In golf, it seems like the very concept of time is broken. This past season, we watched the emergence of Jackson Koivun, who parlayed his ridiculously successful amateur career into an immediate PGA Tour win, then looked like America’s version of Ian Poulter at the Presidents Cup—and seemingly put a stamp on his position as the sport’s great young hope for at least the next three years. I mean, Koivun is 21 years old … who could possibly out-young him?
On Sunday, at the World Wide Technology Championship in Mexico, a possible answer arrived sooner than it had any right to. Blades Brown, only 19—a guy who makes Koivun look like, I don’t know, Fred Couples?—won a playoff against Ben James and captured his first PGA Tour win. As Golf Digest’s Dave Shedloski wrote here, that makes him the fourth-youngest winner in PGA Tour history, and the youngest since (wait for it) Bobby Dunkelberger in 1938. Basically, he’s the youngest to do it in anything resembling the modern era, beating Jordan Spieth and his 2013 John Deere Classic win by about 180 days.
That should feel historic, but frankly, what Brown did seems only a notch more impressive than a handful of other recent wins we’ve seen. I already mentioned Koivun, but there was also Nick Dunlap’s win as a 20-year-old amateur in 2024, the feats of the slightly older Michaels (Brennan and Thorbjornsen) in the past couple years, and even the roaring-out-of-the-gates play of Collin Morikawa and Viktor Hovland and Matthew Wolff what feels like a thousand years ago, but was actually about seven.
Long story short, the kids are getting so good, so fast, and it’s altering the landscape of the PGA Tour. They can win right away, and while their lasting power is still an unsettled question, it’s time to stop thinking of players like Brown as anything but a complete, finished product, regardless of age.
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The WTGL made its debut Sunday with Michelle Wie West’s Los Angeles Golf Club going against Lydia Ko’s New York G.C. Wie West came out of retirement to help usher in the women’s league and she wasted little time giving it a big moment. Playing the par-3, 184-yard hole at the SoFi Center called SOS, Wie West hit the flagstick on a shot that looked good from the start. In fact, watch the video. It’s hard to see how the ball didn’t find the bottom of the cup. The hole, by the way, was designed by Annika Sorenstam.
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Michael Kim had one of the best weekend performances on the PGA Tour this season, but unfortunately for him, it wasn’t quite enough to get him into a Sunday playoff at the World Wide Technology Championship. But he continued to cook after his round (as he usually does) on X/Twitter. After his close call, Kim fired off a tweet that pointed out just how young the only two golfers he lost to in Mexico are.
“These freaking kids are ruining the game. They should have stayed in school 😂”
That would be 19(!)-year-old Blades Brown, who became the youngest PGA Tour winner of the modern era, and 23-year-old Ben James, who combined to make the youngest PGA Tour playoff in at least 50 years. Suddenly, the 33-year-old Kim felt like a grizzled veteran fighting off a younger generation looking to replace him. And he summed up what a lot of older golfers were probably thinking Sunday night. In other words, these
guys kids are good.
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Ryann O’Toole hasn’t played an LPGA event since the FM Championship in August, but she just earned the biggest check in her career. The 39-year-old won the Aon Risk Reward Challenge although it’s been all but official since she took maternity leave after the Boston event. O’Toole has been first in the standings since the summer, and she was able to sit on her lead to win $1 million. That’s almost 20 percent of her $4.7 million career earnings over 16 years on tour. That’ll buy a lot of diapers. She won with an average score of -0.917, a season-long score, relative to par, on the designated challenge holes.
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