In no other sport do players help each other as much as golf.
That fact was part of determining the winner of the RBC Heritage this past weekend.
It’s a simple fact that Justin Thomas has struggled after winning the 2022 PGA Championship at Southern Hills in a playoff over Will Zalatoris.
Thomas said it had been so long since winning that the question of when he would win again didn’t come up anymore.
For Thomas, as for many of the players on the PGA Tour, conquering putting puts them in the best position possible to win.
Thomas struggled in 2024, with his Strokes Gained Putting numbers unsatisfactory. His average was in triple digits for the whole season, the worst being 174th.
The number may not mean much, but in comparison, 2025 has seen a decided uptick in his SG: Putting stat. He started the season at T17 and with some hiccups, has spent the last five tournaments ranked in the top 10 with a T8 after his win in South Carolina.
The putting turnaround came in the form of two-time major winner Xander Schauffele.
“I called Xander at the end of last year because I think he’s one of the best putters in fundamentals, and not just putting but everything, and I was just like, can I just pick your brain for like two or three hours, just talk to you about putting?” Thomas said on Sunday night. “So, I just was talking to him about this process and how he reads greens and how he sees things and his practice and everything. And it honestly was just being with him, and he would kind of ask something, and I was like, yeah, I used to do that. And then he was like, well, how about something like this? Like, I used to use the string line here.”
Schauffele didn’t believe his contribution was much of anything and tried to downplay his influence on Sunday’s win, which came in a playoff against Andrew Novak.
“I don’t think I really have anything to do with him winning. He maybe gave me too much credit,” Schauffele said on a media call as defending PGA champion. “But he was pretty up front and asked if I could kind of tag along for practice one day.”
Schauffele said it was all straightforward; he would ask questions, and it ended up with me asking him all the questions, sort of how he thinks about putting it, and what he’s done in the past.”
The questions triggered thoughts that Thomas recalled when he was putting well.
“It was just sort of, he was searching and maybe trying too hard, and he’s done so many good things in the past that it was sort of like maybe an eye-opening, sort of like, I used to do, three, four, five of the things we were talking about, and I stopped doing them because I was down this crazy rabbit hole of trying to get better,” Schauffele said. “Felt like all the answers were right in front of him. J.T. is so good that he figured it out pretty quickly.”
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