Cameron Young is now inevitable after roaring to another PGA Tour win

On Sunday, Cameron Young shot 33 on the front nine and finished -19 to claim victory in the Cadillac Championship. Orlando Ramirez / Getty Images Share article2There comes a point when a player gets so hot you can’t remember why they didn’t always play so well. It all seems so easy. So obvious. And right now Cameron Young, the version of him we all imagined for so long, seems like an inevitable force of gravity rising on leaderboards for the foreseeable future. But the joy of Young — and his dominant six-shot win in the Cadillac Championship on Sunday — stems from how this wasn’t so obvious for so long. Young turns 30 on Thursday, and he’ll enter that decade after a five-year journey working through quirks and flaws as a complete golfer — the kind who could dominate Trump National Doral with ease not because of his distance, but because of the balance in his game. Until August 2025, Young had never won a PGA Tour event. In the eight months since, he’s won three times, won three Ryder Cup matches and contended at the Masters. First he won the Wyndham last summer for validation. Then that cup invite and his ensuing breakout at Bethpage. But it was really March when this all happened. He contended at the Arnold Palmer, won the Players Championship for his first truly iconic moment, sat out a month and went straight into the final group at the Masters. This win in Miami officially invites Young into the conversation of golf’s elite stars — the group with Scottie Scheffler, Rory McIlroy, Bryson DeChambeau and Jon Rahm always in contention to win the biggest prizes. He is, at least on paper, having the best season on the PGA Tour and a clear favorite at the PGA Championship in less than two weeks. But to appreciate Young’s wire-to-wire this week, revisit how he got here. When Young broke out at 26 finishing top 10 at three of four majors, he was a long-driving, ball-striking wizard who lost strokes putting and was dead average in short game. By Sunday, he led the Cadillac field in putting (by quite a bit) and scrambling (80 percent). In his Players win, he also led in scrambling and was seventh in putting. Young is now a top putter on tour and second of top-10 ranked stars. Cameron Young wins @Cadillac_Champ by SIX shots! pic.twitter.com/NVZIcDlanc — PGA TOUR (@PGATOUR) May 3, 2026 Then go back to his 2025 season, when his usually excellent ball striking took a dip to below average despite his putting finally improving, keeping him from multiple big wins. This season, he’s gained at least 0.81 strokes on the field in approach six starts in a row. This performance propels him to seventh in the world in ball striking. For so long, he was the birdie machine who went hot and cold, the type of player you expected to win shootouts, not wars of attrition. This season, he’s played best at the toughest tracks, winning at Sawgrass and Doral, finishing top 10 at thinking man’s courses like Riviera and Augusta National. Bay Hill is perhaps the most outright difficult of them all, and he finished T3 with positive performances in each category. “I think it mentally makes it easier for me to focus shot to shot,” Young said of tough courses. “When you feel like you have to birdie every hole, and you feel like you’re losing when you make a par, I think that’s proven to be more difficult for me.” On a simple day of conditions, though, Young broke out with a first round 64. On Friday, he extended his lead to five with a dialed 67. The course got more difficult Saturday, yet his lead extended to six with a disciplined, smart 70 to reach 16-under par. The only remaining questions was whether world No. 1 Scheffler, playing in the final threesome with Young, could go on a run to make up the gap. No, sir. Young shot 33 on the front nine to create a seven-shot gap. He could play conservative from then on out, and finished -19. While McIlroy can claim the lone major championship of the year, Scheffler remains world No. 1 and Matt Fitzpatrick has played perhaps the best overall golf in 2026 with three wins, nobody in the world has two better wins on the year than Young. It took him four years to get in the win column. Now, he can’t stop. Spot the pattern. Connect the terms Find the hidden link between sports terms