And with that, the 2025 PGA Tour regular season is over. We saw a few first-time winners throughout the campaign, and end the season on the same note with Cameron Young finally finding the winner’s circle at the Wyndham Championship.
The PGA Tour is trying to pull a fast one on golf fans by claiming that Young is the 1,000th winner on Tour, and while Mr. 1,000 has a nice ring to it, it’s simply untrue, and we’re not going to stand for it.
Across the pond, the women’s major season wrapped up at the Women’s British Open in Wales, and so too did Nelly Korda’s lengthy reign as the No. 1 player on the planet.
We also need to touch on the FedEx Cup Playoffs, which start this week in Memphis, and whether it’s a big deal that Rory McIlroy is skipping the event.
Par Talk readers, feel free to email me at mark.harris@outkick.com with your thoughts, concerns, ideas, etc., or you can also holler at me on X @itismarkharris.
Cameron Young Is A PGA Tour Winner At Last
Anyone who says that they were 100% confident that Cam Young would eventually win on the PGA Tour is lying, even the biggest Young backers had at least a sliver of doubt in their mind that he’d get across the line someday, but now that he has, it feels like the floodgates may be open.
Young’s first win, being a six-shot victory that saw his lead extend well beyond that at points during the weekend, shouldn’t come as a shocker, however, given he’s long shown he has the game to potentially lap fields, especially relatively average ones like we saw at the Wyndham Championship.
The 28-year-old is about as ‘modern golfer’ as modern golfers come. He’s long off of the tee, has creativity throughout the bag, and has shown flashes on the game’s biggest stages while oozing talent.
For Young, the story has always been about the putter. Well, this week he led the field in strokes gained: putting, and it allowed him to be in complete cruise control during Sunday’s final round en route to one of the largest winning margins in recent memory.
The New York native introduced himself to the professional golf world with back-to-back wins on the Korn Ferry Tour in May 2021. He then finished T-3 at the PGA Championship and solo second at The Open the following year, and everyone understandably expected him to make a run at being a certified Top 10 player in the game.
Golf is a fickle game, however.
Young’s highest career ranking is 13th, and he entered the Wyndham Championship as the No. 44 player in the world. Nobody would have predicted that four years ago, but here we are.
Young knew he had the game to win on Tour, everyone around him has been screaming about it for years, and now that he’s checked the elusive box, maybe a great run is on the horizon, which would be quite the scene in the lead-up to the Ryder Cup being hosted in his home state.
The PGA Tour’s Mr. 1,000 Bit Is Embarrassing
At first glance, the PGA Tour crowning its 1,000th different winner in the year 2025 would check out because most would assume that the Tour has been around for 100+ years. In reality, what we actually have here is the Tour trying to pull a fast one in an incredibly strange move.
The TL;DR history of the PGA Tour is that it was founded in 1929, but originally established by the PGA of America before breaking off in late 1968 to form what we now know as the Tour today. The PGA Tour’s official website even has a story about the history of the Tour, with the opening line being “it is not easy to pinpoint the exact beginning of the PGA Tour.”
The story also cites that late 1968 is when golf historians trace the formal beginning of the Tour, but that didn’t stop them from counting countless winners well prior to that date to give Young the ‘Mr. 1,000’ nickname with his victory.
I realize the Mr. 1,000 stuff is definitely Inside Golf and doesn’t really mean anything, but we’ve got Cam Young posing with a piece of paper with 1,000 written on it like he’s Wilt Chamberlain. What are we doing?
Nelly Korda No Longer No. 1
After seven wins in 2024 and 17 consecutive months as the No. 1 player in the world, Nelly Korda has fallen out of the top spot following her T-36 finish at the Women’s British Open. Thailand’s Jeeno Thitikul will become the No. 1 player in the women’s game this week.
The 2025 campaign hasn’t been a bad one for Korda, with five Top 10 finishes in 13 starts and zero missed cuts, but not hoisting a trophy has done damage to her standing in the points system.
Maybe the most stunning part of Korda not winning in 2025 is that she leads the LPGA Tour in strokes gained: off the tee, is fourth in tee-to-green, and third in strokes gained: total. Her game hasn’t fallen off by any means; it’s just hard to win professional golf tournaments, even for one of the most talented players on the planet.
Rory McIlroy Says No Thanks To Memphis In August
Many would say that Rory McIlroy is the face of the PGA Tour. So, the face of the Tour not teeing it up in the first playoff event of the year seems like a not-so-stellar situation, but him skipping the FedEx St. Jude Championship comes as no surprise, and the Tour is partly responsible.
Rory McIlroy said thanks but no thanks to playing in the FedEx St. Jude Championship. Credit: Michael Madrid-Imagn Images
McIlroy explained in November that he would probably be skipping the first leg of the playoffs in Memphis, and he’s stuck to that game plan. With the Tour announcing a new format for this year’s playoffs and Tour Championship, where there will be no staggered start in scoring, all McIlroy would be playing for at this week’s FedEx St. Jude is a paycheck, and he’s all set in the money department.
Having said that, he is the only Top 70 player in the final FedEx Cup standings to opt out of playing in the playoff opener. Taking one more week off before the final two events of the year, and not spending a week in the exhausting Memphis heat when you can’t fall in the standings, isn’t a bad game plan.
