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LAHAINA, Hawaii — Justin Thomas doesn’t think he deserved to be on the Presidents Cup team. But that’s not how elite golfers allow themselves to feel deep down. Not if he doesn’t want this to happen again.
So when Thomas got the call from Jim Furyk that he didn’t make the U.S. team last fall, he felt something he hasn’t felt in a long time.
“I haven’t had the opportunity to play pissed off for awhile,” Thomas said, “so I’m pretty excited to play a little pissed off this year.”
Thomas, speaking Wednesday before the PGA Tour season opener at The Sentry, enters 2025 at a nexus point in his career. He’ll be 32 in April. He’s a two-time major-winner and former world No. 1, but his 2023 season was a disaster, and while 2024 showed drastic improvement he still didn’t win a tournament. Furyk decided he hadn’t done enough to make the Presidents Cup in Montreal.
Thomas is friends with Furyk and he’s spoken with him plenty about the decision. There are no hard feelings, but Thomas quickly stated that there were positives to him being left off. It has him fired up to return to a level where he doesn’t need to wait on phone calls.
“There would be nothing more I would love than about four, five, six times this year text him and say, ‘Good call,’” Thomas continued with a laugh.
Thomas spent the week of the Presidents Cup watching and tweeting along in support. “Glad that they won, and was pulling for ’em like crazy, but luckily we’re close enough where I feel like I can do that and he won’t get too mad,” Thomas said.
In some ways, Thomas has shown he can return to being one of the best in the game. In the past 18 months, he’s risen from No. 73 on DataGolf back to No. 10, which is a helpful underlying analytics metric for understanding how consistently well a player is playing. He qualified for the Tour Championship after missing the FedEx Cup playoffs entirely in 2023. But Thomas was the first to point out that his leaderboard finishes did not materially improve year-over-year — he had one more top-five and one more top-20 in 2024, and has not won since the 2022 PGA Championship.
He was on a postseason vacation with his wife, Jill, when Furyk’s call came. He said if he was home he would have immediately gone to the range because he was so motivated, but unfortunately it just meant he dragged down the trip.
“I felt bad for her because it was in the morning, so it kind of ruined that day,” Thomas joked. “Pretty sure I ordered a beer at lunch. I needed that one.”
It’s been 18 months of change for Thomas. He moved away from working as closely with his father and lifelong coach, Mike, saying that he reached a point he was sending his dad videos just waiting for Mike to tell him the answer he already knew. His focus has been on owning his swing and coaching himself instead of relying on other people.
Starting this week, Thomas will see if the underlying growth in his game leads to better results. And if he can make sure he gets the phone call he wants from U.S. Ryder Cup captain Keegan Bradley later this year.
“Yeah, it’s terrible. I’ve unfortunately been in it for two years, and it is not a fun place to be in. Not only waiting for the phone call, but then not knowing how the phone call is going to go, so it’s a lot of anxiety and a lot of stress,” Thomas said.
Required reading
(Top photo: Maddie Meyer / Getty Images)
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