Blades Brown said it best himself, in the immediate seconds after the World Wide Technology Championship.
“I got him this time,” Brown said, “but I’m sure we’re going to be battling it out for years to come.”
Emphasis on those last few words. Years to come.
It is oh, so easy to over-index on recency bias, but that was what Sunday boiled down to on the PGA Tour, a fall event dotted by up-and-comers the PGA Tour could always use more of. In this case, it was led by Brown, the ascendant 19-year-old who has long seemed destined to create the exact moment he created Sunday: an aggressive 63 to race up the leaderboard.
He found himself on the driving range, staying warm as fellow youth Ben James (half-a-generation older at 23) eagled the last to make it a playoff. James, unlike Brown, worked his way into the pros via college and held the lead all weekend. His form throughout the summer and fall has been so analytically good that he entered the week as one of the betting favorites. The numbers don’t lie!
Both of them calmly birdied the par-5 18th and Brown birdied it again to win on the second playoff hole. It all looked a bit too easy, and in some ways it was easier than winning a PGA Tour event in, say, mid-May.
But there’s only so much the youths can do but show up and show off. Like Jackson Koivun did this summer, winning his fourth tournament after turning pro. James will again be one of the betting favorites next week, in part because of what he did this week. It feels like just a matter of time. Koivun finished T21 in a what amounted to another ho-hum, quality start. Between him and the top of the leaderboard was another one, 24-year-old David Ford, solo fifth, getting back into his game after a six-month injury break.
Compared to all of them, Brown is a baby. He’s only the second teenager to win on Tour in the last 80 years, and the youngest to do it since 1931. You know, three years before the Masters Tournament existed.
That’s what Brown was reminded of repeatedly once he won Sunday, just the latest “youngest ever” trophy he’s bagged. But it’s easy to forget that he’s been a working professional for nearly two years now, only making him more attuned to life as a pro than any of them. You see it in his press conference answers — how he takes the accomplishments in stride but doesn’t dwell on them for long. As he said Sunday night,
“It hasn’t fully set in yet that I am now a PGA Tour winner. I will say, though, tomorrow I’m going to wake up and I’m going to be the same person. Next week, teeing it up in Austin, I’m going to be the same person. I’m going to still pick out the same targets, wear the same clothes, eat the same food, but it is extremely special to be a PGA Tour winner now.”
Disclaimer : This story is auto aggregated by a computer programme and has not been created or edited by DOWNTHENEWS. Publisher: golf.com
