Yurav Premlall’s first golf clubs were plastic. He was around two years old when he picked them up in Durban, and from there the South African golfer built a junior career that has already pushed him into rare company.
Born in Durban in 2003, Premlall became the youngest amateur ever to qualify for the South African Open in 2018, when he was 15 years and five months old. That same year he became the youngest player to make the 36-hole cut at the event, then went on to become the youngest player to win on the Betway Big Easy Tour while still an amateur.
Those early results set up a run of milestones that kept arriving in quick succession. In 2021, Premlall won the Freddie Tait Cup as the leading amateur at the South African Open and also took the Nedbank Junior Challenge at the Gary Player Country Club. Two years later, he represented the Internationals at the 2022 Junior Presidents Cup, adding another marker to a career that had already moved well beyond promising.
The breakthrough as a professional came in 2024, when Premlall won his maiden Sunshine Tour title at the Vodacom Origins of Golf. For a player whose path has been measured by firsts, it was the result that tied the rest together. It also gave new weight to what had once been junior achievements and amateur invitations.
That progress is now carrying into 2025, after Gary Player gave Premlall a personal invitation to appear in the Nedbank Golf Challenge. Premlall has also said his dream fourball would include his father, Tiger Woods and former U.S. president Barack Obama, a line that says as much about the scale of his ambition as any trophy list does.
What stands out in premlall golf is not just the speed of the rise, but how early it began. The question now is whether his first Sunshine Tour win is the start of a sustained climb or simply the point where an already busy junior record turns into something bigger.
