This might be the first time you hear about Blades Brown. It surely won’t be the last.
The 18-year-old golfer knows about firsts, and about setting records. The teen from Nashville, Tenn., was the youngest stroke play medalist at the U.S. Amateur Championship. He’s going to be the first to play eight rounds in eight days between the Korn Ferry and PGA Tours. On Friday, he set the PGA West Nicklaus Tournament Course record with a 12-under-par 60 at The American Express, the PGA Tour’s second tournament of 2026.
Brown enters Sunday tied with Scottie Scheffler for second place at The American Express. They are 21 under par, one stroke behind Si Woo Kim. If Brown wins, he gets a two-year exemption on the PGA Tour as well as a pass into the Masters, PGA Championship and Players Championship.
On Saturday, Brown sank a 45-foot putt on the 18th hole to finish the round with a 4-under 68.
“It was surreal,” Brown told the media after the round. “That’s what you practice for. That’s what late nights that you’re going out to putt and pretending that you have a putt to win the Masters, that right there is what it’s all about.”
Sunday will also be Brown’s eighth straight day of a full round of golf. He played four rounds at the Bahamas Great Abaco Classic on the Korn Ferry Tour. That tournament ended Wednesday. He flew from the Bahamas that same day and teed off at the AmEx the next afternoon.
Breaking barriers seems to run in Brown’s family. His mother, Rhonda Blades Brown, made the first 3-point basket in WNBA history during the league’s inaugural season in 1997 as a player for the New York Liberty. The next year, she was picked No. 1 by the Detroit Shock in the expansion draft. After her WNBA career, she coached the Brentwood Academy girls’ high school basketball team to five state championships in Tennessee.
Blades’ sister Millie made 220 3-pointers playing for her mother at Brentwood and helped win one of those state championships in 2018.
Blades talks and carries himself like a man well beyond his years and not as a teenager, which he will still be until he hits the big 2-0 on May 21, 2027. He’s been on the watch list since 2023, when at 16 he became the youngest medalist at stroke play in U.S. Amateur Championship history. That broke the 103-year-old record set by Bobby Jones, who was 18 when he did it.
For comparison, the youngest Amateur champion is Byeong Hun An, who won the title in 2009 at 17, 11 months and 13 days old. Tiger Woods won three straight titles from 1994 to 1996, starting when he was 18.
Brown, Woods and Bobby Clampett are the only players to win a medal in both U.S. Amateur and U.S. Junior competitions.
Brown played on the Korn Ferry Tour last year but got exemptions to play in several PGA Tour events. He made three of eight cuts, with his highest finishes occurring in the Mexican Open and Butterfield Bermuda Championship (both tied for 34th).
