Isaiah Salinda isn’t one to be caught off guard. But in this moment, he hesitated.

“I don’t know how personal I want to get here,” he asked himself aloud.

Salinda was relaxing on a maroon-cushioned wooden chair at a Korn Ferry Tour content shoot last summer, answering questions about his origins in the game and what a PGA TOUR card would mean to him. The answers came easily, requiring little thought. Then he was asked: “What’s the most daunting thing you’ve ever faced?” He paused for a few moments before making up his mind.

“Sure, I’ll go here.”

Salinda earned his first PGA TOUR card via the 2024 Korn Ferry Tour by finishing No. 18 on the season-long standings to earn one of 30 available TOUR cards. The accomplishment had once seemed inevitable as he turned pro in 2019 as a highly regarded prospect from Stanford, but Q-School struggles and the COVID-19 pandemic hiatus delayed his ascent for some time. His immense talent won out, as he won the Korn Ferry Tour’s 2024 Panama Championship by eight strokes – shortly after having his appendix removed – en route to his best season as a pro to date.

Salinda, 28, finished third at last month’s Mexico Open at VidantaWorld in just his fourth start as a PGA TOUR member, and he enters this week’s Texas Children’s Houston Open with ample momentum as one of the TOUR’s most intriguing 2025 rookies. Salinda often wears zany socks in competition rounds (one of his favorite pairs has alligators on surfboards), and he resists the typical polo patterns seen on TOUR (he admires Jason Day’s unconventional scripting, for one). He wants to break the mold of the typical TOUR pro.

“The kid exudes confidence,” said fellow rookie Kevin Velo, one of Salinda’s closest friends in professional golf. “I hate to give him props, but he just knows how to talk his way into playing well. And everybody knows he's good and he also knows it and he will tell you sometimes when we're playing practice rounds, so he's just a very confident guy.”

But before he reached this status as a PGA TOUR pro – which he has envisioned since he was a toddler in South San Francisco, California, hitting wiffle balls around the house with a plastic club – he was an incoming freshman at Stanford, processing some unexpected news as he prepared to commence his journey as a college golfer.

After undergoing a routine physical as a student-athlete, Salinda was diagnosed with hypertrophic cardiomyopathy, a condition in which the heart muscle becomes abnormally thick, which can obstruct blood flow and interfere with the heart’s pumping function. There are different levels of the condition, and at the time he didn’t know how it might interfere with his pursuit of a career as a high-level athlete. That decade-plus dream in the making flashed before his eyes.

“In that moment, not knowing how serious it was or whether I could continue to play golf or eventually play professional golf, it was a little scary at the time,” Salinda said.

Salinda doesn’t discuss his heart condition much, publicly. He doesn’t want any sympathy, but he’s grateful that his sport of choice, golf, is compatible with his limitations. During workouts, for example, he’s always conscious of how hard he can push himself, and physical activity requires him to be mindful of his heart rate levels. The condition sometimes requires a cardiac device akin to a pacemaker.

“That was an option I considered for a while, but it’s been stable and nothing’s really changed,” Salinda said last fall. “I don’t need that, at least not yet.”

Had he pursued a different sport that required increased cardio levels like soccer, his career as a professional athlete might not have taken flight. “There was definitely a lot of uncertainty,” Salinda said last fall, “but over time, I think it became clear that I could still play and not really be affected too much. I’m definitely lucky, and I guess I chose the right sport.”

Salinda will never take golf for granted. He never has, anyway.

Salinda’s parents, Tony and Debbie, immigrated from the Philippines to the San Francisco Bay Area in the late 1980s, where they married and first settled in a crowded house with several cousins. The Salinda family unit is strong; some of Salinda’s fondest childhood memories involve big group dinners with aunts and uncles. To this day, he loves to cook, notably taking the available ingredients and creating a medley of sorts. Aside from those plastic clubs and wiffle balls, Salinda first fell in love with golf at San Bruno Golf Center, a public two-story range where he’d go “literally every day after school” up until high school. Some of his earliest rounds came at TPC Harding Park’s nine-hole par-30 layout – the Fleming 9 Course – with his dad, uncles and sometimes his brother. He progressed to the full-length TPC Harding Park layout where he could sometimes play for $5 via the Youth on Course non-profit organization's program.

“Looking back, it wasn’t the best conditions or the best golf balls I was hitting,” said Salinda of San Bruno, “But that’s where I learned to hone in on the skills and learn to hit all the shots. I look back on that place with very fond memories.”

Salinda worked and worked to get better, knowing nothing was to be expected in golf or life. His parents are both recently retired; his dad worked as a mail handler “working in the back, driving the forklift and stuff” and his mom was a nurse. He wasn’t a country club kid, but he knew that if he shot the scores and kept up his grades, things would fall into place. It led him to Stanford, where after that shock-to-the-system health scare early in his freshman year, he carved out an esteemed college career that culminated in helping the Cardinal to the 2019 NCAA title as a senior (he was also named second-team All-American that year).

All the while, he has maintained an extremely close relationship with his family. His parents attended last fall’s Korn Ferry Tour Championship presented by United Leasing & Finance in southern Indiana to celebrate his #TOURBound moment. Salinda now lives in Las Vegas, but he frequently returns to the Bay Area to visit his family. He always will.

“Both my parents, just coming from another country and building their own life and building their own family here is really inspirational,” Salinda said. “I think they really set an example for me in what hard work and discipline can do. It can help you achieve whatever you want in life.”

No matter the obstacles along the way.

PGA TOUR’s Elise Tallent contributed to this report