How 15-time PGA Tour winner Justin Thomas overcame near disaster to win this year’s PGA Championship.
Author Mark Twain is credited as once saying, “The inability to forget is far more devastating than the inability to remember.”
What the famed writer might have been referring to is open to interpretation. Could it have been in regard to his own career after the publication of Huckleberry Finn and his subsequent rise to fame? Probably. Or, better yet, was it Twain’s single greatest contribution to golf instruction?
OK, maybe that’s a stretch. But after watching how Justin Thomas rallied back from one of the worst shots of his career to win the PGA Championship in May, it’s easy to picture a satisfied Twain nodding in approval.
“Being able to forget when things go bad, and totally focus on making a good swing on the next shot, that’s an important attribute to being a great player,” said Todd Anderson, director of instruction at the PGA Tour Performance Centre at TPC Sawgrass, home of the Players Championship. “Remember the good shots but be able to forget the bad ones and don’t carry them all with you. That’s what I see the great players do.”
And that’s precisely what Thomas did. At the par-3 sixth tee, Thomas hit a 5-iron off the hosel, then saw the ensuing recovery shot hit a tree and rebound sideways into another hole’s bunker.
No matter. The 15-time PGA Tour winner promptly grabbed his pitching wedge, landed the next shot 20 feet from the hole, and poured in the bogey putt.
“I shanked it,” Thomas said. “I just cold shanked it. I don’t really know how else to say it. It was the best bogey I’ve ever made in my life, that’s for sure.”
It wouldn’t be long before that 5-iron came back into play. One hole later, to be exact.
“The very next hole, with water right of the green, and the green sloping left to right, he’s now got to step up and hit this shot with this club he shanked 20 minutes ago and he hit arguably his best shot of the day,” said his caddie, Jim “Bones” Mackay said. “We were remarking at the time it was his best full swing of the week and he hit it to 10 feet from 197 yards.”
Thomas would eventually rally with five birdies over the next 10 holes to force his way into a playoff, where he edged out Will Zalatoris for his second PGA Championship title. But it all began with that mental reset at the par-4 seventh.
“I’m fully confident in saying that I wouldn’t be standing here if [Mackay] didn’t give me a talk,” Thomas admitted. “I just needed to let some steam out. I didn’t need to bring my frustration and anger home with me. I didn’t need to leave the golf course in a negative frame of mind.”
The ability to put a bad shot behind you and not carry it with you for the remainder of the round is something amateurs and professional alike struggle with, Anderson says. Too often players will put too much emphasis on what happened previously and not dedicate the shot at hand its full attention.
“You can’t teach golf without talking about the mental side of it,” he said. “Obviously when you talk about the swing, that’s mechanical, but how do you take the stuff you’re doing on the range to the course and trust it? All you can do is focus on the shot at hand. You can’t worry about the one you just hit or the one after the one you’re getting ready to hit.”
There are several reasons why you hit a bad shot. Odds are you didn’t have a clear picture or plan when you approached the ball, or it was the wrong plan (trying to do too much or hitting the wrong shot for the situation). Maybe you just didn’t commit to the shot. Or – and most often the simplest explanation – the execution was poor and you just didn’t do what you were trying to do.
“I can accept the poor execution because we’re human, we’re going to make bad swings and mistakes,” Anderson said. “But to not have a good plan and not commit to it, and then not make a decisive swing, those things are all controllable.”
So. You’ve just hit a bad shot. Now what? First things first – hit the reset button mentally. Few probably understand this better than Anderson’s own student, former FedEx Cup winner Billy Horschel.
“Billy is an emotional guy, he gets mad. I tell him that he can get mad so long as by the time he’s ready to hit that next shot he’s got a clear head, a clear picture of what he’s trying to do and how he’s going to do it,” Anderson said.
“It’s easy when you hit a bad shot to get really tentative on the next one. So, I want to be very clear with what we’re trying to do and how we’re going to try to do it, then walk in there with a good, positive frame of mind and make a decisive swing to wherever the target is.”
Anderson can typically spot when a player hasn’t made this adjustment. All it takes is a few quick looks at pace and tempo.
“Normally you can see it. Everything seems to speed up,” he said. “That’s one thing I would say – if you just hit a bad shot or had a bad hole, on the next one don’t be a hero. Just try to slow everything down and make solid contact, put the ball in play.
“What people tend to do when things start going bad, everything speeds up and they start trying to do too much to make up for their mistake. But that mistake is done and gone with. What you don’t want to do is compound it with another mistake. If you had a bad hole, you had a bad hole. But it’s just one. Let’s get into doing the next thing and hitting the next shot better.”
To recap, understand why you made the error, then forget about it and move on to the next shot. Remember to stay committed and not get tentative with your swing, and be sure to watch your tempo if you start to feel yourself speeding up.
Hey, it worked for Justin Thomas.
“You don’t have to be perfect. Just don’t be hard on yourself,” Thomas said. “Keep staying positive so that good stuff can happen.”
Images: Getty images
