It’s fitting that John Daly II speaks like a professional golfer—short, to the point, I just have to keep doing what I’m doing – because he is competing in a professional competition. The 22-year-old amateur is a sponsor exception at this week’s Puerto Rico Open.
But it’s also fitting that he’s doing so this week in particular, along with a handful of other up-and-coming youngsters … in a field that features a host of OUTGOING Members of the PGA Tour. This is the final week before the future of the PGA Tour begins to crystallize in a more public way.
The Puerto Rico Open, played at the same time as this week’s Arnold Palmer Invitational, a signature event, is exactly the kind of tournament that would fit in a future second tier below the PGA Tour. Where dropouts go to figure out their game and where the best players from the next generation graduate by the time their college days are over.
Daly II is a senior at Arkansas and the 54th ranked amateur in the world. He’s working through a rough spring at the moment, but won a pair of significant amateur events in 2025, not to mention his T5 finish in the US Amateur. It’s not just the name – he wouldn’t have won a sponsor’s exemption if he didn’t have at least a good portion of the game to support him. And through 54 holes, he’s giving us a strong reminder: nine shots under and three shots behind leader Ricky Castillo.
Daly II called his third-round 70 “solid,” as a 10-year pro would, before rocking that kind of ho-hum, nothing to see here Answer that the pros regularly spit out: “Stayed well, hit some good shots. Yeah, it’s a bummer to make my first bogey in a while on 18. Hit a good second shot, only the wind let it go up in the air. Oh well, it was a good day.”
The point here is nothing new: these kids make it to the pro ranks, and you have to look really hard to see “(a)” next to their names on the leaderboards. This one, in particular, has a lot, and if more of these kids are ready to compete, then more of them MUST to have a place in the field. At least tournament director Matt Truax seems to think so. Daly II is just one of 14 sponsor exemptions in Puerto Rico, most of which are spent on youth.
there are 18 year old Blades Browntwo away from Daly, who already has BEEN a professional for nearly two years. He is a sponsor exemption but now has the fourth-best chance of going into Sunday’s final round. Another exception was taken by 17-year-old Miles Russell on the field. He has already played eight PGA Tour or Korn Ferry Tour events before this one. Beating a group of veteran tour pros like he did this week is old hat for him now and he’s not even out of high school yet.
Between Brown and Russell is BYU freshman Kihei Akina, who sits tied for 13th. He’s eight times past last year’s Ryder Cupper Rasmus Hojgaard, to name just one top-50 player who watches him on the board.
What the young people are combining to do here is to collectively cry out that there better be a defined place in the future, a system of carved levels for them too. It’s coming at a good time, right before the conference tournaments and NCAAs, when we’ll see them play a lot more on TV. But also as Tiger Woods, chairman of the Tournament’s Futures Competition Committee, has called them out on the tier system his committee members are trying to create.
“We’re trying to create opportunities for that traffic that comes from the (University) PGA Tour,” Woods said at last month’s Genesis Invitational. “Or it’s Korn Ferry and trying to get more young people out here because eventually they’re going to take over the game.”
How many young people will be involved alone? This answer has not yet come. But this weekend suggests the number is quite large.
