TELFER’S THOUGHTS 4.5.26

“It was nuts”. The reaction of Scottie Scheffler to the putting performance of Cam Young’s 4th round of the Cadillac Championship in Florida over the weekend. ”I don’t think he missed anything”, added Scheffler and he wasn’t exaggerating as he talked about Young’s performance on the greens. Over the course of the round, he was 7 strokes better than anyone else in the field on the putting greens. Was it any wonder Young won the championship by 6 strokes - his second win of the year? Earlier he

had beaten the world’s best players in the Players Championship.

Right now Young, believe it or not, is the hottest property in world golf in 2026. Both Scheffler and McIlroy remain Numbers 1 and 2 respectively on the official World Rankings and both have won a tournament this year, but Young has won twice. Add these victories to his performance at the Ryder Cup last year where he was easily the best performed American and Cam is indeed your man. No, he’s not a household name just yet but that epithet he may well have secured by year’s end.

His driving off the tee is nothing short of remarkable. With that long signature pause at the top of his swing he just dials up the middle of the fairway, hole after hole.

Apart from 2 wins, he’s had 5 top 10 finishes so far this year and must now start as favourite for the year’s second Major, the USPGA Championship, which starts next week. Putting him ahead of Scheffler and McIlroy in the betting stakes might not make much sense to many who follow this game, but in golf, of all sports, stats don’t lie.

Also in the field was Ryan Fox who’s becoming the personification of steadiness and consistency. In this event he finished 30th . Okay that won’t win him a Halberg Award this year, but up against 70 of the world’s best golfers, it was again a sterling effort from Foxy on the course they have called for decades the “Blue Monster”, 7700 yards of demanding golf which tests every aspect of your game. It’s also a course Foxy hasn’t played that often. He put together 4 rounds of par or better – 72, 71, 72, 68 and a cheque for around $NZ200,000.

His finishing score was 5 under par, again a pointer to his consistency over the 4 days, but there was one hole, the 18th , which proved his nemesis - he bogeyed it every round. If he’d just parred it each day, he would have finished inside the top 10. Mind you, as tough par 4’s go, they don’t come much tougher than this one. It ranks as the 6 the hardest par 4 across all the courses played on the USPGA Tour in one calendar year.

Meanwhile far away in Southern Turkey, Daniel Hillier and Kazuma Kobori were in action again on the latest DP World Tour event. However, Hillier was seriously off his normally high-quality game and failed to make the cut by a wide margin. But the young Kobori fared infinitely better. After a second round of 68, Kazuma found himself in second place where he doggedly defied his experience at this level and stayed around the top of leaderboard, or within a shot of it, really until the back nine on Day 4. This was a tough course, evidenced by only one player the eventual winner - Mikael

Lindberg from Sweden, the only player in the field to get to 10 under, winning by 2 shots. Kazuma just couldn’t get his usually highly reliable putter to fire on this last day. He only had 1 birdie and that came on the first hole. Eventually he finished in a tie for 13th place and a handy cheque for E34,000.

Elsewhere, Steve Alker came up short in the second Seniors Major of the year, finishing in a tie for 11th , 9 shots behind Stewart Cink who picked up his 4th win this year from 7 starts.

Yep, as Steve Alker has clearly shown, there’s still a lot of money to be won playing golf for a living in the USA even after the age of 50.