Peter Williams: Danny boy is just one of a new breed of teen idols

It's a question you usually hear in gymnastics, swimming, or women's tennis.

Who's the best teenager in the game? But this week, in the wake of Danny Lee's brilliant win in Perth, it's golf, and men's golf at that, making headlines with its new breed of teen idols.

Lee may be the youngest ever to win on the European or Australasian Tour, but he won't be the youngest at the Masters, wasn't the youngest in the field at The Vines last weekend, and is actually the second winner on the European Tour this year yet to have his 20th birthday.

Even in this newspaper seven days ago, there was a half page story about the 17-year-old Japanese star Ryo Ishikawa.

The story, sourced from London's Daily Telegraph, wasn't in the sports pages but ran in the world section and the first line claimed he'd just solved the credit crunch in America because he attracted a few Japanese reporters to the Los Angeles Open.

It was hyperbole a worldly sub-editor might have put the red pen through but it shows the demand for news about these prodigies is insatiable, as Danny Lee has found in the past week.

The best of the teenagers is Rory McIlroy, the 19-year-old from Holywood in Northern Ireland. He's among the game's elite now, ranked the 17th-best player in the world.

McIlroy, a slip of a kid just 1.75m tall and always looking like he needs a hairbrush, has one professional tournament victory so far, wire-to-wire in Dubai last month, but he peppered 2008 with eight top-10 finishes and became the youngest ever to crack the world's top 50.

Ishikawa, ranked 68th despite missing the cut in LA last weekend, has the best results among these whiz kids. The first winner of a professional tournament born in the 1990s, he triumphed at the Munsingwear Open on the Japanese Tour in June 2007 aged 15 years, 8 months. Turning pro last year, he won another official Japan Tour event, was runner up in the Japan Open and had five other top 10s.

Those results attracted an invitation from the green jackets at Augusta National, and he'll play twice more on the US PGA Tour before the Masters, including the Arnold Palmer Invitational in four weeks' time where his fellow competitors will include... Danny Lee.

Lee, rocketing up the world rankings to 159 after his win in Perth, is the least experienced of these youngsters in professional events, having played only nine times, but he's missed the cut just once, and has that hugely impressive amateur record as well.

The fourth of this quartet of teenage stars is Korea's Noh Seung-yul, who's most recent moment of glory was two weeks ago when he shot 62 to lead the Malaysian Open after the first round.

Noh, another 17-year-old, was Rookie of the Year on the Asian Tour last year, a tournament winner and also ran second behind Mark Brown at the SAIL Open in India. But after missing the cut in the Johnnie Walker, he's slipped behind Lee on the world rankings to 169.

I doubt there's ever been a group of teenagers as good as this in golf history. The game has been littered with hot-shot young amateur stars but professional tournament golf is at another level. These four have made serious statements at a young age and the game is the better for it.

But golf is a sport where playing careers are often measured in decades, not just years. It's also a game which puts huge demands on young bodies, and young brains. You'd like to think this quartet would be among the world's top 50 players in 10 years' time, but in a hugely competitive international sport, and with the production line of young stars unlikely to stop, you wouldn't put the house on it.