The Five: Young phenoms looking to turn heads, contend at Rocket Mortgage Classic

Youth and precocity will be on display at this week’s Rocket Mortgage Classic.

But that’s an understatement.

The youngest player in the field this week, Miles Russell, 15, was only 2 when Rory McIlroy won his first major. And Russell wasn’t even alive for 14 of Tiger Woods’ 15 major wins. But Russell could certainly make the cut in his PGA TOUR debut at Detroit Golf Club, given his bona fides. He is the youngest to make a cut on the Korn Ferry Tour, having done so at this season’s LECOM Suncoast Classic before finishing tied for 20th.

He won both the Junior PGA Championship and the Junior PLAYERS Championship last year and was the youngest player to ever be named the American Junior Golf Association’s Player of the Year. (Woods is the only other player to win the award before turning 16.)

"Hopefully he has fun and doesn't beat me, but does well," said Min Woo Lee.

Here are five other phenoms in the field at this week’s Rocket Mortgage Classic.

Neal Shipley

Shipley, who will make his non-major PGA TOUR debut in Detroit, was the 2022 Pennsylvania Amateur champ but was not very well known until last summer. That’s when he went on a heater that saw him finish runner-up in a handful of big amateur tournaments, biggest among them the U.S. Amateur at Cherry Hills in Denver, where he lost to Nick Dunlap in the final.

That result got Shipley, who was seeded 47th at Cherry Hills, into this year’s Masters and U.S. Open. The rest, as they say, is history, as Shipley again rose to the occasion at the Masters, where he played the final round with Tiger Woods on the way to earning low am honors. At the U.S. Open, he battled Florida State’s Luke Clanton down to the wire to capture low am yet again.

Shipley, 23, is just the sixth player to win low amateur at both the Masters and the U.S. Open, and the first to achieve the double since Viktor Hovland in 2019. Shipley made his pro debut on PGA TOUR Americas last week and tied for ninth at The Beachlands Victoria Open.

“It's been wild,” he said at the U.S. Open at Pinehurst No. 2. “It's been something that maybe three, four years ago I didn't think was possible, and to accomplish all this has just been phenomenal. Just the stuff of dreams really as an amateur to do everything I've done.

“I think I've checked all the boxes now,” he added.

Even better, Shipley threw out the first pitch at the Detroit Tigers’ home game Monday night.

Jackson Koivun

It’s a foregone conclusion that Auburn standout Koivun will become the second player (after Vanderbilt’s Gordon Sargent) to earn his PGA TOUR card via PGA TOUR Accelerated, the program by which elite college players are given points for exemplary play in amateur and collegiate events as well as major championships and, as with this week, PGA TOUR events.

Koivun, who just became the first player ever to sweep college golf’s three national Player of the Year awards – the Haskins, the Hogan, and the Nicklaus – and the Phil Mickelson Outstanding Freshman award in the same season, is already at 16 points. He needs 20 for his TOUR card.

Making the cut at the Rocket Mortgage this week would earn him one point, while a top-10 finish would net him two. Koivun, who led Auburn to the NCAA team title while finishing second as an individual, made his first PGA TOUR start at the Memorial Tournament presented by Workday. He made the cut, earning another point, and finished 52nd.

The second-ranked player in the World Amateur Golf Ranking, Koivun, 19, will get yet another point for playing in the Palmer Cup next month, with more points on offer at the U.S. Amateur and elsewhere. With three college seasons still ahead of him, the math favors Koivun. Not bad, considering that PGA TOUR models showed only three people would have reached 20 points in Accelerated over the last decade: Patrick Cantlay, Justin Thomas, and Patrick Rodgers.

Luke Clanton

Clanton, a rising junior at Florida State University, is coming off a sensational sophomore year in which he recorded the lowest single-season stroke average in FSU history, 69.33. (Keep in mind, FSU golf alumni include five-time major champion Brooks Koepka.) Clanton, who is from Hialeah, Florida, also won three times in the spring and led the Seminoles all the way to the NCAA Championship final, where they lost to Auburn.

On the back of all that, Clanton, 20, got through his U.S. Open sectional and at Pinehurst battled to the very end for low am. Trailing playing partner Neal Shipley by one going into the last hole, Clanton found the pine straw right of the 18th fairway but hit a sensational approach from 129 yards, his ball barely sliding past the hole before stopping 6 feet away. Although he three-putted from there, giving low am honors to Shipley, Clanton had merely reminded him of his prowess.

“He really made it tough on me,” Shipley said. “He's got a lot of good golf left, and you're going to be seeing him out here again very soon. He's such a quality player.”

One place we’ll be seeing Clanton, in addition to Detroit, is the 2025 Valspar Championship since he won the Valspar Collegiate Invitational, one of three straight victories in the spring.

And as if things weren’t already looking rosy enough for Clanton and the golf program in Tallahassee, FSU golf products John Pak and Frederik Kjettrup just won tournaments on the Korn Ferry Tour and PGA TOUR Americas last weekend.

Ben James

The fourth-ranked amateur in the world, the University of Virginia’s James was named NCAA Outstanding Freshman of the Year in 2023 after a five-win season.

In his sophomore season, which he had just finished, James, 21, became the first UVA male golfer to be a two-time First-Team All-American. At the NCAA Championship, he was the only player in the field to post a top-10 finish (T2) for the second straight year.

Like Clanton and Shipley, James qualified for the recent U.S. Open at Pinehurst, where the USGA put him in a group with fellow UVA golf products Denny McCarthy and Ben Kohles. (James, playing in his first major, missed the cut by a shot.)

James, from Milford, Connecticut, finished his junior career as AJGA and Golfweek No. 1.

Michael Thorbjornsen

Thorbjornsen, a past winner of the Drive, Chip & Putt at Augusta National, is a Tiger Woods fan who also attended Stanford. Thorbjornsen first announced himself when playing on a sponsor exemption, he contended on Sunday and ultimately finished fourth at the 2022 Travelers Championship. It was the second-best finish by an amateur in a PGA TOUR event since 2000.

His mother, Sandra, was a college golfer. His father, Thorbjorn, got intrigued by the science of the swing and became Michael’s coach. It worked. Thorbjornsen’s accomplishments include winning the U.S. Junior, defeating two-time PGA TOUR winner Akshay Bhatia in the final.

Although a scooter crash and a stress fracture in his back slowed his rise, Thorbjornsen, 22, still held off Georgia Tech’s Christo Lamprecht to finish No. 1 in the PGA TOUR University Ranking and earn his PGA TOUR card for the rest of 2024 and 2025.

Stanford coach Conrad Ray said the big-hitting Thorbjornsen is a generational talent with the driver, and added, “Stressful situations don’t seem to affect him as much as other players.”