While much of the talk in 2025 was around the improvements Scottie Scheffler and Rory McIlroy made on the greens, Cameron Young quietly made significant strides of his own with the putter.
He had finished outside the top 100 in strokes gained putting in both 2023 and 2024, but closed out 2025 ranked seventh on tour.
His first PGA Tour win finally came at the Wyndham Championship, just ahead of the FedEx Cup playoffs.
But it wasn’t just about titles for Young. One of his most memorable moments came at Bethpage Black during the Ryder Cup, where he drained a crucial putt to edge Justin Rose on a dramatic Sunday afternoon.
How Cameron Young turned himself into one of the PGA Tour’s best putters
Young will be hoping to show that his improvement with the putter wasn’t just a flash in the pan. He’s certainly spent enough time searching for what works.
He spoke about it with Smylie Kaufman on The Smylie Show, explaining that he tried all sorts of approaches before finding what clicked. He also talked about why using AimPoint didn’t suit him.
“I tried basically every grip under the sun to get rid of any kind of hesitation or anxiety over the ball. I was able to do that. I putted claw and I never had any issues really. I just wasn’t great. And I feel like I always came back to thinking my best putting weeks were conventional,” he said.
“It just took me a couple of years to get through thinking maybe I couldn’t do that anymore, that I had to putt claw or I had to putt cross-handed, or whatever it was. It just took some experimentation to get back to that, and then also get to a place mechanically where I didn’t have the same feelings and I also was comfortable doing what needed to happen to move the putter properly.
“I don’t think it was necessarily flipping a switch and all of a sudden I was a great putter this year. There were a lot of things I learned over the course of those two years.
“We went through a period of trying to make AimPoint perfect,” he added. “I’m a bit number-oriented. I’ve always been decent at math and that kind of thing. I tried really hard to figure it out and make it exact, and I just couldn’t.
“Looking back, it was such an obvious thing not working for me because you can’t measure perfectly from everywhere on every green.”
AimPoint divides opinion just like the belly putter did
There is little sign that AimPoint is going to stop dividing opinion anytime soon, with some already drawing comparisons to the belly putter debate of years past.
That debate certainly changed things for players like Webb Simpson and Keegan Bradley, who went on to win majors. But it’s not as though everyone used one. Some players clearly didn’t get on with a longer putter, so banning them was never straightforward.
There are those who feel AimPoint should be banned, as Lucas Glover explained during an appearance on “GOLF’s Subpar” podcast in late 2023:
“I have no issue with reading greens however you want. My issue with it is how long it takes. It’s not cool to make your group stand around while you’re doing that and I think that happens sometimes.”
PGA Tour pros such as Bradley, Tommy Fleetwood and Justin Rose would likely push back against that view.
If it was truly a cheat code, every player would be using it. Instead, it remains another option—one Cameron Young ultimately decided wasn’t right for him.
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