Cameron Young's String of Seconds Are a First

The 2022 PGA Tour Rookie of the Year now has seven runner-up finishes without a win.

Douglas P. DeFelice/GettyImages

The PGA Tour's year of unlikely winners continued Sunday at the Valspar Championship as Peter Malnati captured his first victory since 2015 by shooting a four-under 67 and taming the Snake Pit. Afterward he gave a legitimately moving postgame interview while holding his young son. His closest competition also had family and the grind golf requires on the mind after coming up two strokes short.

“Honestly, I realized I wasn’t going to win pretty quickly, and I have a four-hour drive home with a 1- and a 2-year-old,” Cameron Young said.

Perhaps it's easier for the 2022 PGA Tour Rookie of the Year to move on from these close calls because they happen so frequently. Young, widely recognized as one of the best players yet to win, now has seven runner-up finishes. No one has put together that many without mixing in a win since 1983. It's not the type of history any competitor is looking to make but the stat reflects just how talented Young is and how it simply has to be only a matter of time until he breaks through.

The Wake Forest product has finished runner-up at the 2021 Sanderson Farms Championship, The Genesis Invitational 2022, the 2022 Wells Fargo Championship, The Open Championship 2022, the 2022 Rocket Mortgage Classic, the 2023 WGC-Dell Technologies Match Play and this latest one on Sunday. He's a terrific driver of the golf ball and has proven himself capable of competing at a wide array of courses in various weather conditions. And it's not exactly like he's shrinking in the moment. He's just not doing quite as much as the eventual winner.

Obviously the goal is to win but what Young has accomplished over his brief time on Tour is truly impressive. This was his third top-five finish in eight events this year. In total he's made 60 starts and finished second in 11.6 percent of them. He's finished in the top-five 10 different times and the top-10 on 15 occasions. Being able to contend on the weekend with that consistency is a rare skill and to come out of the gates with it as a young player portends great things for his career.

Young seems to have a great attitude about the situation. There are worse fates than stacking up runner-up finishes. But it would be great to see him break through soon.

Kyle Koster is an editor at The Big Lead.