Golf’s Generation War Will Be Fought at the Masters

By Michael WeinrebApril 10, 2019, 10:20 am UTC • 17 min

One Wednesday in March, I stood on the fairway of a golf course in Austin, Texas, watching several hundred people strain to see Tiger Woods drive a golf ball. They craned their necks, jostled for position, and hoisted their cellphones above their heads in an attempt to frame him in their shots; they were dressed in red Nike golf polos and logo T-shirts and a wearable tiger head straight out of a Monty Python sketch. After Tiger hit his drive, he crossed a small bridge near the gallery at the Austin Country Club and someone exhorted him to smile. Tiger, as is his habit, did not comply.

Watching people watch Tiger Woods play golf has been a preoccupation of mine for the past two decades. The first time I did it was more than 20 years ago, soon after Tiger won his first Masters in 1997; and while the sheer road-show fascination is not what it once was, there was a moment during Tiger’s most recent tournament appearance when it felt like this could have been 1999 instead of 2019. But then Tiger’s first-round opponent in the World Golf Championships–Dell Technologies Match Play tournament walked past. His name is Aaron Wise, and he was last season’s PGA Tour Rookie of the Year, though the majority of the gallery referred to him merely as “the other guy.” And it struck me how much golf has changed in a single generation.

Aaron Wise will turn 23 in June, which means he wasn’t quite 10 months old when Tiger won his first Masters. Wise’s college coach at Oregon, Casey Martin, was a college teammate of Woods’s at Stanford in the mid-1990s. Wise looks younger than he is, which brought me back to the reason I had come to Austin: Over the past few years, the number of young winners on the PGA Tour has grown exponentially. In 2018, 10 tournaments were won by six players under the age of 25, including Wise’s victory at the AT&T Byron Nelson. Compare that to 2000, when there were also 10 wins by players under 25—but nine of those could be attributed to Woods. All of this is happening as the generation that preceded this one—Woods, Phil Mickelson, Justin Rose, and a handful of other golfers in their late 30s and 40s—begins to age toward obsolescence (and the over-50 Champions Tour).

Which has brought the PGA Tour to an intriguing juncture. Of the 11 players with the best odds to win the Masters, five are over the age of 30 (including Tiger, who’s now 43). But the other six—Rory McIlroy, Brooks Koepka, Bryson DeChambeau, Justin Thomas, Jon Rahm, and Jordan Spieth—have an average age of 26. And they are merely a handful of what increasingly feels like a generation of prodigies modeled after Woods himself, young players who have already won on Tour—often multiple times—and appear fully ready to win majors, if they haven’t already.

It used to be relatively rare for young golfers to win at this pace: Look beyond the once-in-a-generation examples of Tiger and Jack Nicklaus, and you’ll see that Arnold Palmer won a single major in his 20s, while Ben Hogan and Sam Snead didn’t win any. (Throughout the sport’s history, the average age of major champions has held relatively steadily in the early 30s.) For decades, golf psychologist Joe Parent says, there was a sense that “you needed to kind of pay your dues, put in the work, get the experience on the courses, and the experience of being on Tour.” But that learning curve has dissipated. So I’d come to Austin in search of answers to a few questions: What’s changed, and why has it changed? And what does this mean, both for the sport and for the psyches of young men who are trying to live up the standard Tiger set?

Are we looking at the most successful conflagration of young golfers in the history of the sport? And are we also looking at a generation of golfers who are pushing themselves so hard, so quickly, that many of them could burn out and fade away before they reach their apex?

Youthful success in golf is not an entirely new concept: In 1868, a Scot known as Young Tom Morris won the British Open at age 17, and then he won it again at age 18, and at age 19, and age 21, before he died at the age of 24. In 1911, John McDermott won the U.S. Open at age 19, and two years later, Francis Ouimet won the same tournament at age 20. There have been and always will be prodigies who transcend golf’s typical learning curve, and over the past few decades, there’s been a steady crop of promising young players emerging from junior programs and colleges. In the late 1990s, when I first started following the people who were following Tiger, there was a sense that his generation—which included David Duval, Justin Leonard, et al.—would finally alter the long-held belief that golfers require a longer learning curve to reach their peak. “Golf is cool,” I wrote more than once, almost as if attempting to convince myself of that fact.

