NEWTOWN SQUARE, Pa. — Justin Thomas has competed in hundreds of pro golf tournaments, which means his father, Mike Thomas, is well acquainted with the run of show. If you tee off early and shoot the round of the day, you wait until someone beats it.
So it made sense that, just a few minutes after his son saved par with an angry fist-pump — earning the best 72-hole score to that point — a very long afternoon came into focus.
“I mean, he’s going to have to sit around here for hours,” father Thomas said to Jillian Thomas, Justin’s wife, as their Sunday was upended by their favorite golfer. JT’s final round 65 was complete at 3:05 p.m. and he was already off to handle the myriad duties that come for the Low Man In The House.
It starts with signing a scorecard to ratify the whole deal. While Thomas made it official, he ripped through a water bottle and stole peeks at the broadcast on a nearby flatscreen. At 3:12 — it’s amazing how much can happen in just a few minutes at a major championship — the scores are tallied. Jordan Spieth and his wife stop by to say Congrats! and Goodbye! and the Rolex is clasped onto the left wrist. It’s time for interviews.
Up first is Amanda Balionis and CBS, breaking down Thomas’ best shots in front of a backdrop of newly-purchased cedar trees. Fifteen steps away is CBS Sports, somehow a different media entity. Then it’s Sirius XM and, after that, the PGA of America’s own digital platforms. Each interview is essentially the same, but at least it buys some time for the rest of the field to make some progress. Around 3:15, Mike Thomas is thinking again about the rest of his day. Now, though, the internal dialogue is about more than just scheduling — it’s about the nagging feeling that his son might not be out of the golf tournament. He calls out to JT’s caddie, Matt Minister, who lugs the clubs toward the locker room, five steps ahead:
“There’s something about putting that first number up there,” Mike says. It’s the first, real warning sent to the leaders, who still have a dozen holes to play. Alex Smalley, then beating JT by one shot, stood in the 4th fairway. Jon Rahm, tied with JT, was about to bogey the 7th hole.
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The Thomases are a golf family. Mike is a lifetime club professional and still tutors his son. His father, Paul, was a lifetime pro, too, and was one of Justin’s favorite people in the world. They’ve sat on clubhouse leads before. Hell, JT won his last major, the 2022 PGA Championship, after waiting nearly an hour for a playoff. The Thomas clan knew what JT knew, which would take a long time for everyone else to know: They weren’t out of it. Not by a long shot. This PGA Championship could conceivably — and maybe even realistically — wind up with Thomas as the winner. But his lone bogey on the front nine was glaring at them. And Mother Nature needed to get involved.
“I’m hoping to see the wind just start to blow,” Justin said during a 12-minute press conference with reporters. “I need some wind. I need a little help.”
He had the clubhouse lead, which felt good. But he also had something else. Something slightly better: the rental–house lead.
The Thomases snagged a rental home close to the course this week — in posh Newtown Square — and probably paid a pretty penny to do so. There’s a swing set in the backyard JT and his daughter, Molly, played on throughout the week. The Aronimink clubhouse is a massive, gorgeous mess of wood and stone, but it doesn’t compare to the living room with your family. So around 3:49, Justin left the golf course with a bright red duffel slung over his shoulder, driven away in a white courtesy car by Jillian. When would we see him again? Might we see them again, like winners do with their partners?
As they drove off, Padraig Harrington gave Thomas no chance. “[The lead is] not going to stay at five under, unfortunately for Justin Thomas,” Harrington said. “Somebody is going to get to seven or eight under. Especially as he’s posted that score. They already know what they have to beat.”
That’s the whole deal, right? Most often, pros rip around a course and jockey for position on a leaderboard, well out of eyesight of each other. They can learn a little from the roars of the crowd, but they can learn everything by glancing at the digital leaderboards throughout the property. Thomas didn’t look at a leaderboard until he was in the interview tent.
When Thomas grabbed his first glimpse at that leaderboard, he was thinking a cliche that doubled as a coping mechanism: you just never know.
Sam Burns knows. He finished his Sunday at even par and, about 90 minutes into JT’s holding pattern. “I had to wait like this when I won Colonial,” Burns said. It was whipping that day, in Dallas, much like the wind has whipped all week here in Philadelphia. Burns began that day seven back and said he waited for three hours that afternoon, ultimately beating Scottie Scheffler in a playoff by sinking a 38-footer.
A lot of pros have been through a long wait before a playoff, but three hours is practically unheard of. Only Burns could recall doing it, and as it turned out, even he was wrong. Burns barely waited two hours after his round at Colonial, playoff-included. The wait always feels longer than it really is.
If Thomas opened Instagram at any point during the final stretch, he would have seen that part of his press conference had started coursing through the internet. He was asked if there’s an art to waiting on the clubhouse lead. And no, there’s no art, he said, but there’s definitely a wrong way of doing it. At the 2016 Travelers Championship, Thomas went out early and posted a 62 for a 12 under total. Thinking he was out of the running, he had sent his caddie to catch a train. He invited his buddy into the clubhouse for lunch, and then proceeded to have four or five beers and watch as a windy afternoon launched him up the leaderboard.
“I’ve never not wanted to be in a playoff before,” he said Sunday. “But I kind of didn’t want to be in a playoff then. That wouldn’t have been a good situation. So I’m not going to [repeat] that, I promise you that.”
Back in Philly, Thomas watched with his family while his caddie, Matt Minister, watched with his. Minister spent about 45 minutes with a cousin who lives nearby. Then he sat in caddie dining for the next hour of play, sometimes all by himself.
“It’s so out of your control, it’s actually not really nerve-wracking,” Minister said. True as that may be, Minister had never endured a wait like this in his decades of looping service. He exchanged texts with Thomas throughout, a few hilly miles between them, while everyone in the field took leaps forward and steps back. At 5 p.m., Aaron Rai surprised everyone and eagled his way into a one-shot lead. Minister left caddie dining and found the leather recliners inside the Champions corner of the players locker room.
One might think, for how much the entire golf world fixates on these major championships, that the players and caddies at the center of it all might sit around and watch all the horses finish the race. But no. They’re onto whatever is next. Another race. Scottie Scheffler kindly tipped the locker room staff, packed up his trackman and gave some gear to the local policeman who walked with him as security all week. Then he drove off with a big smile. His next tournament starts Thursday.
I caught Minister on the edge of the parking lot just as things were getting real. He held a drawstring bag of his belongings, readying to go but obligated to stay. He talked like a caddie, counting up the shots Rai would have to hit to become the next clubhouse leader. Rai was at seven under thru 15 and two clear of Thomas. If he just got through the first two shots on 16, it would be easy from there. (And it was.) Thomas had committed to returning when the final few groups reached the 14th hole, and before long he was back at Aronimink, same pink pants, same white top, same red duffel in tow. He was ready to warmup.
How were the last three hours? I asked Thomas around 6:30 p.m. He wore all black and dragged a suitcase toward his courtesy car.
“It was weird, man,” he began. How could it not be? So close and so far, on the leaderboard and in the neighborhood.
In the end, Thomas’ three-hour wait had ended painfully. After the better part of two-and-a-half hours in the rental home, the Thomases weren’t out of it, so they decided to get back in the car and head to the golf course. The rental home was only a few minutes from the golf course, but it’s amazing how much can happen in a few minutes at a major championship. As it turned out, the rental home was just far enough away.
“The time between leaving my [rental home] and when I got here,” Thomas said, “Aaron had gone birdie-birdie.”
“I was like, Oh, wow. It really is over now.”
