The Players: Cameron Young shines late to claim championship over Fitzpatrick

Jared C. Tilton via Getty Images

A week that began with yet another round of debate over whether The Players is a capital-m Major ended with a definitive statement: The Players is a major tournament. 

When the tournament is this good — the game’s best battling the course, one another and their own fears and anxieties — who cares about its historical status? Just enjoy the ride. Cameron Young did, besting Matt Fitzpatrick in a winner-take-all 18th hole, and Young is now the 2026 Players champion. 

Ludvig Åberg looked like he was ready to ascend to the next level in his career, but TPC Sawgrass decided otherwise on the final nine. Xander Schauffele mounted a too-little, too-late birdie charge. But the last hours of the tournament belonged to Young and Fitzpatrick, who both sidestepped the plummeting Åberg to duel on the 18th green with the tournament on the line.

Young’s 15-foot tournament-winning birdie putt slid past the hole … but so did Fitzpatrick’s eight-foot par putt. Young finished at -14, a stroke ahead of Fitzpatrick, for the greatest win of his career to date.

After five players tied for the lead on Thursday, Åberg took control of the tournament with a front-nine 29 on Friday. He wouldn’t relinquish the lead until late in the afternoon on Sunday … and when he did, he threw it into the waters beside TPC Sawgrass’s 12th hole. 

Åberg had played so well for so long that, by Sunday, he was three strokes ahead of the field and just a few holes from a coronation. Perhaps he started looking too far ahead, perhaps he even started visualizing what it would mean to be The Players Champion. And perhaps he jinxed himself. 

“I think about winning a lot. I think a lot about what it would look like, what it would feel like,” Åberg said on Saturday evening. “I’m trying to embrace it …  We spend so much time practicing, playing, training, preparing, so why wouldn’t we think of what it would actually mean to win?”

Whatever the reason, Åberg’s round started rattling on the 11th hole, and fell apart completely on the 12th. He found water on both holes, walked away from them with bogey-double bogey on his card, and suddenly found himself three strokes off the lead. 

As Åberg struggled, his Ryder Cup teammate Fitzpatrick found an extra gear. Fitzpatrick birdied both the 12th and 13th to leap out to a one-stroke lead. 

The Young-Fitzpatrick pairing, the penultimate of the round, soon became the equivalent of the decisive singles match in a Ryder Cup: Whoever bested the other would claim the trophy. With cries of “U-S-A!” ringing out around Sawgrass’s iconic 17th hole, Young stuck his tee shot to inside of 10 feet, a good 20 feet inside Fitzpatrick’s tee shot. Young drained the birdie while Fitzpatrick could only par, and the two walked to the 18th tee all tied.

With all the momentum of both the gallery and the scoreboard, Young striped a 375-yard tee shot perfectly down 18 while Fitzpatrick found the pine straw to the right side. They ended up on the green eye-to-eye, and Fitzpatrick blinked.

Sunday had its lighter moments. Sepp Straka recorded a birdie, but not the kind he would have wanted:

And Kevin Roy’s tee shot on the 12th found a hole, but not the one he would have wanted:

The two biggest names in the game — not coincidentally, the two most recent defending champions — didn’t have quite as much fun. Both Rory McIlroy and Scottie Scheffler posted disappointing rounds throughout the tournament, and both had to sweat their way through the cut line on Friday afternoon. Scheffler finished the day at -5, while McIlroy, who only showed up at TPC Sawgrass on Wednesday following a withdrawal last week, finished at even par.

“Happy to come through four rounds and feel like my body held up well,” McIlroy said. “A couple little things to work on, but overall, not the week that I wanted. Just trying to take the positives.”

For McIlroy, there weren’t many. For Cam Young, for the fans at TPC Sawgrass, and for the PGA Tour, there were plenty.