Thomas – finally – hits sweet 16
JT snaps 3-year drought with RBC Heritage playoff win; Making sense of Bryan suspension
Justin Thomas is elated with snapping his three-year winless drought (Andrew Redington/Getty Images)
If there is anything the last two weeks have once again hammered home, it is the notion that winning is very difficult — even for the very best.
Seven days after Rory McIlroy’s epic and, at times, excruciating push to victory in playoff over Justin Rose at the Masters, Justin Thomas also needed overtime to dispatch Andrew Novak at the RBC Heritage.
McIlroy completed the career slam with his Masters victory, an 11-year quest which also included winning his first major title in that span. The stakes were not nearly as high at Harbour Town on Sunday, but you can bet it was ultra-important to Thomas.
The 31-year-old 15-time winner had gone nearly three years since his last victory — his second PGA Championship win at Southern Hills. JT had some close calls along the way and a bit of a career lull two years ago, as well as all of the criticism that came with his captain’s pick for the 2023 U.S. Ryder Cup team.
Thomas opened the signature event with a 61, a Harbour Town course record. That means he holds nine course records in professional golf alone, including Medinah Country Club and Erin Hills, which have both hosted U.S. Opens.
And yet, despite going 10-under par on the opening day of the RBC, Thomas still had to fight hard for the victory, falling behind after 54 holes and needing a 21-foot birdie putt on the the first extra hole to fend off Novak.
“I think the hard part about it is it’s just really hard to win,” said Thomas, who won for the first time since capturing his second major at the 2022 PGA Championship. “I feel like I’ve been playing well enough to win for a couple years, but just because you feel that way and you are, obviously that doesn’t mean that you’re going to.
“Obviously ’23 was tough and I was trying to work my way through it and get out of that, but it definitely — I feel like I was putting more pressure on myself even last year to win than I was this year, and I just feel like my game is in such a better place and in a good spot to where I’m just really trying as hard as I can to get myself in a place mentally of just trusting and playing and just committing to what I’m doing and having the belief that it’s going to be good enough the more often I get myself there. And I’ve done that a couple times this year and haven’t been able to close it out.
“Even knowing in the playoff, it was like, obviously I planned and hoped and wanted to win, but if it doesn’t we’re just going to keep plugging and try to put ourselves there the next time.”
Despite the lack of trophies in recent years, Thomas managed to work his way back into the top 10 in the Official World Golf Ranking before this week. The victory moved him from No. 8 to No. 6, barely behind Ludvig Åberg.
Thomas has seen a marked improvement in putting this year — he was third for the week at the RBC in strokes gained putting — and attributed it to, in part, a discussion he had with Xander Schauffele in the offseason.
“You guys obviously know Xander, but he doesn’t leave any box unchecked,” Thomas said. “He said that day, he’s like, if it has anything to do with you potentially improving in golf, I’ve probably done it or tried it.
“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. Okay.
“The more I was talking, I’m like, I don’t do any of the things that I used to do in my best putting years. 2017-18, I was very, very regimented of the things that I did, and how he said it is I had a home base and I had no home base. I had things that I did, but it was a very vague bag of things and there was no consistency to it.
“I feel like I used to have a very good home base of fundamentals and things that I did.
“So it honestly, while he helped, it was more of the questions he asked me made me realize that I’m trying basically too hard and I’m trying too many different things versus I think it’s a serious, serious, serious skill to continue to work on the things that you do really well and not doing it differently, and I think that’s been more of what it is. I have my fundamentals and things that I do and checkpoints, and I’m sticking to them.”
Thomas’ 16th PGA Tour victory is a reminder of how fleeting things can be in the game. He appeared to easily be on his way to 25 or 30 wins on tour. He had 13 wins at age 27 less than five years ago and then added the Players Championship in 2021 and PGA in 2022.
Three years later, he’s finally added another. And yet McIlroy, with 29, is the only active player on the regular PGA Tour who has more.
Wesley Bryan pays price for participating in LIV-affiliated exhibition (Lauren Sopourn/Getty Images)
Making sense of Bryan’s suspension
The PGA Tour often doesn’t make things easy on itself. Because it rarely comments on discipline and has at times been petty when it comes to dealing with LIV Golf and its fallout, the suspension of Wesley Bryan in the aftermath of his participation in a “LIV Duels” YouTube golf event in conjunction with LIV was cause for plenty of consternation.
Sports Illustrated’s Bob Harig attempted to get to the bottom of the indefinite suspension first reported by Ryan French of Monday Q and said that the issue deals with the PGA Tour’s media rights policy.
It is fair to point out that it is probably not a coincidence that Bryan — a one-time winner on the PGA Tour who was eligible to play in last week’s opposite event, the Corales Puntacana Championship — disclosed his suspension on the same day that another popular YouTube golfer, Grant Horvath, revealed that he had been offered a sponsor invite to the Barracuda Championship.
Both players participated on April 3 in the LIV Duels, a six-team “creator” event with YouTubers and LIV golfers at Doral that over the weekend of April 5-6 aired on Horvath’s YouTube channel.
Bryan got suspended while Horvath is allowed to compete in a PGA Tour event. What gives?
While anyone who plays in a LIV Golf tournament, even if they are not a member, is considered to have participated in an unauthorized event, the exhibition was apparently not deemed that. Why? Because if it was, then Horvath would not be free to accept a sponsor invite. Got it? (Eugenio Chacarra is a high-profile example of a player who cannot play on the PGA Tour until a year has passed since his last LIV Golf event, which was in September.)
Bryan, meanwhile, has conditional status on the tour by virtue of his 128th place finish in the 2024 FedEx Cup standings. He had played three times this year previously and would be getting several more starts throughout the year. Last year, he finished second at the Corales Puntacana event won by Billy Horschel.
But as a PGA Tour member, Bryan is subject to the media rights policies, which do not permit taking part in any broadcast — live or taped — without consent of the commissioner. While Bryan and other tour members are allowed to post all kinds of content to YouTube or social media channels, this event apparently was not in keeping with that. It was a competition with a $250,000 purse, for which Bryan was warned he’d face sanctions if he participated.
The PGA Tour, as is its custom, has not commented on the suspension. It has not explained exactly what the violation is. It can only be assumed that because Horvath is okay to play and Bryan isn’t, that the event wasn’t deemed unauthorized but that it violated media rights rules for a member.
In this case, the tour might have been better off making the event unauthorized and taking both Bryan and Horvath out. It was sponsored and paid for by LIV Golf, played with LIV players — Horvath had Phil Mickelson as a partner while Bryan had Dustin Johnson — and it was played at a LIV tournament location and broadcast while the final round of the PGA Tour’s Valero Texas Open was underway.
That might be easier to explain, even if it is just a nine-hole creator exhibition that seems harmless in the big picture.
But while the PGA Tour/LIV Golf battle continues, so, too, will issues such as this, apparently.