Ryan Ruffels is back on the PGA Tour this week for the first time in four years, set to tee it up at the Myrtle Beach Classic in South Carolina after winning a YouTube tournament to earn the start.
The 28-year-old once looked like one of Australian golf’s next big things. He turned professional as a 17-year-old prodigy a decade ago, already had 20 PGA Tour events on his record and, as a teenager in 2016, picked up seven sponsor exemptions that pushed him into view early.
For those inside the game, the return carries a sharper edge than a routine exemption. Golf Australia’s high performance staff once rated Ruffels as the nation’s best young talent since Jason Day, and he had already shown he could handle pressure by making the cut at the Australian Open as a 15-year-old amateur before playing the final round a year later alongside Rory McIlroy.
Ruffels has spent much of the last stretch outside the sport’s top tier, moving through the secondary Korn Ferry and Lationamerica Tours after PGA Tour sponsor invites dried up. He last teed it up for world ranking points in 2023, tried to qualify for a spot on LIV Golf that same year and no longer has a world ranking.
What gives his return extra relevance today is the route back. Ruffels and Jason Day are part of The Lads, a golf content creator group with 205,000 subscribers on YouTube that has pulled in more than half a million sets of eyeballs on some recent videos, while Ruffels and Day have more than 75,000 followers across Instagram and TikTok. The rise of social media golf content has given players outside the traditional ladder another way back into the conversation, and Ruffels is now one of the clearest examples of it.
He also comes from a family built around sport. Ruffels is the son of former tennis professionals Ray Ruffels and Anna-Maria, and his younger sister went on to become an LPGA professional golfer after first being the nation’s top ranked junior tennis player.
Ruffels has not yet won a professional tournament, but Myrtle Beach gives him something more immediate than a story line. It gives him another chance on the main tour, in front of the ranking points, the pressure and the audience that first made him a name worth watching.