The notion that professional golf was increasingly dominated by youth in the 1990s was only partially true, though. Tiger was an obvious outlier, but, as I learned from Matt Courchene, who along with his brother Will runs the analytics blog DataGolf, many of Tiger’s contemporaries were not. The so-called “performance ratio”—the percentage of top-10 finishes by players divided by the percentage of starts made on the Tour—of golfers under the age of 26 rose briefly in the mid-1990s before Tiger won his first Masters, but then it settled back into the pattern we’d been seeing since at least the early 1980s: The group’s overarching performance fell below the level expected given the proportion of young players on Tour. And with the exception of a few outlying years—2005, for instance, when a 25-year-old Sergio García finished 10th on the money list—that held relatively steady. Many of Tiger’s potential rivals, like Leonard and Duval, eventually flamed out.

But in 2011, things changed. The performance ratio of golfers under 26 began to grow, and that pattern has continued throughout the decade. Not only did young players begin to finish in the top 10 more frequently, and not only did they win more PGA Tour events, but Rory McIlroy and Jordan Spieth won multiple major championships in their early 20s, filling the vacuum that a post-scandal Tiger Woods had left behind. The best of those young golfers attack courses more aggressively, they swing harder and faster than ever before, and they lack the tentativeness of their predecessors. In 2016, the number of Tour winners under 26 skyrocketed from an average of 10 to 15 percent to roughly 35 percent, and while the number fluctuates from year to year, it’s been consistently higher over the last few seasons than ever before.

Ask some current Tour players why this is happening, and you’ll get a variety of responses. “I won when I was rookie,” Dustin Johnson (age 34) tells me. “I don’t think it’s any different. It’s been like that since I’ve been on Tour.”

“I think we can put a lot of that down to equipment,” Paul Casey (age 41) says. “Take something as simple as the size of the driver head. There’s absolutely zero consequence now for going at it a hundred percent. You can’t miss a driver face. So why not go at it a hundred percent or harder?”

“You hit the ball anywhere on the face now and it goes 300 yards,” Woods says. “It promotes people swinging harder. It’s become a game that’s played up in the air more than it ever used to be.”

That newer, more user-friendly equipment is certainly a large part of this renaissance of youthful golfers, as is the increasingly specialized technology that permits for more detailed swing analysis and precision in terms of gauging distance and selecting the right club. But I had a feeling there was something more going on here; that the fundamental psychology of golf had changed in a generation. And as is the case with so much about the sport even now, that, too, can be traced back to Tiger Woods.

Last Friday, I went to Berkeley to speak to a golfer who could very well be included among the lists of future favorites at Augusta. His name is Collin Morikawa, and he’s a senior at the University of California. And while his talent may be atypical, his story is not: He first picked up a club at a Los Angeles driving range around the age of 2, encouraged by his father and mother, and started attending golf camps at age 5. Soon after that, he learned who Tiger Woods was, and that Woods had also started playing at a precocious age (occasionally on national television). By the time he approached his teenage years, Morikawa had decided to give up playing baseball and basketball and focus on becoming a professional golfer. And at least in part because of Tiger, Morikawa says, anything felt possible.

“We all read about that list of goals he had on his wall, like breaking Nicklaus’s record of 18 majors,” Morikawa says. “A lot of the players I grew up with had it in their mind that they wanted to reach those goals.”

So it turned out that Tiger did make golf “cool.” But even more than that, he made golf feel like a true sport. Before Tiger, fitness was essentially optional for golfers; before Tiger, guys like John Daly would go out toting a cigarette in one hand and a driver in the other and, with a bit of momentum and luck, were able to win the PGA Championship. (Which was cool in a totally different way.)

