Sometimes the final nine of a PGA TOUR event can be a game of chicken, as professional golfers battle their emotions and the course while chasing the title.

Conversely, William Mouw seized the moment Sunday at the ISCO Championship with a course-record 61 at Hurstbourne Country Club to earn his first TOUR title in his 20th start – a performance that was anything but “chicken.”

It was an unconventional first win for Mouw, a PGA TOUR rookie who entered the week at No. 153 on the FedExCup standings – very much on the verge of losing his card after his debut season – and stood a distant T25 into the final round in Kentucky, seven strokes off the 54-hole lead. But it was a fitting performance for the California native whose upbringing has been anything but conventional, and who was best known on TOUR (before Sunday) for making a 13 at The American Express in January but meeting the media to discuss anyway.

Mouw grew up on an egg farm in California, frequently waking before dawn to help his parents Billy and Michelle tend to farm tasks. Billy’s Egg Farm celebrated its 30th year of business in 2022, and it’s fully a family business – Mouw’s sisters Madison and Taryn work at the farm and also create content for the farm’s popular social media accounts. Mouw’s grandpa also worked as a farmer in California, and his uncles are farmers in Iowa.

Practicing golf doesn’t seem too bad in comparison to a pre-dawn wheelbarrow run with fertilizer, or keeping chickens alive in the summer heat, or tending to a drive-through line that weaves down the road before the store opened at 8 a.m. (like during a nationwide egg shortage in early 2023).

When things are tough, work hard: That’s what Mouw did after making that octuple-bogey 13 in the Coachella Valley. That’s what he did after missing the cut by a stroke at the John Deere Classic, the week before the ISCO, which marked his third missed cut in four starts and kept him mired well down the FedExCup standings. That’s what he did after making bogey on his final three holes in Friday’s second round at the ISCO for a 3-over 73, potentially squandering his chance to make some hay in a pivotal weekend with time running out to keep his job. So now he has a job on the PGA TOUR through 2027 – at an opportune time, as he and wife Hannah are expecting a baby in the coming months (after his win became official Sunday, he kissed his wife’s belly).

Working hard is all Mouw knows how to do, and it paid off Sunday in career-changing fashion.

“The egg farm has been my foundation for sure,” Mouw said Sunday. “To be born and raised on a farm taught me work ethic and hard work and … you've got to work for everything. So coming from a farm, it was amazing. It definitely led me to see what it takes to make it in this world, watching my dad wake up early mornings and work hard on the farm, deliver eggs, and it just solidified in me that hard work does pay off in the end.

“Just, you need a lot of it.”

Mouw grew up on the family farm in Chino, California, roughly 35 miles east of Los Angeles, and enjoyed playing most sports as a kid. Although he was intrigued by the prospect of playing on TOUR from a young age – he attended The Genesis Invitational several times and remembers leaving Riviera with inspiration to work even harder – it wasn’t until age 14 when he went all-in with golf, his parents recalled last fall. Mouw was also a competitive basketball player, a point guard/shooting guard hybrid who never shies away from a three-pointer. Mouw and his eventual wife met at a high school basketball game, of all places – he was in the game, she was in the crowd, and he thought to himself, “I want to wife that up,” he quipped later. He introduced himself after the game, they reconnected for ice cream a few months later, and the rest is history.

That might not be a conventional way to meet one’s future spouse, but it neatly fits Mouw’s life arc. If you want to achieve something (whether it be a career in a professional golf, a relationship, or anything else), go for it.

It's a callback to the time in middle school when he taught himself to ride a unicycle, mainly because he wanted to be the “unicycle guy” at school, and the time he taught himself to juggle within a half hour because he was bored at school one day. Mouw didn’t have much idle time as a kid – there was always plenty to do on the farm. So just because he seemed out of contention into Sunday at the ISCO, there was no point in having an idle day. Why not go achieve something?

After racing up the leaderboard with five birdies in his first eight holes Sunday on a firm, fast Hurstbourne layout, Mouw found trouble at the par-3 ninth where he missed his tee shot into a left greenside bunker and arrived to find his ball in a plugged lie (a fried egg, of sorts). Yet he didn’t fret, splashing to 14 feet and draining the par putt. Then he added four back-nine birdies for a final-round 61 and 10-under 270 total, which was eventually (after nearly two hours of waiting) one stroke clear of runner-up Paul Peterson.

“Especially on the egg farm, it's just learning how to … turn bad breaks into opportunities to use that to make something better than what you had before,” Mouw said Sunday. “So looking at it with that mindset is the right way to do it. And I was never looking at a lie like that or a situation like last week at John Deere where I missed the cut on the last putt, it was disappointing, but how could we use that as motivation to thrive this next week and use that plugged lie as a positive, which I did and ended up getting up and down and actually going on to win the tournament for me.”

Mouw played college golf at Pepperdine and got married as a college senior – again, not beholden to the more standard timeline of waiting until after school for marriage. He finished No. 6 on the 2023 PGA TOUR University Ranking to earn Korn Ferry Tour membership, and he quickly adjusted to the professional game with four top-25 finishes in his first five Korn Ferry Tour starts. He then finished No. 10 on the 2024 Korn Ferry Tour season-long standings in his first full year as a pro to earn his first TOUR card with plenty of room to spare.

It was a quick ascent from college to the game’s highest level, and even though he hit a relative snag in his first few months as a TOUR pro, he knew what to do: Channel the trait that has always worked for him, and for his family. Just keep working.

“Nothing is given,” Mouw said Sunday. “Everything is earned.”