Justin Thomas before US PGA title defence: "It sucks! It's terrible!"

Justin Thomas has revealed what he preaches to himself after a frustrating year.

16 May 2023

Justin Thomas before US PGA title defence: "It sucks! It's terrible!"

When Justin Thomas won the second major championship of his career at Southern Hills last year in a thrilling playoff over Will Zalatoris, you'd be forgiven for thinking he'd go on absolute tear.

Winning breeds confidence. But winning a major? Surely that would've got the juices flowing much, much more.

Unfortunately for Thomas, who turned 30 on 29 April, the last 12 months have not yielded the results he would have been expecting. Probably demanding.

Thomas has four top-10s in the 19 events he has played. He also missed his first Masters cut in eight appearances when he failed to find the centre cup with a 15 footer on No. 18 at Augusta National after a disastrous finish.

His demeanour matched the miserable conditions in Georgia.

Speaking before his title defence at the PGA Championship at Oak Hill, Thomas delivered an insight into how frustrating the last year has been.

For example, has there been a point where he'd enter a tournament wondering whether he could win or thinking he couldn't?

"Yeah," Thomas said, adding:

"It sucks. It's terrible. I mean, how I described it for a couple months is I've never felt so far and so close at the same time. That's a very hard thing to explain, and it's also a very hard way to try to compete and win a golf tournament.

"That's how you get out of it, just playing your way out of it and hitting the shots when you want to and making those putts when you need to, and then your confidence builds back up, and next thing you know, you don't even remember what you were thinking in those times."

Justin Thomas before US PGA title defence:

Thomas continued:

"At the end of the day, after a couple of months or six months, whatever it is, where you're not performing as well as you feel like you should and not having the finishes you feel like you should or not winning tournaments like you feel like you should, it's pretty easy to get pissed off and understand what's going wrong.

"Like anything, I've preached this to myself, I'm sure I've said it to y'all or I've said it to younger guys that ask, how you learn is failure and negatives, and I feel like I've had a great opportunity for a lot of learning the past, whatever, six months, couple months, this year."

Related: PGA Championship field

Thomas also revealed that he's now adopting AimPoint.

GolfMagic's Equipment Editor Alex Lodge recently had the opportunity to chat to putting coach Jamie Donaldson about this.

Watch:

5 of the top 10 players in the world use AimPoint. Should you?
We chatted to @golfdonaldson about all things AimPoint, and got to grips with it ourselves!
Make sure you tune in to our Instagram live on Wednesday at 7.30pm G.M.T where we talk to Jamie about AimPoint! pic.twitter.com/xSpBl1H8gw
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