Akshay Bhatia, 21, continues his ascent at The Sentry

KAPALUA, Hawaii – Akshay Bhatia recently started a YouTube channel, befitting his status as one of the TOUR’s top young prospects and something of a Pied Piper to a younger generation of golf fans.

Bhatia has made cameo appearances on the medium, engaging in matches with some of YouTube’s successful golf content creators. But he recently decided to start his own channel in order to shed a new light on TOUR life to a younger generation of fans.

Sunday represents an opportunity to produce some incredible content because Bhatia has the chance to win the biggest title of his pro career.

He enters the final round of The Sentry, the first of eight Signature Events in 2024, just one shot behind leader Chris Kirk. Winning will not be easy, however.

Jordan Spieth and Xander Schauffele, two former winners of this event, are among those just a stroke behind Bhatia, and Scottie Scheffler is lurking two shots behind him. There are 13 players separated by just four shots atop the leaderboard. Kapalua’s Plantation Course has allowed plenty of low scores this week, allowing an average score of approximately 4-under par this week. The back nine, with two par 5s and four par 4s under 400 yards, has been especially volatile.

“I'm excited to see how I feel with the lead or with expectations that I have on myself of winning tomorrow,” Bhatia said. “I'm looking forward to it.”

Bhatia is still early in his golf career – he’s just 21 years old – but to a certain generation of golf fan, he has been a star for years. A dominant junior golf career, as well as his work with the well-known coach George Gankas (who coached Bhatia alongside his longtime swing coach, Chase Duncan), made him something of a social-media sensation.

“It’s our generation now, right?” Bhatia said. “I love social media, I love doing Instagram stuff and showing people my life and my lifestyle and all the cool places we get to go to. It's just so fun because as a 21-year-old when kids are looking up to you, it's a weird feeling, right?”

Bhatia was the AJGA Player of the Year and the youngest American to ever play in the Walker Cup before turning pro at age 17. It is an unconventional route, and one that is fraught with challenges, but also one that Bhatia is proving was the right one for him.

His progress was stalled by the COVID-19 pandemic but two years ago he became the third-youngest winner on the Korn Ferry Tour, behind only Jason Day and Sungjae Im. He started 2023 as a Korn Ferry Tour member but earned PGA TOUR status with his runner-up at the PGA TOUR’s Puerto Rico Open. He followed with his first PGA TOUR victory a few months later at the Barracuda Championship.

Winning this week would only accelerate his ascent because it would be a victory over the likes of Spieth, Scheffler, Patrick Cantlay, Viktor Hovland and Collin Morikawa at one of golf’s most recognizable venues. Bhatia already is among a promising young crop of players on TOUR. Tom Kim already has three TOUR wins at age 21, and Ludvig Åberg, 24, won the previous PGA TOUR event, The RSM Classic, just months after turning pro out of Texas Tech. Åberg’s Ryder Cup teammate, Nicolai Hojgaard, and the charismatic Australian Min Woo Lee are two more young, intriguing talents who, like Bhatia and Åberg, are set to begin their first full season on TOUR.

According to Justin Ray, Bhatia would join Spieth and Tiger Woods as the only Americans in the past 30 years to win multiple times on TOUR before turning 22. Bhatia also could become the second-youngest winner in The Sentry’s history, behind only Woods.

Spieth played alongside Bhatia on Saturday and called him “extremely impressive,” noting the way he creatively shaped his shots.

“Just the way he flighted the ball, different shot shaping, playing the ball on the ground, playing it up in the air, couple of the short game shots,” Spieth said.

A win Sunday would make Bhatia the FedExCup leader of this nascent season, awarding him 700 points, and would earn berths into the season’s seven remaining Signature Events, the limited-field tournaments reserved for the TOUR’s top players, as well as the Masters and PGA Championship. It also would vault him up the world ranking from his current position of 110th.

Bhatia has shot 69-64-66 in his first visit to Kapalua thanks in large part to his switch to a broomstick-style putter. He experimented with the club last fall, using it for one round at the Fortinet Championship and the final three days of The RSM Classic, but this week is the first where the club is scheduled to be in his bag for all 72 holes.

“Maybe I’ll change tomorrow,” he joked. That’s doubtful, considering he leads the field in Strokes Gained: Putting (+5.594). That’s a marked improvement over last season, when he ranked 183rd out of 193 players in that metric.

The putting was the last piece needed to unlock Bhatia’s massive potential. He ranked 32nd in Strokes Gained: Off-the-Tee last season and 33rd in Strokes Gained: Approach-the-Green. Only nine players ranked ahead of him in both categories last season.

He’s taking a “no judgement” approach to the new putter, he said.

“Just not result oriented,” he said. “If I make a lot of putts or miss a lot of putts, I'm not judging the putter, specifically. … I'm seeing the ball go in a lot more than I have, so it's nice that it's kind of going this direction.”

Of the 5.6 shots that he’s gained on the greens this week, 3.41 came Saturday. He holed five putts from between 10-20 feet and missed just once from inside 10 feet. A victory for Bhatia also would continue the success of the broomstick on TOUR. Lucas Glover used a similar club to win back-to-back starts last summer. Glover was one of the players Bhatia consulted with about the potential change. Glover’s advice about using the club, which can carry a certain stigma for being a potential crutch on the putting green?

“Don't forget,” Glover said, “all those people that you're worried about judging you want to be you."