The Boy Champ
At just 16 years old, Sam Ferrans needed his parents’ approval to send to the airline to travel to the 1984 PDGA Pro World Championship. This was one of his first disc golf tournaments outside of Southern California, and he had only received his PDGA number a month before the event.
You learn from difficult defeats
Although Sam was young and didn’t have much tournament experience before the 1984 PDGA Pro World Championship, he had two painful losses in overall events that stuck with him. He lost the 1983 World Junior Championship by 4/10. Then, just a month before the 1984 Pro Worlds, he lost the U.S. Open by a single stroke when he missed a 15-foot putt on the final hole. Those two experiences were devastating at the time, but little did Sam know they would be the drive he needed to become the youngest PDGA Pro World Champion in history. From his U.S. Open loss until the start of the Worlds, Sam practiced every day from sunrise until the street lights came on in La Mirada.
The youngest world champion in the history of the PDGA
The 1984 PDGA Pro World Championship was played at Ellison Park in Rochester, New York. The venue featured a permanent course and a temporary course created for the tournament. Luckily for Sam, the permanent course at Ellison Park was long and favored power players like himself.
Armed with an Aero, XD, two Aviars and a towel, Sam competed against the best players in the world. After the first round he was already 8 strokes behind the leader, but the World Championship is a marathon, not a sprint. Sam set the course record with -8 in the second round and backed it up with another -8 in the third round. By the last 18 holes the “California Kid” (as he was jokingly called) had built up a lead of 6 strokes.
Going into the final round, Sam was understandably nervous. He lost three shots in the first three holes against a large field chasing him. Sam recalled his last few close losses and said, “That won’t happen again.” He leaned on his practice sessions at La Mirada and focused.
I was very ambitious and still remembered the one-stroke defeat the previous month and the 4/10 points the year before.
– Sam Ferrans
On hole 6, the Top of the World, Sam pulled out his trusty Aero, took a deep breath and tapped the stick downhill over 600 feet away. The crowd cheered and Sam set out on his round, confident that this was his week. In the end, Sam won the tournament by 5 strokes.
Bringing the trophy home
Sam Ferrans returned to Southern California, where Innova Champion Discs had recently been formed, and was extremely proud to share the news of his victory with Dave Dunipace, Harold Duvall, Charlie Duvall, Tim Selinske and the rest of the growing Southern California disc golf scene. Sam remembers this being the beginning of his relationship with Dave Dunipace, who took Sam under his wing and trained him to break the world distance record. There was no official team at the time, but in many ways Sam Ferrans was one of the first athletes on Team Innova. With Innova as the “Choice of Champions,” he laid the foundation for decades to come.
The next young champ
40 years later, disc golf has reached heights that no one could have imagined in 1984. With huge fields of athletes dedicating their lives to the sport, the top events in disc golf are more competitive than ever (even winning a C-Tier event in MPO is super hard!). So will anyone ever break Sam Ferran’s record? It seems unlikely, but it’s not impossible. In 2022, at age 17, Gannon Buhr won the United States Disc Golf Championship, the only event comparable to Worlds in prestige.
As more money is poured into the sport and younger and younger kids look to the best disc golfers as role models, there’s a chance another Boy Champ will emerge. Maybe they’re already out there, having accumulated their own tough losses and arduous training sessions, looking to topple today’s top players.
Even if the window of opportunity is very small, it is possible that a child can make it. And I’ll keep my fingers crossed for you.
– Sam Ferrans
