Cameron Young, PGA Tour Golfer

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BirdDogs off. We promise you. Alright, just got in nine holes. Here's the Travelers. Just trying to get my work done after getting in last night from US Open. Well, it's a beautiful golf course and I've been to Cromwell, Connecticut a bunch for the Travelers.

They do a wonderful job. I know you got the Pro-Am tomorrow and then the big tournament gets underway on Thursday. Have you been enjoying the experience so far?

It's good. I'm playing it for the first time this year. I came and watched the tournament when I was in high school but I haven't played the golf course. I saw the back nine today and I'll play the front and the Pro-Am tomorrow. It's a beautiful spot. That back nine I feel like is a lot of fun.

I'm excited to see the other side tomorrow and get my work done and then ready to go Thursday. You've had a lot of immediate success. I'm just wondering when you talked about that this has been a place that you've been a fan of before and you've gone to as a fan. How surreal is it now when you actually get to be a part of all these tournaments and you see kids kind of screaming your name trying to get your autograph and all that stuff? It's really cool. It does feel like a very short time ago that I was kind of just a golf fan. I was playing many tours and stuff like that.

It's been two and a half years probably since then and obviously a lot has changed for me in a very good way. But one of the fun things is seeing those kids and I try really hard to take as much time as I can to even practice rounds. Going over the ropes and signing some things and spending some time each day just interacting with some fans especially the kids because that's what it's all about and that's a lot of fun for me.

Cameron Young here with us. Looking at your roots and your origins, I know that your father is the head golf pro at Sleepy Hollow Country Club in Scarborough, New York. Just speak to me a little bit about how you fell in love with the game and then when you started to realize okay this is not something I just enjoyed doing with dad.

This is something I could one day maybe do for a living. It started just like you said. My dad was in the business and my mom played golf and it was a great way for me to spend time with the two of them. They always took me out and said you don't have to play but you're going to come out with us anyway. And I think some days I kind of just picked up sticks in the woods and some days I'd hit a few but it started just a good way for me to hang out with my family. And then probably I started playing tournaments maybe when I was 9 or 10 and started really taking it seriously probably about 13, 14 years old. That's when I started to really practice and obviously kind of right around then is when college stuff starts.

You know 14, 15 years old early high school. So I was kind of thrown into that world pretty quickly realizing that I could go play in college and kind of once you realize that then you start looking at, you know, could be a career, depending on how that goes. I feel like it came at me pretty quick and I've been very blessed with the opportunities to play, you know, in school and then I was around the PGA Tour. We've mentioned that you were the reigning PGA Tour Rookie of the Year. We know last year at the PGA Championship you tied for third. You finished second in the Open Championship this past year at the Masters. You finished tied for seventh.

When you look at this journey so far professionally, what have been some of the things that you're most proud of Cameron Young? I think that major performance. I've pretty much either been like close to winning or missing the cut. I think last week at the U.S. Open was probably my most middle of the road finish.

I finished 32nd. But I think that tells me a lot about what I can do going forward because those are, you know, the best fields in golf and the hardest tests. So I think proving to myself my ability to compete, you know, on that stage has been a lot of fun. And I think I would love to bring a little bit more consistency to what I do throughout the year, but being able to perform it in those events has been a lot of fun. And I think really good for me to, you know, just have the feeling that I can, you know, stay around the league for four days in a tournament like that.

It's been an awesome experience for me. So many people just focus on if you're able to win a major championship or not with those previous experiences. I got to imagine you have that confidence that you feel like you're close to getting a major championship. Yeah, for sure. I think I've proven to myself well enough that I can win on the PGA Tour and win a major.

I haven't done it yet, obviously. But I think being that close enough, you have to believe that, you know, it's just a bounce here or there or a putt throughout four days. And if you're that close, your game's got to be good enough to win when it's your time. I've definitely had some struggles this year. I feel like last year was a little bit easier, honestly.

I've had some struggles mentally and haven't played quite as well, especially recently. But I feel like I'm really coming out the other side of that. Last week was a huge step in the right direction. So I'm excited for the upcoming events this week at the Travelers.

And then, you know, I've got one more major left. So I'm excited for the next few weeks and to kind of finish my season off the way that I can be proud of. You know how up and down this sport can be when you talk about those struggles. Just how do you kind of work on fighting through those struggles to get the best version out of yourself? I'm still trying to figure it out.

That's why they've lasted so long, I think. I think everybody's different. I've gone through it before. And I really think I'm coming out the other side.

So it's all very individual for me. It's just a lot of work on acceptance and realizing I've put in enough work to be proud of. And I've prepared myself as well as I can.

And at some point, you don't have control over everything that happens. That's a very hard thing for me to accept because I think, like all golfers, you want to be perfect at everything. But feeling like I'm doing my job well and I'm preparing myself well and eventually kind of the results they carry themselves. So I've been working on trying to think better in that way.

I think it's going to help me a lot. And I think sometimes people forget you're only 26. You've had so much success and so many accolades thrown your way. You still got to kind of navigate and figure out how you handle all that success and all that praise. Yeah, life's definitely changed a lot. My family has changed a lot, too.

I've got two little kids at home. And learning just to manage life is difficult. Obviously, I'm still pretty young. I definitely don't have everything figured out, not even close. So I'm still learning every day. And this job is different than a lot of them.

