PONTE VEDRA BEACH — Last week, in his first competitive action since the Ryder Cup, Justin Thomas did what you might expect him to do—he shot 79 twice and finished last in the field. He underwent microdiscectomy surgery last November after suffering from nagging back and hip pain throughout 2025, and the long layoff, coupled with rehabilitation, had the expected affect on his play at Bay Hill.
What almost nobody expected, less than a week later, was for him to come out on Thursday at the Players Championship and shoot a 68 in rough weather, good enough for T-2 early in the afternoon. In fact, Thomas might have been of the few who wasn’t surprised.
Advertisement
“I can’t necessarily say I’ve been playing well because last week was my first tournament in six months,” he said, “but I felt I was more than capable of doing that … was able to knock a little bit of rust off last week and obviously felt a lot more comfortable today.”
There was no rust to be knocked off on Thursday, as he led off the tournament with three straight birdies. With approaches inside six feet on 10 and 12 (Thomas played the back nine first), he hit his best irons first, but it was his game off the tee and on the green that would give him the biggest boost, with strokes gained numbers in the top 10 of the morning wave in both categories. His putter, in particular, bailed him out on a few occasions, starting on 16 when he hit his approach into the water but managed to convert a 15-footer to save par. Two bogeys on 17 and 18 brought him back to one under, but after four straight pars to start the front, he hit a six-footer and a seven-footer for back-to-back birdies, and finished his round with a nine-footer for a final birdie on nine.
So what did he do better than last week?
“Literally everything,” he joked. “Literally every single thing you could imagine I did quite a bit better.”
Advertisement
Thomas said that Sawgrass fits both his eye and his game in the way that it requires a wide variety of shots, and how it rewards experience, particularly in knowing how to attack pins. Perhaps the key moment, though, came in settling himself after the two bogeys to close his opening nine.
“I kind of had a deep breath to myself walking off 9 and even, like I said, internally, I needed that,” he said. “Again, I feel like I’ve been playing well at home. I feel like I’m doing the right thing swinging well. I feel confident with things. But again, until it happens in competition, it’s kind of hard to fully buy into you’re ready.”
Thomas admitted that his goals are divided here at the start of his comeback—he wants to compete for trophies, and believes he can, but he’s also trying to build confidence and competitive muscle memory so that he’s somewhere close to 100 percent at Augusta. His confidence and belief took a major leap forward on Thursday, to the extent that he was willing to open up about how he felt on Friday at the Arnold Palmer Invitational.
“I wasn’t expecting to go be in contention and have a chance to win the golf tournament,” he said. “But when you kind of post two pretty humiliating scores, it’s hard to give yourself too much grace … it took a little longer for me to kind of decompress and just feel like I was able to get to a place where I’m like, OK, if I had this over tomorrow, what would I do differently to learn from it.”
Advertisement
The fatigue and difficulty focusing will undoubtedly rear its head again—he’s still very early in his comeback journey—but Thomas has clearly made a huge leap from his first event and will have a chance Friday to take another step along the path. Winning huge tournaments is the ultimate goal, and when it comes to the building blocks that will get him there, there’s no substitute for experience.
Read the full article here
