Every so often, a young star comes around and throws golf into a frenzy. Projections are made. Predictions are confidently declared. A hypothetical number of future major championships is assigned to a name. This kid is different, they’ll say. The future has arrived.Jackson Koivun has had this effect on the amateur game for the better part of the last three years.So, naturally, professional golf experienced a tidal wave of excitement over the weekend when Koivun — the 21-year-old from San Jose, Calif. — won the PGA Tour’s 3M Open with ease. For a sport that will not have a men’s major champion younger than 30 when the 2027 Masters rolls around, this feels especially notable.Not only did Koivun, in his third start as a pro, win by three strokes and set a tournament scoring record with a 25-under tournament total of 259, but he also fended off a Sunday charge from the world No. 1 Scottie Scheffler. Scheffler shot a final-round 63, and Koivun barely flinched.“That’s what we train for,” he said after the win. “That’s the position we all strive to be in even through college. You want to be leading a PGA Tour event… once you’re finally in it, you’ve just got to keep your head down and commit to every single golf shot. Fortunately, it worked out for me today.”Hyperbole aside, there are real reasons to believe Koivun is, in fact, different.As a freshman at Auburn, Koivun put together one of the greatest seasons in college golf history. He won all four major college golf awards in 2024: the Jack Nicklaus Award, the Fred Haskins Award, the Ben Hogan Award and the Phil Mickelson Award, and led the Tigers to their first-ever NCAA title.As a sophomore, Koivun got right back to it. He earned three individual wins, and more than doubled the necessary amount of points in the PGA Tour University program to turn pro with immediate tour status at the end of the season.Jackson Koivun emotionally responds after winning his first PGA Tour event. (Andrew Wevers / Getty Images)But he decided to wait a year and return to Auburn for one more run, where he helped the team win another NCAA title in 2026. And Koivun swept the major collegiate awards he was eligible for again, becoming the first player in college golf history to win all three more than once.Koivun holds 11 collegiate titles, joining just a handful of players to reach double-digit victories, with Tiger Woods, Mickelson and Jon Rahm included in that group. He won six of his last 10 tournaments in college, and broke Collin Morikawa’s single-season scoring average.