With so much attention on how good the likes of Scottie Scheffler and Rory McIlroy became on the greens in 2025, you would have been forgiven for overlooking the improvement Cameron Young made with the putter.
Cameron Young was well outside the top 100 for strokes gained putting in both 2023 and 2024. But the American ended the 2025 season as the seventh best on the PGA Tour.
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He ended his wait for a win on the PGA Tour with his victory at the Wyndham Championship just before the FedEx Cup playoffs.
And there is an argument that Young’s most memorable shot of the year came with the flat stick in his hand. Of course, that was the putt to win his match with Justin Rose on an electric Sunday at Bethpage Black during the Ryder Cup.
Cameron Young explains how he became one of the best putters on the PGA Tour
Young will hope to prove that his drastic improvement on the greens is here to stay. He has certainly spent long enough trying to find the magic formula.
As he told Smylie Kaufman on The Smylie Show, Young headed down several different paths with his putting.
He also explained why using AimPoint proved to be so unsuccessful.
“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 was 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 to me such a ridiculous thing to try to do. You can’t measure perfectly, you can’t measure how far you are from the hole. It was kind of insane to try to actually go through and make it work.”
AimPoint has become one of the most divisive issues in the game
Much like the belly putter, it appears that AimPoint will continue to divide golfers.
It was always interesting that some felt that using a belly putter should not be allowed. Clearly, it helped the likes of Webb Simpson and Keegan Bradley become major champions.
But there was never a time when every single player was using one. Some players obviously could not get along with a longer putter. So it was not straightforward to ban it.
Lucas Glover called for AimPoint to be banned as he felt it took too long. He also suggested that it was rude to the other players in a group to have one person stepping around the hole.
The likes of Bradley, Tommy Fleetwood, and Justin Rose would likely argue with that suggestion.
But once again, if AimPoint was some sort of cheat code, every player on the planet would be using it.
Ultimately, it is a skill; a skill that someone as good as Young could never master.
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