Justin Thomas emerged victorious at Harbour Town on Sunday as he picked up his 16th career PGA Tour victory at the RBC Heritage. It took a playoff hole to get there, the fifth playoff on Tour this season, but that only added to the intensity of it all.
Interestingly the event marked the 250th start of Thomas’ career so a conversion on 16 of them puts his career winning percentage at 6.4%. Putting it that way may sound paltry, but this is professional golf where winning is extraordinarily difficult. Context is required.
Consider that Thomas is still only 31 years old (for just a little bit longer if we are being technical). His securing of win number 16 makes him just the 58th player in Tour history to get there and he is now tied for 54th all time in terms of wins (Jack Burke, Jr., Ralph Guldahl, Mark O’Meara, Tom Weiskopf).
JT has always been a passionate player who seems to thrive when the lights are brightest. We could offer that his Atlanta Drive winning the inaugural TGL season is proof of that, but clearly there are a number of opinions on the league at large.
Consider some other marks then relative to Justin Thomas that demonstrate his love for the proverbial moment:
As noted, Thomas won in a playoff against Andrew Novak. He is now 5-2 in career playoffs. Clutch.
Thomas also notably became the first player to convert an 18-hole lead into a win this season. He is certainly capable of carrying that burden in a big-time event. Obviously this wasn’t a major and was actually the week following one, but that is not easy and this was indeed a signature event at that. JT has now converted 5 of 12 possible first-round leads, by the way.
Finally, while JT did hold the first-round lead in Hilton Head (the second- as well) he lost it following the third round. Speaking technically, this means that his victory was ultimately of the come-from-behind variety. Half of his career victories have involved storming back from some sort of deficit, not to mention the last five specifically, most memorably among them the 2022 PGA Championship where at one point he was down 7 strokes.
The world of golf felt impossible to ever contextualize following Rory McIlroy’s win at The Masters, but just one week later Justin Thomas helped reaffirm that multiple elite careers can be happening in parallel of one another.