The way the PGA Championship field at Aronimink sorts out, in the hours before the practice rounds give way to a Thursday tee sheet, has the look of a tournament whose betting market has spent the last few weeks trying to keep up with one player in particular. Scottie Scheffler is the defending champion and, on most weeks, the world number one. He is the favourite at roughly four-and-a-half to one. Rory McIlroy is the second pick at eight to one, off the back of a second consecutive Masters in April. The third name in the market, ahead of every other major champion in the field and ahead of nearly every player who has won a recent signature event, is Cameron Young. The number next to his name is somewhere around eleven or twelve to one, depending on the book. He has never won a major championship. He arrives this week as the most interesting player in the field who has yet to win one.
What has happened to Young in 2026 is the kind of run that is supposed to take a year or two to convert into a major. Instead, it has all happened in the months since the start of the season. He won the Players Championship in March, which was, before this year, the largest single thing on his résumé and the win that finally announced him as a player who could finish a Sunday at a course where every elite player in the world is also trying to finish a Sunday. Six weeks later, at the Cadillac Championship at Trump National Doral, he led from Thursday morning. He shot four rounds in the sixties. He beat Scheffler, the same Scheffler who had been in the lead group with him on Sunday at the Players, by six shots. He became the first player to lead Doral wire-to-wire since 1977. He matched the largest margin of victory the Blue Monster has produced. The Doral win was, in the way these things are sometimes recognised in retrospect, the week that the Tour stopped thinking of Young as a player who could win majors and started thinking of him as a player who probably would.
The shape of his game
The reason a Donald Ross design like Aronimink reads well for Young is that his game has, over the last eighteen months, narrowed itself into the shape that classic American parkland courses tend to reward. He is one of the highest-ball-speed players on Tour off the tee. He has, since a swing tweak in 2024, become one of the more accurate drivers as well, which had previously been the part of the bag that cost him most often on a Sunday. The combination of distance and accuracy off the tee is the input that Aronimink’s longer par-fours need. The course is well over seven thousand five hundred yards on a championship setup. The fairways are not the narrowest the rota has, but they are pinched in the right places. The player who can hit a four-hundred-yard driver into the correct quarter of the fairway, week after week, will save himself the awkward mid-iron from the rough that the course extracts the most strokes from.
The other thing the course will ask is mid-iron precision into greens that are smaller than the modern Tour standard and that fall away at the back. Ross greens, even the heavily renovated ones at Aronimink, are graded so that a ball pin-high but slightly long will not stay on. The player who hits a high, controllable seven-iron is the player who can attack pins that other players will play to the centre of the green and accept the two-putt. Young’s iron game has been the part of his statistical profile that has improved the most this season. He has, in the rounds where he has been in contention, hit short and mid-irons inside the danger zone at a rate that has made his proximity numbers look, on some weeks, like Scheffler’s.
His first PGA Tour win was at the Wyndham Championship in 2023, a Donald Ross course at Sedgefield, on a similarly tree-lined property where the test resembled the one Aronimink will present this week. It is the kind of coincidence that the broadcast will note on Thursday morning, and that the player himself will deflect in the interview before play begins. The deflection will be accurate. Course history is the second-weakest predictor of major outcomes. But the type of course is the second-strongest, and a Donald Ross major is, in design terms, the same family of test as the win that put Young on the Tour map three seasons ago.
What he has not yet done
Young has been in major championship contention several times in his career. The Open at St Andrews in 2022 is the one that most viewers remember. He finished second to Cameron Smith and made the eagle on the seventy-second hole that briefly looked, for the forty minutes Smith was still on the course, as if it might be enough. He has had three other top-tens in majors since. The pattern of those finishes is not the pattern of a player who has been crushed by the moment. He has, on each occasion, played a more controlled Sunday than the round he had played on a Saturday. The collapse pattern that some major-less players develop, where the lead becomes too heavy to carry in a final round, has not been part of his profile. The pattern has been closer to the opposite. The major he has not yet won has, more often, been a major where someone else has produced a round he could not match rather than a round he has handed away.
That is the part of the form line that makes the eleven-to-one price look honest rather than generous. A player who has been in the right places on a major Sunday, who has won two of the biggest non-major events the Tour offers in the space of six weeks, and who has the type of game the course will reward, is exactly the player the market should be quoting third. The interesting question this week is not whether Young is the right kind of contender for Aronimink. It is whether he is going to play the Sunday afternoon that the wins at the Players and Doral have suggested he is now capable of.
What the week could turn into
There is a version of this PGA Championship that the broadcast has been quietly hoping for since the Saturday at Augusta in April. The version where Scheffler, McIlroy and Young arrive at the back nine on Sunday separated by a shot or two. Each of them has produced enough Saturday rounds in the last month to make the scenario plausible. Scheffler is the player the field is chasing. McIlroy is the player who has beaten the field at the last major. Young is the player who has beaten Scheffler at the most recent signature event by the largest margin in five decades. The piece that has not yet happened, that the season has been quietly setting up since March, is a Sunday at a major where the three of them are playing for the same trophy.
Aronimink will not necessarily give that version of the week. Major Sundays rarely arrange themselves so neatly. The course will produce someone the leaderboard has not entirely been expecting. There will be a name a stroke or two clear of the favourites at some point on Friday afternoon. The week will, in some shape, produce a story the broadcast was not entirely prepared for, which is what major championships do. But the names at the very top of the betting market are the names that should be at the top of the leaderboard on Saturday night. Scheffler, McIlroy and Young have been the three best players in the world for most of the calendar year. The Wanamaker is most likely to go to one of them. The question that has not been answerable until now, and that may well be answered by Sunday, is whether Cameron Young is, finally, the third.