It took roughly a generation for the trend to catch on, but over time millennials looked at Tiger and saw an athlete, which meant they looked at golf and saw a sport that would require the same physical preparation as any other sport. And those kids who were either fortunate enough or wealthy enough to have access to a golf course started choosing golf over other sports—just like Morikawa. “Tiger inspired those athletes to go pursue golf,” says Stephen Hamblin, executive director of the American Junior Golf Association. “Here he is, handsome and fearless and strong. All of a sudden, golf is cool.”

If I don’t now try to play the way young guys play, I’d be left behind.
Paul Casey

In fact, Tiger clarified a few years ago that breaking Nicklaus’s record of 18 majors wasn’t even on his list of childhood goals; his goals were about accomplishing everything Nicklaus did, just at a younger age. But that’s essentially the part of Tiger’s story that golfers of Morikawa’s generation (which has long been noted for its collective impatience) picked up: If there are numerous prodigies in other sports—if a generation of 19-year-olds can start in the NBA, for instance—why can’t it happen in golf? Why should golf’s meritocracy be different from every other sport?

In 2011, Rory McIlroy won the U.S. Open at age 22; in 2015, Jordan Spieth won both the Masters and the U.S. Open at age 21. In 2017, Justin Thomas won the PGA Championship at age 24, and in 2018, three of the four majors were won by players under 30 (two by Brooks Koepka and one by Patrick Reed). The notion that you had to pay your dues in your 20s and start winning in your 30s has been obliterated. Maybe Spieth and McIlroy were the exceptions to the rule by winning multiple majors before they turned 26, but their victories felt a little bit like the moment Roger Bannister broke the four-minute mile barrier in 1954, and then dozens of others eclipsed that same milestone soon after.

At age 22, Morikawa is now the fourth-ranked male amateur in the world. He chose to stay at Cal for four years to fully develop his skills, but his goals remain the same: Go through the qualifying process, play on the Web.com Tour, and then eventually graduate to the PGA Tour, where he hopes not just to be occasionally competitive and win enough money to set him up for life, but to be no. 1 in the world, like Tiger once was. He sees all these young players winning on Tour—some of whom he competed against as a junior—and thinks to himself, “Those guys are good. But I’m good, too.”

“I’ve been putting my full effort toward this since I was 11 or 12,” he says. “I know I’m going to change, and things are going to happen to challenge me. But my coach and I, we’ve been focusing a lot on the mental stuff lately, things like visualization and meditation. I want to be able to picture every shot I take. And I want to be able to picture where I’ll be five or 10 years in the future.”

Physical aggressiveness in young golfers is fairly common: As Bubba Watson (age 40) tells me, “Young kids play it more aggressive, and then they realize they have to pay bills and turn pro, and so it changes.” Davis Love, he says, was one of the longest hitters we’d ever seen when he played in college, and then he dialed it back once he turned pro.

But it isn’t as easy to pull back as it used to be. There’s a sense among many young players that they have to be as aggressive as possible, because that’s how a lot of them were taught. Morikawa tells me that many of his peers were first told to “swing as hard as you can, and we’ll figure the rest out later.” Morikawa’s coach at Cal, Walter Chun, says he’s had to teach two of his younger players when to lay up rather than pursuing the most direct path to the green. And even out on Tour, Paul Casey says he’s had to alter his style to compete with the younger generation of players. There are occasional exceptions, veterans who are still finding success outside the techniques used by their youthful counterparts: Jim Furyk (age 48), who finished second at this year’s Players Championship; Phil Mickelson (age 48), who won the Pebble Beach Pro-Am in February; and, of course, Justin Rose, who’s risen to no. 1 in the world rankings at age 38. In a previous era, that late-career success may have been easier to sustain. But now, those older players often feel as if they’re chasing their own youth, and it’s become harder and harder to defy what’s become the stylistic norm.

