Arnold Palmer was a part of the first golf youth movement back in 1960, when Sports Illustrated presented him on its cover as one of golf’s “young lions”, along with Dow Finsterwald and Ken Venturi.
Palmer was 30 at the time, and so was Finsterwald, while Venturi was 29 – which was pretty youngish for top golfers back then.
“Several projections of domination by new waves of 20-somethings have followed, none of which came to true fruition. Some hitched their wagons to a virtuoso who had picked off a fistful of majors by age 25 – like Jack Nicklaus, Tiger Woods and Rory McIlroy. But one golfer does not a youth movement make.” Via Golf Digest
As Johnny Miller, who had 18 victories in his twenties (as did Tom Watson), observed in 2010. “We keep hearing there are all these great young players, but none of them have won very often. They look like they should be doing it, but nobody’s really doing it.”
But now, things have changed.
The anecdotal evidence has piled up. Emiliano Grillo and Smylie Kaufman, both 23-year-old PGA Tour rookies, have won the first two events of the wraparound season. It means the winners of nine of the last 11 events on PGA Tour were in their twenties. Overall, 24 events in the 2014-2015 season were won by 20-somethings, a PGA Tour record.
The current movement is being led by the World Ranking leading trio of Jordan Spieth, 22, McIlroy, 26, and Jason Day, 27. And there is the vaunted high school Class of 2011, consisting of Spieth, Daniel Berger, Justin Thomas, Grillo, Patrick Rodgers and Ollie Scheiderjans.
Via Golf Digest
