Cameron Young birdies 17, hits monster drive on 18 to win 2026 Players

· Yahoo Sports

PONTE VEDRA BEACH, Fla. – Cameron Young learned how to get out of his own way, how to stop stressing over achieving his wildly unrealistic goals and how to stop berating himself. It freed him up to hit some of the best shots of his life down the stretch at the Stadium Course at TPC Sawgrass and win The Players, the PGA Tour’s flagship event, on Sunday. Young birdied the iconic island-green par-3 17th and tapped in for to shoot 4-under 68 and edge Matt Fitzpatrick, who bogeyed the last.

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“What kept me going all week is honestly, I pretty much walked down the fairways looking at my feet asking myself where my feet were. If I could just focus on where I was, what I was doing without getting ahead or behind the present moment, I felt like I could continue to execute shots well enough to stay around,” he said. “Today I feel like it was a great mental test just how much can you linger. How much can you keep yourself in the tournament and see what happens.”

Young entered the final round trailing by five strokes, but 54-hole leader Ludvig Aberg struggled to a final-round 76, including rinsing his second shot at the par-5 11th and tee shot at the par-4 12th in the water.

“It got away from me quick there,” said Aberg, who drifted to a T-5 finish. “It was just poor swings. I felt like I've had that sort of 7-wood right miss a few times this week, on No. 4 especially twice, and it came up on 11 as well. Then tried to press a little bit on 12, hitting driver, where sometimes you can play 3-wood a little short of that bunker. It was a poor swing, a really poor swing, and it definitely stings a little bit.”

When Aberg left the door open, his competitors pounced. Fitzpatrick, an Englishman who won the 2023 U.S. Open, birdied three holes in a four-hole stretch beginning at 12 and wrapped a three-putt bogey in between at 14. Young had birdied the first, seventh, 10th and 13th while making his lone bogey at No. 6. In past years, Young may have pressed, he may have let his frustration boil over, he admitted he would have grown impatient. Caddie Kyle Verbitsky, his college teammate from Wake Forest, who has been on the bag for less than a year, provided some messages to keep Young focused on the prize. “I reminded him that happy golf leads to really good golf,” he said. 

Young endured seven second-place finishes in 94 starts before his first win on the PGA Tour last season at the Wyndham Championship. Then he was one of the few bright spots for Team USA at the Ryder Cup. An attitude adjustment and eliminating setting goals has helped him reach new heights. 

“My expectations,” he said, “I think they have been wildly unreasonable. This is a hard game, and there's a lot of people that are really good at it. Yeah, I'm not huge on setting goals. I've done it. I don't have like a list for this year or anything. My mind for the second half of last season was East Lake, Ryder Cup. My mind for the first part of this season is preparing for the Masters. So my goal is to be in contention as much as possible before that.”

Fitzpatrick, who closed in 68, nursed a one-stroke lead after canning a 12-foot birdie putt at 15. Young failed to birdie any of the par 5s on Sunday, wasting a beautiful drive at 16 and fortunate to make a par after a fried egg lie in a bunker. But he stepped up with a helping wind whipping and stuck a 57-degree sand wedge at the 130-yard par-3 17th to 10 feet.

“I just so happened to have the best number you could have possibly asked for,” he said. “I felt like if I hit just a full hard sand wedge it would carry that bunker by a yard or two, and trying to hit a softer gap wedge would have been a lot more difficult.”

Young dripped in the 10-foot birdie putt. Tied going to the 18th tee. The crowd chanted “USA-USA,” which only made Fitzpatrick smile. “That was literally child's play compared to Bethpage. If they think that that was anything, then they need to reassess. Get yourself up to New York,” he said, referring to the site of Europe’s victory at the Ryder Cup in September. “It's funny to me. I find it hilarious.”

Young and Fitzpatrick both had made double bogey on the 18th hole a day earlier after finding the water off the tee. Earlier that morning, Young’s father had said to Sterbinksy that it was probably “a blessing in disguise” that Young had found the water because he wouldn’t do it again.

Not only did he stay dry this time but Young hit the tee shot of his life, a 375-yard adrenaline-aided blast into the fairway that was the longest drive in the ShotLink era (since 2004) at 18. Fitzpatrick picked up his tee quickly thinking he’d ripped a good one too but it stayed straight and ran through the fairway, nestling into the pine straw and with overhanging branches limiting his options. But he had an alley and hit a low runner that stopped 40 yards short of the green. Young’s sand wedge from 98 yards stopped 15 feet away on the back fringe. He narrowly missed the putt, but Fitzpatrick missed from 8 feet to force a playoff. That’s when Young finally felt nerves.

“I was really, really good until I had to make the eight-inch putt on the last hole, and I just about fell apart,” he said. “I couldn't get my line to point anywhere near the hole, and I went and hit it anyway, which maybe I shouldn't have. But it went in, so all is well.”

Young had kept his feet in front of him and he hung around just long enough for all the pieces in the puzzle to fall into place for him.

“Today I felt like I did an incredible job of just hanging around and giving myself the opportunity to have, you know, Matt miss an 8-footer on the last hole to win the tournament,” he said.

After he signed his scorecard and verified a 13-under 275 total, he had one more treat: this time his three young children and his wife were there to celebrate with him.

“I've dreamed of having that moment with them for a long time, and last year at the Wyndham Championship happened to be one of three weeks that they missed all year last year,” he said. “To get to see them after I went and did my interviews and stuff and got to actually, you know, give my boys a hug, see my wife, see my little girl, that's something I'll remember for a long time.”

This article originally appeared on Golfweek: Cameron Young wins 2026 Players Championship at TPC Sawgrass

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