“If I don’t now try to play the way young guys play, I’d be left behind,” Casey says. “I hit driver way more now than I used to. Sometimes you’ve got to crash and burn and miss cuts, and sometimes you’ll have an amazing week and you’ve got a chance to win. It used to be more methodical, plodding your way around. But the older guys, if they don’t adapt, they’re gone, plain and simple.”

I know I’m going to change, and things are going to happen to challenge me. … I want to be able to picture where I’ll be five or 10 years in the future.
Collin Morikawa

That attitude can create its own problems. Back in March, Joe Parent—who worked extensively with three-time major champion Vijay Singh, and is the author of a book called Zen Golf—watched Jon Rahm (age 24) size up a shot on the final day of the Players Championship. It was a classic dilemma: Rahm was leading the tournament, but he landed his drive in a fairway bunker on the par-5 11th. He could either lay up and deal with a slightly tougher angle to the green, or he could go for the green in two. His caddy advised him to lay up; Rahm waved him off, and as his caddy literally shook his head and frowned in the background, Rahm dropped his second shot into the water, bogeyed the hole, and never recovered.

“He made a bad mental mistake,” Parent says. “I know he’d said he’d been working on his personal growth and managing his emotions. But because he was struggling with his physical game, he didn’t make a good mental decision. He overruled his caddy and tried to hit a shot he had no business hitting.”

This, to Parent, seemed like a microcosm of the test facing so many young golfers, especially those who excelled at a young age, then as juniors, and in college and the lower levels of professional golf. Golfers like Rahm—who was once the no. 1 amateur in the world, won 11 tournaments while playing at Arizona State, and has won twice on Tour—push themselves to succeed at every age and every level, and they simply expect that to continue as they advance.

But at some point, in a sport where winning is exceedingly rare, even for the top-ranked players, the question becomes this: How do you deal with failure?

The idea of marrying golf and psychology didn’t take hold until the 1970s, when a man named Bob Rotella came along and got Sam Snead to open up about his demons and lingering regrets. Now, the mental aspect of golf is an industry unto itself; out on Tour, golfers who don’t pay at least some attention to their psychology are the exception. Morikawa tells me about a headset he uses that purports to “rewire the belief” of a golfer. By emphasizing creative instincts over analytical ones, he says, he can better visualize his next shot.

Here, again, is something else Tiger—whose life-long mental training began as a small child when he was famously heckled by his father in an effort to build up his tolerance for distractions—helped popularize: The idea that constructing the proper psyche is just as important as constructing the right swing. Because of that, says psychologist Jon Stabler, who’s worked with hundreds of Tour pros, there are more “naturals” than ever before—players whose personality traits are optimized for the sport.

“But golf is still golf,” Stabler says. “It’s the most diabolical mental sport we’ve ever created.”

And that means everyone is going to break down at some point, no matter how talented they might be. That it took more than a decade, a host of injuries, and a monumental self-inflicted tabloid scandal to bring Woods down from the no. 1 ranking is an incredible outlier that a generation of players are now trying to live up to. Before his first-round match against Aaron Wise in Austin, Woods talked about how, once you reach that level, the demands on your time become increasingly untenable. Which is ironic, given that a number of those demands exist because of Woods’s effect on the sport. “You add in lifting sessions of an hour and a half to two hours a day,” Woods says, “plus training table, practice time, practice rounds or competitive rounds, and next thing you know it’s a 10-hour day. How do you recover from that?”

It’s almost as if young champions like McIlroy and Spieth—and perhaps even Tiger, during that run in the late 1990s and early 2000s—were so focused on performance in their early years on Tour that they didn’t fully comprehend the complications of their own success. They won as juniors, and they competed right away as professionals. But at some point, because this is golf, the mental burden hit them; it did for McIlroy, who has now gone five years without winning a major, and it did for Spieth, who hasn’t won a Tour event in over a year. Their failures are amplified by social media, and by the questions about why they can’t win like they used to.

