Blades Brown shot 9-under 63 on Sunday, made up a seven-shot deficit and won the World Wide Technology Championship in Los Cabos, Mexico, on the second playoff hole. He is 19. No one younger has won on the PGA Tour in 95 years.
Brown, a Black golfer from Nashville, finished at 23-under 265 and forced the playoff with a birdie on the 72nd hole. Ben James answered with an eagle at the par-5 18th to force extra holes, then missed an eight-foot putt on the second trip back. Brown holed his three-footer to win.
The record he took belonged to Charles Kocsis, who won the Michigan Open in 1931 at 18. That was a regional event in the tour’s early years, which is why some tallies count from 1938, when Bobby Dunkelberger won the St. Petersburg Open. By either count, no teenager has done what Brown did in nearly a century. It came in his 22nd career PGA Tour start.
He turned professional at 17, still in high school. In 2023, at 16, he broke Bobby Jones’s 103-year-old record as the youngest medalist in U.S. Amateur stroke play. This fall he became the youngest player to earn a PGA Tour card through the Korn Ferry Tour. The win comes with a two-year exemption and a place in next year’s PGA Championship, his first major.
His mother, Rhonda Blades Brown, was the first player to make a three-point shot in WNBA history. His first name is her maiden name.
Brown said afterward that the size of it had not landed yet. “It hasn’t set in just yet, I guess, the magnitude of being a PGA Tour winner,” he said. He went back to where it started: “I just go back to 5-year-old Blades that was watching the TV and watching Tiger Woods and all those great players win major championships, and to think that I’m now in a similar spot with having won a PGA Tour event is mind-blowing.”
That is the line to hold on to. Tiger Woods showed a generation of Black kids that the tour was a place they could win, and a 19-year-old who was a child in front of that television has now won there. Golf has kept the doors of its clubs, its junior circuits and its tours narrow for Black players for a long time. Brown walked through all of them before he could legally rent a car.
He gets his first major next year.
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