Justin Thomas puts PGA Championship celebration on hold as he eyes title at Colonial Country Club

Justin Thomas took an unusual approach to celebrating his stunning, come-from-behind victory in last week’s PGA Championship.

He reveled as little as possible.

“I have a golf tournament this week, and I’m just trying to perform and play as well as I possibly can,” Thomas said Wednesday at Colonial Country Club in Fort Worth, Texas, home to the Charles Schwab Challenge.

“Hopefully give us something else to celebrate.”

So there was no quick trip to Las Vegas following his three-hole playoff win against Will Zalatoris, no over-the-top party long into the following night despite winning his second major title Sunday; it was his 15^th PGA Tour triumph, which put him alongside Jack Nicklaus, Tiger Woods, Rory McIlroy, Johnny Miller and Tom Watson as the only players since World War II to win at least 15 PGA Tour titles and two majors before turning 30.

Instead, the world No. 5 kicked up his heels at every opportunity.

“Obviously the last couple days have just been filled with rest and just trying to kind of recoup and get my mind and body back and ready to go come tomorrow morning,” Thomas said. “Had a nice early morning this morning, but I’ll just relax this afternoon and be good to go tomorrow (for the first round).

“Obviously I want to enjoy it and I don’t want to just act like it didn’t happen because it did, but at the same time I have a week next week off potentially to just enjoy it and have some good times with my family and friends if we choose to.”

When Thomas does get around to celebrating this victory, part of the fun likely will include watching the TV coverage of the final day, when he stormed back from eight shots back with four birdies in his final 10 holes before toppling Zalatoris by one shot in the three-hole aggregate score playoff.

“I haven’t had a chance to watch like the full coverage on Sunday, which I’d like to, but I did happen to see when I was putting on nine, I was eight back. I was eight back with 10 holes to go. That’s unfathomable,” Thomas said. “If I was looking at leaderboards, I probably would not have thought I even had a chance to win. It’s a huge learning lesson for me. You’ve got to play golf. Those majors and in golf tournaments, anything can happen.

“I just kind of kept plugging along, and somehow it happened.”

He’ll try and do the same this week. Thomas is making his third start in the tournament – he tied for 40^th and 10^th in 2020 and 2021, respectively. If he needs anything to get his juices flowing, he just has to look around and take in Colonial Country Club, an old-school, tree-lined layout rich in history.

“This course is right in front of you,” he said. “You can play it very conservatively and put the ball in the fairway, kind of play to the doglegs or you can take a lot of drivers and kind of send it over some bunkers or over some doglegs and potentially make it a lot shorter.

“Playing from the fairway is very, very important here. The greens were very soft this morning with the rain last night and I guess into this morning, but with the wind that they potentially have forecasted, it can firm up by the weekend, which makes this place play pretty difficult.”

And if so, Thomas can call on his imagination and creativity and his ability to work shots in different shapes and heights.

“It just puts a premium on ball-striking and playing good golf,” Thomas said. “I just like the old-school designs because this place is a good example of you don’t need length to make a golf course hard. I just like the opportunity to play holes different ways, just putting a premium on hitting the ball in the fairway, putting a premium on just having control of your ball and understanding where you can miss it, where you can’t miss it.

“Because I think a lot of places nowadays is just kind of bomb it, send it as far as you can and just get it somewhere around the green, and the greens are so big that you can usually get up-and-down versus a place like here, they’re so small, have some very subtle undulation, that you just have to be smart around here.”