PGA Championship 2026: The secret behind Cam Young’s breakout spring is … a swing thought from his three-year-old?

Since February, no golfer on planet earth has been hotter than Cameron Young. Like Scottie Scheffler in 2022, Young has undergone a transformation this spring, becoming a legitimate threat to win every time to he steps on the golf course. A week after a T-3 at the Arnold Palmer Invitational, Young won the Players Championship, crushing one of the greatest drives golf has ever seen on TPC Sawgrass’ 18th hole to outduel Matthew Fitzpatrick. A month later, he pushed Rory McIlroy to the brink at the Masters, and though he came up short in his bid for a green jacket, he rebounded with a runaway victory at the Cadillac Championship just two weeks later.

So what has been the secret behind Young’s meteoric rise this spring? What has taken him from a “nearly” man to no. 3 in the world and the top of FedEx Cup standings? According to his dad, David, it all started when Young watched a video of his three-year-old son’s golf swing and saw, reflected within it, a feeling he recalled from his own youth.

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“A couple months ago, [Young was] looking at a swing video of his son John who’s three now … and he does a lot of the things Cam did when he was really small,” David told Golf Channel on Wednesday. “He said, ‘wow, that kind of looks like how I used to feel.’ And if he felt a little bit more like that, then maybe he’d let himself move a little bit more … put some of that balance and rhythm back into his swing that he had been missing a little bit … He sort of got back to what he did as a kid and that feel has really given him a lot more consistency.”

As far as swing thoughts go, that’s as poetic as it gets and certainly right on brand for Young, who has earned a reputation as a church-going family man over the past several months. How much of this is real and how much is just a nice story for TV is ultimately for Young to say, but it should be a familiar refrain for all golfers of all skill levels. Sometimes in our chase for incremental improvement, we overcomplicate things. We become too robotic. When that happens, the only solution is take a step back, simplify things and swing the golf club with a child-like freedom. That can be tough to do on the PGA Tour, with an army of swing coaches and an avalanche of data at players’ disposal every second of every day, but if Young’s play is any indication, there’s no better reminder than watching your own child stripe one down the middle of the fairway.