He’s long. Now he’s 10th in putting this year so I think this will be one of those situations where … he’ll be a guy we’re talking about for 10 or 15 years.” – Webb Simpson

A choppy bogey at the first hole Sunday sent a flicker of uncertainty across the property but it disappeared under an avalanche of birdies – five in a row starting at the second hole – that briefly stretched Young’s advantage to nine strokes.

Here’s how good Young was: He played the front nine in a combined 18-under par, posting a pair of 30s and a pair of 31s, strong-arming the old-school layout.

Technically, two things made the difference. In the week before the Wyndham Championship, Young decided to build his ball-striking around a draw, committing to it even if pins were tucked on the right side of greens.

It gave him a clarity of purpose, at least for one week.

“Right now that seems to be a good way to do it,” Young said.

Young also putted like an angel. Last year, Young ranked 145th in strokes gained putting. This year, he is 10th and at Sedgefield he was first.

Young played his college golf at nearby Wake Forest, where he was a teammate of Will Zalatoris and both arrived on tour with great expectations.

“He’s one of those players, he’s unique in the sense everyone knew how good he was. There’s plenty of guys who we think are good enough to win, but you’re still not sure until you do it. He was a little different knowing, like we knew, everyone knew how good he was,” Webb Simpson, another former Wake Forest golfer, said.

Young, at age 28, has broken through. Johnnie Izquierdo, Getty Images

Part of the grill room chatter about Young’s current Ryder Cup candidacy already centers on his New York upbringing, suggesting that Young might be just what captain Keegan Bradley and his crew at Bethpage Black can use because of where he was raised.

That mistakenly supposes that Young is a product of the city streets, a notion he humorously shot down a few years ago. He attended a private school on the Fordham University campus and grew up at Sleepy Hollow Country Club, one of those wealthy golf enclaves outside the city.

Young did ride the train to school but he didn’t grow up playing stickball in the streets.

As one of Bradley’s Ryder Cup vice captains, Simpson was asked what message he would deliver Sunday evening.

“Man, I mean, Cam’s a New Yorker, I know he loves that golf course. Anytime you’re about to win by 10, you’ve got to talk about him,” Simpson said.

“And he certainly has the right game for that golf course. He’s just adding his name to the list of many guys that are hard for us to say no to.”

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