When the dust had settled on his win at the RBC Heritage Sunday, Justin Thomas rose to No.5 in the world for the first time since 2022, and also bagged his first trophy since the PGA Championship that year.
His off-the-tee game was actually below average in Hilton Head, his iron game was exceptional, but his best attribute? Putting, where he finished third in strokes gained for the week. That jives with his season numbers on the PGA Tour, where as of Sunday night he’s 24th (which will undoubtedly rise after the Heritage), which is excellent in general, but miles better than his 174th place finish in 2024, and 135th in 2023.
So, what happened? Plenty of hard work, of course, but the revelation that started the turnaround came from a meeting with Xander Schauffele, of all people.
“As funny as it is, a huge help was when I called Xander at the end of last year,” Thomas said on Sunday. “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?'”
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Schauffele, who broke through with two major wins in 2024, agreed. The two met, and Schauffele peppered him with questions on every aspect of the subject.
“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.”
The two of them talked about all the fundamentals, from green reading to process to practice techniques, but in the end it wasn’t anything technical that gave Thomas his epiphany – it was the simple act of having a system.
“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,” he said. “I was very, very regimented…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.
“Honestly, while he helped, it was more of the questions he asked me made me realise 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…I have my fundamentals and things that I do and checkpoints, and I’m sticking to them.”
It may sound like a simple conclusion to reach – be consistent in your practice and goals – but hearing it from Schauffele through his Socratic method of asking question after question clearly opened Thomas’ eyes to what he’d been missing. Now he’s putting the lights out, and while the glib way to end would be say, “gee, we hope Schauffele doesn’t live to regret it,” let’s put those thoughts aside and root for some good karma to come his way for helping out a friend.
