Ludvig Aberg, superstar in the making, now plays RBC Heritage in Hilton Head

Ludvig Aberg just finished second in the Masters and until the 11th hole on Sunday, when he hit his second shot into the water, it looked like he actually had a chance of overtaking Scottie Scheffler.

“I was very lucky to still be able to take part in a major championship. “Playing Sunday with nine games in hand is what I’ve dreamed of my entire career,” Aberg said of the whole experience. “Even though I made a stupid mistake on the 11th, I was still in the hunt and still felt very lucky to be in that situation.”

Aberg has a charming way of speaking, which is difficult to achieve in a second language. (Think Bernhard Langer, whose German accent is still present.) Spending four years at Texas Tech probably had something to do with it.

This year, almost every course the young Swede plays on the PGA Tour is a course he has never seen before. That could cause a lot of anxiety, but he's looking forward to it because playing professional golf is what he's always wanted to do.

“Last week was incredible,” he said of his first Masters. “You don’t really know what it’s going to be like until you actually play in your first major, especially the Masters.”

Instead of Augusta National's vast green spaces, Aberg this week has claustrophobic pine walkways hugging the narrow golf corridors. It's Harbor Town Golf Links, a fairly early Pete Dye masterpiece that convinced Deane Beman to hire Dye to build TPC Sawgrass. Here golf television showed railway sleepers around water hazards and bunkers for the first time. Arnold Palmer won the first professional event played there in 1969, before the PGA Tour was actually founded.

“You have to make sure you know the angles, especially on a golf course like this where it has a little more to offer,” he explained.

The course is more subtle than TPC Sawgrass, a later Dye triumph. For inside information, Aberg relies on the knowledge of his caddie Joe Skovron, who worked for Rickie Fowler for 13 seasons.

“In cases like this, I trust my caddy a lot,” Aberg said. “I lean on him for all of this information. He tells me where to hit and I try to do it as best as I can.”

The wonderful thing is that at least most of the time he can hit where Skovron tells him.

For now, Aberg has the luxury of a two-year exemption to win the RSM Classic, also known as Davis Love III's event. This allows him to continue playing while he learns which courses work best for his game.

After this week, he has what he calls a tentative plan. He will play at Wells Fargo, PGA, Memorial, US Open and Travelers. Then he'll go back to Europe for a while, and if he qualifies, he'll be back for the FedEx Playoffs.