Cameron Young executes a masterful shot on the 17th hole. The pressure is at its peak. It’s Sunday. The stadium is buzzing. Shouts of “USA, USA, USA”. He is one shot behind Matt Fitzpatrick. It’s not the Ryder Cup, far from it, but it feels similar. The winner of THE PLAYERS Championship was going to be decided in a handful of shots. The next five, six, seven. There was no more room for error.
The New York golfer, who looks like he might work in an early 20th-century metalworks, plays down his achievement. “It was a tough shot, but I was lucky. I had the wind behind me and that helped me get the perfect distance. I knew it was a 57-degree wedge, a sand wedge cranked up. If I hit it well it would fly the bunker by one or two metres. It would have been more problematic to hit a shortened gap wedge. The distance was perfect,” he explained on Sunday to reporters flanked by the gleaming golden champion’s trophy.
The shot was superb and sinking the birdie putt made it extraordinary. He drew level with Fitzpatrick at the top. Everything would be decided on the 18th hole. There luck no longer mattered; instead it was determination, conviction and desire. Young, while going over the numbers with his caddie Kyle, tried to clear from his head the nagging shadow of what had happened the day before. He hit a good drive, but it found the water by one metre. “It’s a very intimidating tee shot,” he confessed afterwards.
It was a now-or-never situation and Young knew it. So, looking at the ground, focusing for a few seconds before hitting the shot, he said to himself: “I’m going to hit the best shot of my life”. Nothing like that had ever been said before on a golf course. Ever. And he explains: “Maybe because I’d never been in a situation like that before, tied on the last hole in a tournament of this calibre. When I won at the Wyndham I went through hole 9 with a nine-shot lead”.
The fact is he said it and he delivered. He hit the best shot of his life. In fact, he likely hit the best drive ever struck in the history of THE PLAYERS Championship. It’s really impossible to make such a claim objectively, but if we analyse the circumstances, it doesn’t seem an excessive conclusion. The objective fact is that Young’s drive was the longest ever recorded on that hole in THE PLAYERS history. In other words, since 2003, the year these measurements began. And, moreover, the 18th tee is objectively the most difficult on the Stadium Course at Sawgrass. Not to mention the moment. It seems very unlikely that before that date anyone had hit a longer shot there. It was 375 yards of pure adrenaline and desire. An outburst. “I’m going to hit the best shot of my life”. And so it was.
The champion of THE PLAYERS is not one to make a big deal of himself, quite the opposite. He comes across as shy and reserved. “My kids were more interested in the drone than the trophy, which helps keep you grounded”, he said yesterday. What he takes from the final round is his mental approach. After Riviera, where things didn’t go well, he wiped the slate clean. “I felt my head wasn’t in the right place. I decided that at Bay Hill and here I was going to focus completely on the process and the execution for two weeks, without thinking about the result. Trying to accept what happens and what you do. I think that mindset change was part of playing good golf”, he said.
Again the process and acceptance, the great mantra of modern professional golf alongside managing expectations. “I’m trying to stop thinking about where I am compared to where I think I should be in my career. My expectations have been too high. This is a very difficult game and there are a lot of very good players”.
It took Young more than 90 tournaments on the PGA Tour to get his first win. Now he has added his second victory in eleven starts and is already thinking about Augusta. Specifically, “to arrive as well prepared as possible for Masters Sunday”. Yes, he said on Sunday, as if he already assumed it will be a good week and that he’ll have chances to win on the final day. A lovely battle that plays out in golfers’ heads: determination versus expectations.
In that vein, speaking about the psychological side, Young referred to the boost the Ryder Cup at Bethpage provided. “It helped me a lot. The Ryder Cup was a great learning experience about how I handle the nerves. It gives you context for how you can perform and think when you feel like that. The nerves are tricky. Your senses sharpen. I normally hit the ball further. It’s a balance between recognising they’re there and using them to your advantage. Today the nerves arrived on the last putt on the 18th hole. It was very short, but I almost fell apart. I couldn’t see anything. Maybe I should have backed out of the putt, but I hit it and luckily it went in”.
Everything is a bit easier when you hit the best shot of your life at the moment that matters most.
