Justin Thomas didn’t expect to be in Minnesota this week and making his debut in the PGA Tour’s 3M Open, but he arrived in the Land of 10,000 Lakes on Saturday after missing the cut at the British Open, his fourth missed cut in his last six starts.
Thomas shot an opening-round 82, tying the highest score he’s posted in his career and packed his bags early for the third time in this year’s four major championships. (He finished back of the pack in his title defense at the PGA Championship.) Of his dismal performance last weekend, he said, “I’ll hit shots like a No. 1 player in the world, and then I’ll make a 9 on my last hole of the tournament. I don’t know if it’s a focus thing or I’m just putting too much pressure on myself or what it is, but when I figure it out, I’ll be better for it.”
Thomas’s first course of business is to qualify for the FedEx Cup Playoffs, which he won in 2017. In his nine years as a Tour member, he has never missed the playoffs, but he enters the week at No. 75 in the season-long standings. This is the first year that 70 players – down from 125 – qualify for the first of three post-season events. Being on the outside looking in is unchartered territory for Thomas, who has five top-five FedEx Cup finishes in the past six seasons.
This stretch of bad golf constitutes the longest slump of Thomas’s career. He hasn’t won since last May and has recorded just three top-10 finishes this season after never having registered fewer than seven in a season. He’s also fallen from No. 8 at the start of the year in the Official World Golf Ranking to No. 24. Some of his stats help explain what has gone wrong: he ranks 159th in Strokes Gained: Putting, losing more than a full stroke to the field per 72 holes, and dropped from third two years ago to 40th in SG: Approach, a category in which he’d ranked in the top 10 in each of the last six seasons.
With just two regular-season FedEx Cup events remaining, Thomas had little choice but to sign up for the 3M Open and he’s already registered for the Wyndham Championship next week, where he’ll make his first start in seven years, to give himself his best chance of qualifying for the FedEx St. Jude Championship, where he counts one of his 15 career Tour titles, and to improve his odds of advancing to the BMW Championship (top 50) and then the Tour Championship (top 30). Stats guru Justin Ray of Twenty First Group, a sports intelligence agency, crunched the numbers and lists Thomas’s playoff probability at 40.4 percent. But Thomas won’t be deterred.
“I really feel like great things are coming,” Thomas said during his Tuesday pre-tournament press conference. “I have a lot of faith and belief in myself to know that this is just a challenge and an opportunity for me to grow and get better and really come out of this even better than I have been in the past.”
Not only does Thomas need to play well if he wants a shot at the playoffs, but he also is attempting to show some form ahead of the Ryder Cup in September and make his case to be one of six picks by U.S. Captain Zach Johnson. He sits No. 14 in the point standings and only the top six automatically qualify.
“I want to make the Ryder Cup more than anything,” Thomas said at the British Open. “I’m probably honestly trying too hard to do it.”
One player who is confident that this will be a short-term blip in what is shaping up to be a Hall of Fame career for Thomas is defending 3M Open champion Tony Finau, who played in the same group with Thomas last week at Royal Liverpool.
“He’s playing some quality golf, he’s getting some tough breaks. Hitting a couple more errant shots than I’m used to him hitting playing with him, but this game is so fickle, you’re never as far off as you think, and he’s definitely not,” Finau said. “J.T.’s going to be more than fine, he’ll find his form. It’s crazy in our sport, you know, how fast we forget how great someone like J.T. is. But you get to appreciate his talent and what he’s accomplished to this point in his career more when he’s going through a slump like this.”
Finau offered Thomas the following advice to get through his rough patch.
“You just continue to play and believe, that’s all there is to it,” he said. “But J.T.’s an extremely talented player and one of the best in our game, arguably the best of our generation. I have full faith that he’s going to snap out of it.”
That’s why Thomas is at TPC Twin Cities this week — to show himself and Johnson, his Ryder Cup captain, what he’s capable of and try to bust out of his slump.
“Hopefully this is the week that it all clicks and comes together,” Thomas said.
