CALEDON, Ont. — The path toward the highest reaches of professional golf is rarely a straight one, and it tends to get increasingly narrow the closer you get to the prize. There are plenty of prodigies among the game’s biggest names, athletes whose success seemed assured from the time they picked up a club: Tiger Woods, Rory McIlroy and Phil Mickelson among them. 

But for so many others, it’s a road less travelled, with plenty of potholes and blind turns. 

And yet one way or another, the ones with the right combination of talent, temperament and perseverance find a way. 

Sudarshan Yellamaraju, the 24-year-old from Mississauga, Ont., who is teeing it up at his second RBC Canadian Open at TPC Toronto at Osprey Valley this week, is just such an example. 

He didn’t come from a golfing family or grow up with access to the best equipment or the finest courses. His family immigrated from India to Winnipeg as a child. And golf was something that his father — who didn’t play golf himself — would put on TV to keep his son occupied. 

Something must have crept in through osmosis because Yellamaraju couldn’t get enough of this strange new game. He took up golf as a six-year-old, playing almost exclusively indoors during the long Winnipeg winters, using rental clubs. At age 9, he entered his first tournament and shot 101. It was the last time he wouldn't break 100. By the time he was 11, his family had moved to Mississauga to give him more opportunities to explore the game.

But it was very much an exploration. Rather than hire coaches, he watched YouTube, absorbing clips of the greats he was trying to chase, taking advantage of the opportunity to watch their swings frame by frame and compare them to his own. If he saw something they were doing that he wasn’t, he’d try it. If it didn’t work, he’d try something else. In between, he’d keep practicing.

Does he have a superpower for discernment?

Most people who resort to YouTube or go swimming solo in the deep........

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