the last word
Their FuTure is Now
A record season of success by PGA TOUR players in their 20s shows how the game has changed By Bill Fields
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couple of pictures of Jordan Spieth and Justin Thomas got plenty of play this past PGA TOUR season on social media and elsewhere. They weren’t recent images but shots of the stars before they were stars. Spieth and Thomas—major winners and FedExCup champions—were barely in their teens, junior golfers with bigger dreams than trophy collections. The decade-old photographs of the two young men are instructive, not only as charming glimpses into the past and evidence that they were friends long before they were asked to give an autograph. Spieth and Thomas—and their precociously talented peers who don’t need long professional apprenticeships before big-time victories—wouldn’t be doing what they are now without an early immersion in golf. Sure, success has come quickly for some players throughout golf history—Tom Morris Jr., Gene Sarazen, Horton Smith, Jack Nicklaus and Tiger Woods, to name a handful of legends—but winning sooner instead of later seems to have become the rule not the exception. PGA TOUR rookie Xander Schauffele’s victory at the TOUR Championship—the second win of the 2016-17 season for the 23-year-old Californian—was the perfect punctuation for what had transpired in the preceding months. Schauffele’s triumph at East Lake made it 28 wins by 19 different players in their 20s, the most in TOUR history. Over the last three seasons, nearly half the TOUR events—70 of 141—have been won by players under 30. No doubt the present crop of young players is special, but this trend was a while in the making. A confluence of factors is responsible for making this much more than a cyclical development. These talented golfers were born in late 1980s (Rickie Fowler, Adam Hadwin, Russell Henley) and early 1990s (1993 alone saw the arrival of Spieth, Thomas, Schauffele and Daniel Berger). By this point, the American Junior Golf Association, the idea of a visionary Georgian, the late Mike Bentley, was well established as a competitive
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proving ground for elite juniors. When today’s stars were young children, in 1996, Dan Van Horn started U.S. Kids Golf offering equipment that is the proper size and weight clubs for small golfers. In concert with instruction technology that allowed kids to easily see their swings, proper form was less of a mystery and within closer reach. Golf Channel began about the same time, bringing more of the game to golf-loving households including juniors who couldn’t get enough of it. Woods, who gave the sport an electric jolt with his power and cool under pressure, won the first of three straight U.S. Amateur titles in 1994. Joining the TOUR in 1996, Woods set golf on fire, raising its profile in the sports world. Tiger’s determined, dominant golf was must-see TV, and among the many watching were boys and girls who wanted to follow in his footsteps and make their own fist pumps. Two decades later, the kids are grown up. They are confident, eager and capable, a winning combination that was being forged years before a Sunday afternoon with everybody watching.
Justin Thomas (left) and Jordan Spieth typify how seasoned top young players already are when they get on TOUR.
Xander Schauffele’s TOUR Championship win was the 28th of the season by players in their 20s—a PGA TOUR record.
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