At golf’s PGA Championship, Justin Thomas looks for magic

NEW YORK – Five years ago, when Justin Thomas came to the 2018 PGA Championship as the defending champion, he was still cruising along as one of the top three players in the game and had spent a stint as the top-ranked golfer in the world.

At that moment, elite golf came easily to him.

Thomas was 25 and the winner of one Major. This week, he once again returns to the PGA Championship as the defending champion. But things are different now.

Since claiming his second Major victory in 2022, he has endured the bumpy irregularity typical of any golf career. He comes to the Oak Hill Country Club without finishing first in any of the 20 events he has entered.

In April, he missed the cut at the Masters. A month earlier, he stumbled to a tie for 60th at the Players Championship, an event he won two years ago.

In 10 tournaments in 2023, he has just two top-10 finishes and five results outside the top 20.

Thomas conceded on Monday that his game was tattered enough at times in the past year that he teed up for some tournaments knowing that he could not win.

“It’s terrible,” he said.

“How I described it is that I’ve never felt so far and so close at the same time.

“That’s a very hard thing to explain, and it’s also a very hard way to try to compete and win a golf tournament.”

But he does feel as if he might be battling his way out of the golfing darkness in recent weeks.

The American shot three rounds under par at May’s Wells Fargo Championship on the PGA Tour to finish in a tie for 14th.

He has learnt a newfangled system of putting, which he said was complex but made reading the greens very simple.

He sees progress. But perhaps most importantly, he has allowed other golfers to help him because the sport can be too hard to manage by yourself.

Thomas, for example, played his 18-hole practice round on Monday with Max Homa, who is now the sixth-ranked player worldwide but who once appeared to have bungled his chance of making a living as a golfer – at about the same time Thomas was winning his first Major.

Things have changed, and two of Homa’s six tour victories have come in the past eight months.

On Monday, as Thomas was attempting to explain how he was trying to fight his way back to the highest echelon of men’s golf, he used Homa as an example.

“There’s no other top player in the world who’s gone through what he’s gone through in terms of having a tour card, losing your tour card, having to earn it back and then becoming one of the top players in the world,” he said.

“I’ve talked to him about it before because he’s like, nobody out here really knows how bad it can be.”

Thomas was not going to allow himself to feel too badly about his recent slump. He is still the 13th-ranked golfer in the world, and “it’s all about making the most of whatever situation you’re in”.

“That’s how you get out of it, by just playing your way out of it. You hit shots and make those putts... and then your confidence builds back up,” he said.

“But like anything else in golf, it’s easier said than done.” NYTIMES