Hoylack, England – Justin Thomas is trying to solve an impossible mystery. He knows it, but he still begs the question, still wonders aloud if there is an answer to why he can go from a shot befitting the best player in the world, to hitting the next ball in a way unworthy of anyone who calls himself a professional golfer.
Thomas knows that golf is not a game that is perfected by some method or solved by formula. One moment there, the next it’s gone. One shot and you are the best. Two shots and you’re suddenly the worst. how? The search for an explanation may provide an answer, but it will only continue until a different question arises.
“It makes no sense,” said Thomas Friday. “There’s nobody shooting an 82 that hit some good shots I did yesterday.”
The top of the golf world has been a good fit for Thomas in recent years. He has been hailed as one of the best ball forwards in the game and has won two major championships. He’s struggled before, but he’s never dealt with anything like this: a second-round 81 at the US Open and a missed cut; A first round 82 at The Open and a missed step. Both were his worst runs in the majors of his career.
Thomas admits he made mistakes that remind him of him as a mini golfer, more than 20 years ago. How will he fix them is the very important question. No one seems to have an answer for him—not Thomas’ dad and longtime coach, Mike, who watches every drill swing; Not the caddy, Jim “Bones” McKay, who walks his every move; Not even Thomas himself.
“I don’t know if it’s focus or I’m pushing too much on myself or what it is,” said Thomas. “I try not to focus too much on days like yesterday. I try not to dwell on it… but it sucks when it’s the first round of a major, and you don’t have a chance anymore.”
After Thursday’s debacle, Friday’s round has become an experience. With neither the cut-line nor the trophy in sight, Thomas was trying to find something, something that could pick up and make the trip to Liverpool worth it. So it doesn’t matter if it’s the open championship, golf links require precision and restraint. Thomas had made a decision: he was going to beat his chauffeur all day.
Over the course of his second round, the main winner never faltered or undone. As he fired balls from the tee left and right, he yelled “fore” so many times, it was hard to call strategy clever or even take it as a sign of a certain kind of freedom. It seemed more like a combination of having nothing left to lose and trying to figure out where to go from here after a series of wasted cuts in the majors. The result was an equally impressive round that was 11 shots better than the first, and allowed Thomas to herald the positivity thereafter.
“I used today as a good opportunity to prepare for the week ahead, and I felt like I did,” said Thomas. “I take a lot of good shots. I just make a lot of mistakes and crazy things happen. I’ll be fine.”
During his round on Friday, Thomas embodied golf’s cruelest paradox with plenty of good shots followed by bad shots and vice versa. After the errant drive, he dropped his head, winced and mimicked his swing as if trying to fix himself in the process. He’s still fighting, even grinding, for pars and ghost and found a bunch of sparrows along the way too.
“It’s hard here, for me, to play a lot of the golf swing because it’s very windy and you have to hit a lot of putts, which I love,” said Thomas. “It kind of takes me away from thoughts of golf.”
Thomas’ technical virtuosity is one of the fundamental principles of his game. He’s no good at driving it further than anyone else or being a better batsman. The magic of his game lies in the shot making, the bump and run, the chiseled seven irons and the tight wedges. When he watches the 18th hole on Friday after his last two main rounds, you can almost see that those shots are still stored inside his hard drive in his mind. The struggle is not that they have disappeared. It’s a much harsher reality: right now, he can barely conjure it up, if at all.
But even when elite golf seems like a distant, unattainable reality, that magic still spills over as it did at various moments on Friday. On the 12th, after his approach came up short, the low-spinning chip he shot toward the hole found its way to the bottom of the cup. A rare smile appeared.
“I try to look at the big picture,” said Thomas.
Despite his overall performance at Hoylake, Thomas was more resigned than despondent, never angry, only disappointed. Once he exited each hole, he gave the nearby fans loud whoops and fist pumps, and nodded to the cheers that continued despite what the leaders showed. By the time he reached nearly every T-shirt box, he had to pull a new ball out of his bag and tag it – he had given the ball he was using to a kid. When asked in his post-tour interview if he would come to England to watch Leeds United – the football team in which he and Jordan Spieth have invested – Thomas smiled.
He said, “I’d like to.” “But I have to discover this sport first.”
To get technical for a second, it’s hard to pinpoint what Thomas’ problem really is. He hits the ball shorter than the tee and was much less accurate, but his approach technique is still well above average. His putter had been problematic all year, and he tried to replace it with a blade-shaped one at one point in the season before returning to his original mallet. On the PGA Tour this year, Thomas ranks 152nd in strokes earned: the shot. The struggle on the green might have seeped back into almost every part of his game. So much so, that he missed four cuts in his last six events and dropped to 20th in the world rankings.
This is why questions about the Ryder Cup are so loud. Thomas likely won’t qualify for points unless he suffers an unlikely tear, and although he’s roommates with USA captain Zack Johnson this week and until recently was seen as a great deal, Thomas admitted he worries about his place.
“I want to make the Ryder Cup team more than anything else,” said Thomas, who is very successful in the event. “Maybe I’m honestly trying to make it up.”
As Johnson said, “The bottom line is, this game is really tough. There will be peaks. There will be some valleys. He’s very good. I might be a little worried, as I said, as a friend, but I’m not worried about him because I know what he’s doing and I know what he can do.”
It’s not just the Ryder Cup. Questions about his father as a coach are also getting louder.
“It was tough,” Thomas said of the relationship in the midst of struggles. “He feels bad as a coach. He hates it for me as a father. None of us want anything to be bad when it comes to playing golf, but we work hard. We try as hard as we can.”
What was clear on Friday was that Thomas cared. a lot. Twenty shots off the lead at one point, he was still begging balls in the air to miss the bunkers, to go left, down, right, or up. He was still hanging on to every shot as if in disagreement.
As he walked towards the ninth hole, one fan quipped, “GT looks miserable.”
It only took me walking with him all day to realize he wasn’t. Struggle? Yes. frustrated? definitely. but miserable? No, he was still playing, tape on his wrist from being “hit off the float and the bunkers a few times,” still hoping to get the best shot he could on every try. It was, in a way, getting better in a way.
“We all go through bad patches,” said Rory McIlroy when asked about Thomas. “That’s golf. GT will be fine. He’s one of the most talented players out there. He shot 69 in the TPC [Sawgrass] Two years ago in 40 mph winds, I always remind him of that.”
On the 18th, Thomas again found himself in the cellar where he made the quadruple bogey on Thursday. This time, though, he got out of it and hit two for bogey, saluting the crowd before dropping a few more balls and his glove and then walking down a tunnel.
Several times on Friday, Thomas has his eyes fixed on the leaderboard. His name is nowhere to be found, but he seemed to want to know who was playing well. The past two majors have been as low as they’ve ever been, and while there’s certainly always more room below, Thomas has no choice but to believe that Friday was a step up, and that these leaderboards will soon include his name again.
“Everyone has their waves, that kind of momentum and rides and rock bottoms,” said Thomas. “I just tell myself this is it, I’m getting out of it.”