So it's hard to find people to ask for advice sometimes. But it's been a lot of fun. And I think as I get more and more settled out here, life gets easier and I think that'll show in my golf as well. Talking to Cameron Young, so we've all seen people tee off and hit the ball way left. I've never seen the ball land in a golf cart right where the ball is supposed to go, like what happened to you Saturday at the U.S. Open. How did you react to that one?

As I said, I've seen people, I've done it 9,000 times. Ball goes all the way left. Never land where you hit it, though.

Yeah, that was very far left. But yeah, initially, reaction is kind of like, I feel like everybody's kind of laughing. And I'm in the middle of Saturday at the U.S. Open playing okay and I've just hit it 50 yards left, so I'm upset. I was able to get a chuckle out of it, thankfully. But yeah, it's one in a million. I don't know how often that's happened. And the relief actually worked out really poorly. I still had some boxes in my way and a shot linked tower.

So I got to drop it there and it was still a bad spot, but thankfully managed okay. I think I made it four, which was a pretty good accomplishment. Yeah, I was just going to say, people go out there on Twitter and say, see, he's one of us.

And I go, no, he isn't. He ended up par in that hole. It would have taken me another six shots, probably.

Yeah, no. Honestly, I really couldn't have done it. I couldn't have played it much better than I did from there.

Took one of the easiest goals probably on that ball, of course, and made it really, really hard. But yeah, no, that was actually a really big momentum wise. I made probably like an eight or nine footer for par after playing a really nice front nine that I feel like I didn't get a ton out of. So that would have been a huge bummer to make bogey there. But yeah, I mean, that's kind of what the U.S. opens are about.

You make some good pars to keep your momentum and that was one of them for sure. I've always wondered the impact of a crowd. A lot of people said the crowd wasn't as great and other U.S. opens that they've seen because there was a limited amount of tickets. Being made to the public does not have a big crowd at a big event like a major championship.

Could that all impact a golfer? I'm sure it does for a lot of people or some people. I'm honestly really oblivious to what's going on around me most of the time.

Especially when I'm fighting during a golf tournament. So I feel like I don't notice some things like that very much. I heard a lot of comments about it. I felt like for the most part there were some good golf fans. I don't know if there weren't as many as they would have hoped. But I didn't notice anything major. It wasn't something that I was focused on. On the way out with Cameron Young, a big topic of conversation currently has been the merger, PGA tour, live golf and European tour.

Had a few weeks to digest that. I know there's still a lot of unknowns but how do you look back when you found out about that news and what are your thoughts on it? I think right now it's a hard thing to have many thoughts on. Nobody seems to know a lot. I think it's just one of those times you have to exercise some patience and see what comes of it before you can make a great judgement of it. There's some smart people on both sides there and I obviously don't have all the information. So it's really hard to say what I really think of it.

I'm just taking the approach of being patient and waiting to see what comes of it. Were you at the meeting with Jay Monahan right before the Canadian Open and if you were what can you tell us about it? I was not at that player meeting, no.

I figured there was going to be a lot of yelling so I just didn't attend. I just wonder because for two years people tell you don't take the money, don't take the money. Now everyone looks back at it and says see the guys that took the money ended up winning. Is there regret that you didn't end up joining live golf? I think I'm happy where I'm playing.

This is still the greatest place in the world to play golf. And like I said I think one side or the other winning I think is kind of a preemptive judgement. I think it's really hard to tell at this point what's going on.

I don't think anyone knows that well. I think a lot of that is speculation on how everything is going to work. So like I said I think it's just a matter of waiting to see what's real and what's just on Twitter. So it's just one of those times I think you have to wait and see what comes of it. Obviously I hope it works out well for us in the PGA Tour in the long run. And we'll see what happens. And who knows what the future of golf is going to look like.

You can only control individually what you can control. Let's just say we're talking 10 years from now. How do you hope people are talking about Cameron Young and what do you hope to accomplish in the next 10 years? I mean golf wise there's a lot of things I'd like to accomplish.

I think it's hard at this point to really put any numbers on anything. You know I would love at some point to be the best player in the world. I think there's unfortunately quite a lot of competition between me and that at the moment. But I don't know I think if I could do that at some point in my career I would feel like I've accomplished what I set out to do.

And then a lot of this little stuff I'd like to be remembered. I think I have a reputation for kind of being pretty unhappy. I'm not unhappy on the golf course. I'm especially unhappy off the golf course. But I would like to kind of better express that. I think I keep a very stoic demeanor just to keep myself in a mental space to do my job.

And I feel like sometimes it's taken kind of the wrong way. But I'd like to be remembered as someone that was great to fans and you know fun to watch and good for the game of golf. Yeah well I've enjoyed this conversation today. It's been great to get to know you. I don't want to put any extra pressure on you.

But Zander Shauffele joined us last year right before the Travelers and he won. So we're going to be placing some money on you and hoping you do that this weekend. Fair enough. I need to do a lot more of what he does.

He's pretty good at golf. Well good luck coming up at Cromwell Connecticut. Enjoy the Pro-Am tomorrow and the next few days. And really do appreciate you stopping by for a few minutes. Yeah no problem. Thank you for having me.