It wasn’t a normal championship Sunday for Cameron Young.
He entered the final round of the Cadillac Championship at Trump National Doral leading by six. He called a penalty on himself for inadvertently causing his ball to move before hitting his approach shot on the second hole. “It’s just one of those, your heart sinks when you see it move, but it moved and that’s part of what golf’s about,” Young said of calling the penalty on himself. He responded by draining a 13-footer for par, and no player, not even World No. 1 Scottie Scheffler, who finished second, got closer than six as Young waltzed to his third career win and second of the season.
But Young’s Doral Sunday was different not only for how it unfolded and how he steamrolled a Signature Event field, but also because President Donald Trump made an appearance for the final round of the PGA Tour’s return to his Florida championship course. That meant increased security and, for Young, an encounter with the Secret Service to start the day, and a handshake, a thumbs up and a chat with President Trump at the end.
“Not at all. No,” Young said after his win when asked if it felt like a typical Sunday. “I mean, once you get out there you’re out doing your job. But everything that leads up to that, you know, the place is obviously crawling in Secret Service and security and police, and it has a definitely a different feel.”
Young said he attempted to enter the side door to the clubhouse, which he had been using all week, and was immediately stopped by two members of the United States Secret Service, who told him the entrance was not being used today with Trump in attendance.
“So there’s little things like that that’s obviously different with the President here, and it changed the rhythm of the day a little bit to start,” Young said.
Championship Sundays have a different cadence and feel. The weather threw things off from the start. The PGA Tour moved tee times and had players go off in threesomes from split tees to avoid the expected inclement weather. The final round was still delayed for more than an hour. The increased security made the final day feel even stranger.
But once it got underway, Young continued putting Scheffler and the rest of the field in a sleeper hold.
“Every time I’ve played with him, I’ve always been impressed with his game,” Scheffler said of Young after the round. “This week he hit a lot of quality shots. A lot of quality iron shots, quality tee shots, especially on the holes where it really matters. There are some tee shots out here that are really difficult, and he stepped up and hit the shots. On the greens, he was unbelievable this week. First 27 holes, I don’t think he missed anything really. It was nuts. Guy was just holing everything. When you’re hitting really good shots and holing a lot of putts, that’s a recipe to run away with a golf tournament.”
After Young saved par on the second hole, he birdied Nos. 3, 5 and 8 to go out in 3-under 33 and put the tournament to bed. Even bogeys at 11 and 13 didn’t give Scheffler and the other chasers hope. When Young made back-to-back birdies on 15 and 16, all that remained were Doral’s final two holes and a brief meeting with the President.
“It’s very unique,” Young said about meeting President Trump after his win. “He’s nothing if not a very, very interesting man. He’s very powerful, and it’s an honor to get to play in front of him.
“He was just very complimentary, the way that he, you know, I’ve been fortunate to meet him before, and that’s especially with us golfers, it’s something he loves and I think appreciates how good everybody is on the PGA TOUR. So really just hugely complementary, and I of course thanked him for hosting us, and that was about it.”
This week marked the first time in a decade that the PGA Tour has hosted a tournament at Trump National Doral. It’s a course that Young is glad is back on the schedule and one he’ll be looking forward to returning to next season as defending champion.
“It’s just undeniably a big, difficult championship golf course,” Young said. “That’s I think what a lot of us like out here. For me personally, I prefer a difficult golf course to an easier one, I think. Just that’s the kind of golf I like. … I like having one more place on the schedule that’s more that style of golf.”
A year ago, Cameron Young was still searching for his first PGA Tour win. He had knocked on the door several times but had been unable to kick it down. He changed caddies, changed balls and changed his ball flight. Then he won the Wyndham Championship in August, was the best player on the USA Ryder Cup team and beat Matt Fitzpatrick to win the Players Championship.
This week, he decimated the Blue Monster to secure his third PGA Tour win and now will be one of the favorites to win the PGA Championship at Aronimink in two weeks.
“It certainly did,” Young said of how his win at the Wyndham opened things up for him. “Once you’ve done it once, I think it is easier to do it again. But at the same time, the golf hasn’t changed tremendously. I think I keep just slowly improving in, I think, all the different areas of the game. I think I’m slightly better just everywhere than I was a year ago. That’s the goal, just keep incrementally getting a little bit better. When you do that, I think the good weeks come together, and they look more like this as opposed to finishing second, third, fifth, where you had a chance to win and didn’t.”
Cameron Young hasn’t changed much in the past year. But his standing in the professional golf hierarchy has, and the scene after his Doral domination was proof of the difference 12 months can make.
