It’s fitting that John Daly the Second speaks like a pro golfer — short, to the point, Just have to keep doing what I’m doing — for he is competing in a professional event. The 22-year-old amateur is a sponsor exemption in this week’s Puerto Rico Open.
But it’s also fitting that he’s doing it this week in particular, alongside a handful of other up-and-coming youths … in a field that features a bunch of outgoing PGA Tour members. This is the final week before the future of the PGA Tour starts 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 into a future second-tier beneath the PGA Tour. Where those relegated from the top tier go to figure their game out, and where the best players from the next generation graduate to when 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 difficult spring at the moment, but won a pair of meaningful amateur events in 2025, not to mention his T5 finish at the U.S. Amateur. It’s not just the name — he wouldn’t have earned a sponsor’s exemption if he didn’t at least have a good bit of game to back it up. And through 54 holes, he’s paying us a solid reminder: nine under and three shots back of leader Ricky Castillo.
Daly II called his third-round 70 “solid,” just like a 10-year pro would, before rattling off the kind of ho-hum, nothing-to-see-here answer that pros spit out with regularity: “Stayed in it well, hit some good shots. Yeah, sucks to make my first bogey in a while on 18. Hit a good second shot, just the wind let it rise in the air. Oh, well, it was a good day.”
The point here isn’t a new one: these kids arrive at the pro ranks and you have to squint pretty hard to see the “(a)” next to their names on leaderboards. This one, in particular, has a lot, and if more of these kids are ready to compete, then more of them should have a spot in the field. At least tournament director Matt Truax seems to think so. Daly II is just one of 14 sponsor exemptions into Puerto Rico, a large majority of which have been spent on the youths.
There’s 18-year-old Blades Brown, two clear of Daly, who has already been a pro for nearly two years. He’s a sponsor exemption, but now has the fourth-best odds entering Sunday’s final round. Another exemption got 17-year-old Miles Russell in the field. He’s already played eight PGA Tour or Korn Ferry Tour events before this one. Beating a bunch of veteran Tour pros, like he’s done this week, is old hat for him now and he hasn’t graduated from high school yet.
In between Brown and Russell is Kihei Akina, a freshman at BYU, who sits tied for 13th. He’s eight-up on last year’s Ryder Cupper Rasmus Hojgaard, to mention just one top-50 player looking up at him on the ‘board.
What the youths are combining to do here is collectively shout that there better be a defined spot in the future, tiered system carved out for them, too. It’s coming at a good time, just ahead of conference tournaments and NCAAs, when we’ll see them play a lot more on TV. But also as Tiger Woods, chairman of the Tour’s Future Competitions Committee, has been invoking them them in regards to the tiered system his committee members are trying to create.
“We’re trying to create opportunities for that turnover coming from the PGA Tour [University],” Woods said at last month’s Genesis Invitational. “Or it’s the Korn Ferry and trying to get more youth out here because eventually they’re going to take over the game.”
Just how many youths will be included? That answer hasn’t arrived yet. But this weekend suggests the number aught to be pretty big.