ORLANDO – When Rory McIlroy found out from his Florida neighbor Justin Thomas that Thomas was making his return from back surgery at the Arnold Palmer Invitational, he had to give him a side-eye glance.
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“I saw J.T. a few weeks ago, and he said that this is going to be his first start,” McIlroy recalled, “and I said, ‘Oof, that’s probably not the best place to come back to after six months off.’”
Well, he had to start again somewhere. But, indeed, Bay Hill was no place for a guy on the mend, and about the only positive Thomas could take away after two rough, “humiliating” days is that he came out of it with no pain—except to his ego.
“Yeah, just one of those things will take a little some time and decompressing this afternoon to kind of evaluate it,” Thomas said Friday after shooting a second straight seven-over 79 to be last in the 72-man signature event that is making its cut at the top 50 and ties. “Yeah, it’s a place that it really, really exposes you if you’re not sharp and hit in the wrong places and don’t have a lot of control. It was a lot of everything. I had the lefts going and just pretty miserable first couple of days back, but I guess better get it out of the way.”
Between the 10 fairways he hit over 36 holes and the meager 110 feet of putts made in two days, there was no avenue to scoring for the two-time PGA champion, whose previous high score at Bay Hill’s Championship Course was 76 in the final round a year ago. Thomas seemed to be knocking off not just rust, but also ice and fog after undergoing microdiscectomy surgery Nov. 13.
“It would have helped if I played remotely decent. It would have been a little better,” said Thomas, 32, whose last competitive golf was the Ryder Cup in September. “But look, I’m trying as hard as I can to give myself a little bit of grace of how long I haven’t played and how difficult this sport can be. But at the same time, I expect more out of myself. I don’t think there’s any situation where I feel like I should shoot 14 over par for two days, but it is what it is.
“I just said walking up 9 or 10 to Rev [caddie Matt Minister], obviously sucks playing bad, but when it gets to the point … I felt like I was getting into Hideki’s way,” Thomas added, referring to playing partner Hideki Matsuyama, who made the cut at even par. “He’s grinding and trying to make the cut, and it’s like he’s waiting on me and I’ve just felt like I was like humiliating myself out there. I’m, like, ‘This isn’t really that fun.’ So just really tried to use the [last] nine holes to be productive and get ready for next week. There’s no better place to try things, if you will, than competition. I had zero to lose.”
Ranked 14th in the world, the 16-time PGA Tour winner mostly struggled with the mental side of the game, finding it difficult to adjust as he was fighting a driver that he kept losing to the left.
“More than anything, I feel it’s [about] just getting mentally ready and mentally in the place of when you’re at your best, if you will, because that was the biggest thing I noticed the last two days is just, mentally, I was so spacey and couldn’t concentrate on what I was doing,” Thomas said.
Next up is the Players Championship, which he won in 2021. Thomas was not planning to go to TPC Sawgrass this weekend, opting to find a place to practice in town. But he had no desire to hang around Bay Hill.
“I’d come out here to practice, but it doesn’t really make sense to putt on these greens. … I mean, there’s zero chance that they’re going to be alive Sunday. They are so dead already,” he said. “So that is one good thing about not playing here this weekend, because it is going to suck. It’s going to be really hard.”
This article was originally published on golfdigest.com
