Patience, Justin Thomas has occasionally admitted, isn’t the strongest weapon in his considerable arsenal.
It’s not that he gets testy and brusque when things aren’t going his way. It’s just Thomas knows the thin line between getting the job done and not forcing things to arrive at the desirable outcome is a tough one to walk.
Now, however, patience has to be the 15th club in his bag.
The 14-time PGA Tour winner and 2017 PGA champion fell short once again Sunday, when he fell one shot shy of a playoff between Sam Burns and Davis Riley, a fellow Alabama golf alum, in the Valspar Championship on the Copperhead Course at Innisbrook Resort in Palm Harbor, Florida.
While Burns won on the second hole of the playoff, Thomas left the grounds with his fifth top-10 finish in eight starts this season. But he still hasn’t won since the 2021 Players Championship.
“It’s coming,” Thomas said of an expected upcoming victory. “I’ve just got to be patient and be in the right frame of mind because you can’t force anything in this game. As soon as I start doing that you get down some rabbit holes.
“I’m doing a lot of really, really good things. I just need to keep putting myself there and it will start happening. I didn’t really do anything at all today and I very easily could have won the tournament. A lot to build on a, lot of positives, and we got a big stretch coming up, so I’m excited for it.”
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After posting 5-under-par 66 in each of his first three rounds, Thomas just couldn’t get on any type of roll in the final round. He couldn’t get the putter to cooperate in the early going and then made a bogey on the par-5 11th when his second shot ended up in a small depression 54 yards from the hole. He pitched his ball over the green, then chipped much too strong past the hole and missed the par putt from 15 feet.
Another poor approach on 16 from 160 yards forced him to scramble for par. On the difficult par-3 17th, he pulled his tee shot into the greenside bunker but nearly holed his second for birdie. On the par-4 18th, the last nasty fang of the finishing stretch called the Snake Pit, Thomas drove his tee shot into the upslope of a fairway bunker and scrambled for par again.
“I didn’t make enough birdies. I didn’t hit the ball as well today,” Thomas said. “Got a couple of bad breaks, which is a bummer. I laid that ball up pretty nice there on 11 and just right into a hole there at the end of the fairway. That’s one I’m usually licking my chops, kind of pitching off the green. And then I was just, pretty much just trying to figure out how to hit the green.
“But everybody had to play in the same conditions, so it’s not like I was the only one that was dealing with that on the golf course. It just, I didn’t execute when I needed to.”
With a win, Thomas, 28, would have been the youngest player to win 15 PGA Tour titles since Tiger Woods in 1999. He would have also joined Woods, Jack Nicklaus and Johnny Miller as the only players since 1960 to win 15 titles before turning 29.
Earlier in the week, Thomas said, “To be perfectly honest, it pisses me off,” about his ranking of No. 8 in the world. The former No. 1 might go up a notch or two heading into next week’s World Golf Championships-Dell Technologies Match Play, but he’ll keep calling on his patience until win No,. 15 comes.
“I haven’t been out here a crazy long time, but I’ve been out here long enough to know that stuff like this happens, and you’re going to go on times where things maybe aren’t going as well or some of the difference of those putts going in don’t go in and some of balls that bounce in the fairway bounce in the bunker,” Thomas said. “And then when you get on those hot streaks, those 10-month, year-and-a-half, two-year stretches, like I was on in 2017 and 2018, or like (Dustin Johnson has) been on, Jon Rahm, Collin (Morikawa).
“But you just have to be in the right frame of mind for it to happen. I can’t be all pissed off and moping around the golf course and somehow expect things to start going my way. I just have to stay in that positive frame of mind, so that way when it does happen I’m expecting it.”
