For Justin Thomas, the Wyndham Championship was a transformative week. How it ended is well known. His regular season was over when his chip shot for a birdie on the 72nd hole, which would have guaranteed him a place in the FedExCup Playoffs, ricocheted off the flagstick. Nevertheless, Thomas had a revelation through this.
He had to assume full accountability for his performance. His best performance in months occurred this week, and one thing was different, he did it all by himself. Mike Thomas, his father and coach, wasn’t present. John Graham, his putting instructor, wasn’t either. The week brought back memories of his early days as a professional when he worked on the range and handled issues on his own. He liked it.
“I am extremely fortunate to have a team that is actively participating. However, I simply believe that in my own case, they were present far too frequently to the point where I eventually lost all ownership and accountability to the point where, when things went wrong, I turned to them for answers rather than sorting it out on my own.” Thomas said on Wednesday while making a statement at the Silverado Resort in Napa, California.
Since the Wyndham Championship two months ago, Thomas has reduced the frequency of his father Mike’s involvement. While his father continues to be his swing instructor, Mike no longer attends every competition or range practice. It’s the same setup that allowed Thomas to play some of his best golf in 2017–18 while his father still retained his PGA tour job.
“As a father, he is free to act any way he pleases, but there will be weeks when, if things go well, I won’t necessarily need a coach, and I believe that’s more or less how I want things to be,” Thomas said.
His putting coach, Graham, also left him. Even though Thomas believed he and his partner had optimized all of the mechanics and principles of his putting stroke, he was still placed 137th in Strokes Gained: Putting.
He recalled some of his best-putting performances as a junior as part of his desire to master every aspect of his game. At that moment, the only thing that mattered was getting the ball into the hole as soon as possible, regardless of how his putting stroke seemed or where his feet were placed.
“I basically told [John] that he can’t make the putts for me; I have to figure that out, and only I am capable of doing that,” Thomas said.
Thomas has spent the past month trying to reignite the swing that helped him win his first PGA Championship in 2017 and climb to world No. 1 less than a year later. The decisions have been liberating for him.
He spent hours watching old recordings of his swing from those times, contrasting it with his swing going into the 2022–23 season and his position following the Wyndham Championship.
He observed that as time went on, his swing lengthened and became more inconsistent. The result was that he overdid and overemphasized a number of modifications, which reduced the width of his backswing and made the club excessively steep at the top. The lengthy period between tournaments was devoted to resolving those problems.
“To try to sort of get it back in those places, it was just a lot of balls and repetition,” he said.
The 2022–2023 campaign has seemed like a never-ending series of firsts. None that Thomas desired, either. It was his first Regular Season without a victory since 2015 and his first time missing the Playoffs. It was the only year that he relied on a captain’s decision to make a U.S. National Team, and he missed the cut in numerous big tournaments, a first for him. Each undesirable milestone builds on the one before it.
However, Thomas is eagerly anticipating his first opportunity to implement the modifications in competitive play at this week’s Fortinet Championship.
He hopes to place between No. 51 and No. 60 on the FedExCup this fall in order to qualify for two 2024 Signature Events: the AT&T Pebble Beach Pro-Am and The Genesis Invitational.
Prior to the Ryder Cup, he was also perfecting his swing, but he is not under any pressure to perform well or earn a spot on the captain’s team. In reality, all of that stress vanished when squad captain Zach Johnson called to congratulate him on joining the team. He is now free to play.
“I’m simply trying to be myself once more and dig it out of the dirt,” he said.