But golf is still golf. It’s the most diabolical mental sport we’ve ever created.
Jon Stabler

“The elements for young players are a quality of fearlessness and confidence—and sometimes they get that by putting together a very good week at a tough venue like a major championship,” Parent says. “For Jordan Spieth, he played so well as an amateur in pro golf tournaments”—Spieth finished in the top 20 at the Byron Nelson Championship at age 16—“that he had confidence that he belonged before he even got there. But when they struggle, it goes the other way. Now, here’s the outside pressure of people saying, ‘So, Jordan, when do you think you’re going to win another major?’”

That sense of belonging, psychologists tell me, is tested with every step forward a young golfer makes: from junior tournaments to college to the professional ranks to the rarefied air of the major championships. Stabler says that he sees junior players who have success, then hit adolescence and start to think about college and their futures and begin to unravel. Eventually, you’ll be tested by failure—and for some of the best young golfers, that may not happen until they turn pro. You burn out, lose your confidence, and then get trapped in a cycle of putting more and more pressure on yourself. Sometimes it spirals to an untenable point, as with David Duval and Ian Baker-Finch, who won majors and then seemingly lost themselves. And Parent says it’s the reason why young golfers win early, “and then we see a gap. And then in their late 20s, or 30s, or even in their 40s, they start winning again.”

In McIlroy’s case, he’s spoken openly about having to separate his struggles on the course from his personal sense of self-worth; eventually, he says, he had to stop following his own narrative—the murmurs among the golf cognoscenti that he had lost the ability to finish off a tournament became almost a self-fulfilling prophecy. “It might be a narrative to some people, but it’s not a narrative to me,” says McIlroy, who won this year’s Players Championship, and, on the verge of age 30, is now the odds-on favorite to win this year’s Masters. “It’s not being defined by your wins and losses. That’s the key.”

Not long after McIlroy uttered those words and walked out of the media room in Austin, Spieth walked in. He apologized for being late, spoke about “flying under the radar” during his recent downturn in performance, and then opened up about his internal struggles—about how he pushed himself to work harder instead of knowing there might be days he was better backing off. Rest, he learned, was not the same as laziness. “I’m like, man, I was trying to work on something and I hit two extra buckets of balls, but it wasn’t the right thing,” he says. “Well, that just moved the needle the wrong way. … I just started to get maybe overanalytical and a little too emotional on either side.”

If that imbalance can throw off Spieth—who might be the most talented player of his generation—then it can happen to anyone. And the longer that imbalance persists, and the older you get (as with Tiger), the harder it becomes to get back on track. Do I belong here anymore? That can be a heavy question for a young player to deal with: Witness Norman Xiong, who came out of the University of Oregon bearing the “next Tiger Woods” label and has struggled in his first months on Tour.

Yet that’s what golf is now: It is a sport increasingly dominated by prodigal talent embracing the aggression of youth. And while some of those talents will survive, others won’t. Amid the Tiger-influenced generation, everything starts earlier. When Parent started counseling golfers years ago, most of his pupils were adults. Then he started seeing teenagers, and then tweens, and a couple of years ago, he found himself counseling a 9-year-old girl. Two years later, when he saw her again, she told him she’d won a world junior championship.

“You see, they’re already winning world championships at age 11!” Parent says. “And so it’s like they come out there as rookies on Tour and they don’t know how to be afraid. … But they’re out there alone. They’re the only one hitting shots. Because they’re so self-oriented and self-responsible, the failures—they don’t get to share with anybody. Those expectations led them to their level of achievement, but it’s a two-edged sword.”

You could see it on that Wednesday in Austin, even on the first hole. Woods and Wise both overshot the green and scrambled for bogey and double-bogey, respectively. The day would be a struggle, and Woods would win the match, but it felt as if both of them—the most influential golfer in history and one of hundreds of the young acolytes who grew up in his shadow—were spending the afternoon searching for the sense of belonging that had gotten them here in the first place.

Michael Weinreb is a freelance writer and the author of four books.

Michael Weinreb

Golf’s Generation War Will Be Fought at the Masters

Golf’s Generation War Will Be Fought at the Masters

Keep Exploring