Will the PGA Championship be a return to glory for Justin Thomas and Jordan Spieth?

LOUISVILLE, Ky. — Jordan Spieth is no stranger to playing with Justin Thomas. From practice rounds at major championships to alternate-shot matches at the Ryder Cup, the two have almost always gone in tandem.

But this week, among the long, narrow fairways of Valhalla Country Club, Spieth has already noticed that the energy around his longtime friend from Louisville is unique.

“I play a lot of golf with him,” Spieth said Tuesday. “Yesterday felt different.”

Park yourself outside the ropes at Valhalla during Thomas’ practice rounds and it doesn’t take much to see the hometown support Thomas is receiving. He was 7 years old when he attended the 2000 PGA Championship and watched Tiger Woods beat Bob May in a three-hole playoff. And though his memories are vague, the feeling he had is still palpable.

“I remember being inspired, being in awe,” Thomas said this week. “Being a Tiger fan that I was, it was about as perfect of a week as I could have imagined. Not that you know what you want to do when you’re 7 years old, but I had a pretty good idea that I wanted to play golf.”

The galleries he was a part of 24 years ago are now his, this week perhaps more than ever. But much like they are at every tournament, the galleries are also always Spieth’s. With his free-swinging style and success early in his career, Spieth’s magnetism is still strong.

Aside from Woods and perhaps Rory McIlroy, Spieth and Thomas are still the most beloved household names you will hear called out at any tournament.

Jordan. Justin. Spieth. JT. Their names all roll off the golf fan’s tongue, casual or die-hard, quite easily. These days, the noise that surrounds them, though, is more of a reminder of what was then than what is now.

Once the two began winning tournaments and majors early in their careers, golf fans flocked to crown them the next great thing. But where it might have seemed that both Spieth and Thomas were ready to take over the sport in the 2010s, the reality over the past five years has been more complicated. Success in sports is almost never linear, and Thomas and Spieth have been firsthand witnesses to that.

Over the past two years, Spieth and Thomas have shown momentary flashes of past greatness — be it single rounds or even performances at a tournament (see: Spieth at the 2023 Masters), but by and large, come Sunday they haven’t made much noise.

To say that their careers are past their prime would not be accurate. But Spieth and Thomas are in their 30s now. The boyish faces might not have fully disappeared, but their games have evolved, hit obstacles and look vastly different than they did when the two burst onto the scene.

As another major championship arrives, golf’s former phenoms find themselves in a unique place. They are no longer the new, most exciting thing in golf and have not become the dominant stars they once were expected to be.

Even though they’ve both won tournaments in the past two years, both seem as far removed from their peaks as ever. At Valhalla this week, both will continue to search for a way back to the top of the sport.

Spieth, for his part, arrives needing a PGA title to complete the Grand Slam, but with his game far from major championship form. Thomas is returning to the place where it all began hoping for a storybook week. Can either of them win another major, not just now but ever?

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IT’S EASY TO forget that Spieth has been doing this for a while. His first major appearance came in 2012 as a 19-year-old amateur. Now he has 16-year-olds who once asked him for an autograph as a little kid making their PGA Tour debut.

From 2014 to 2017, Spieth won 10 times on tour, including three majors. He has won only twice since and hasn’t won a tournament in more than two years. And when it comes to majors, Spieth hasn’t just failed to win one since 2017 — he has three missed cuts over the past nine majors, the same amount of missed cuts he had in his previous 28 major appearances.

As his career has progressed, Spieth has gone through swing and coaching changes, and his peak years are starting to look more and more like aberrations than what they felt like at the time: harbingers of further greatness to come.

At Wells Fargo last week, Spieth said he was trying to hit the reset button after not having the year he envisioned. After getting “burnt out” trying to find stuff, Spieth wanted to clear his head. This week at Valhalla, he admitted to wanting to force things at times, and how that has gotten him in more trouble than the flaws in his game could.

“I try and force it because I haven’t had the results I’ve wanted,” Spieth said. “I’m not very good at being patient, but that’s kind of what I have to be.”

Thomas’ patience has been equally tested over the past four years. From 2017 to 2020, he won 12 times. He has won twice since, but unlike Spieth, those two tournaments are the Players and the 2022 PGA Championship. However, 2023 was one of Thomas’ worst seasons, as he missed the cut at three of the four majors.

“I think I took for granted how good I did that there for a couple years,” Thomas said last week at Wells Fargo. “I just would accidentally find myself in contention in tournaments way more often by not forcing the issue or not making things harder than it needed to be.”

This season, both players have made strides in certain aspects of their games — Spieth is driving the ball better than he has in seven years (15th on tour), while Thomas’ approach game is back to being one of the best in the world. But each of them also has an Achilles’ heel.

Thomas’ putting has continued to regress over the past few years and is now at rock bottom. This season, he ranks 150th on tour in strokes gained: putting.

For Spieth, the problem is slightly more worrisome. When he was on top of the golf world in the mid-2010s, his ballstriking and approach play was the fuel that powered his winning. Now, Spieth has regressed so much in that area that he ranks 135th in strokes gained: approach this season.

Listening to Spieth and Thomas talk through their struggles is fascinating in its own right. Both feel like they are right there, not far from success, just needing a couple of holes, a round or two — even just one aspect of their game — to turn in their favor and they could be hoisting trophies once again.

Although their games have evolved, and worsened in some cases, their self-belief remains as high as any professional athlete’s. It’s part of their DNA.

“I feel like I’m playing well. I feel like I haven’t necessarily gotten as much out of my golf as I feel like I’ve been playing, which can be frustrating at times,” Thomas said this week. “I finally feel like at least this year I know I’ve been playing well enough to win. It’s just a matter of doing it. I’m sure there’s kind of anywhere from 10 to 20 people each week that probably play well enough to win, it’s just there’s only one that takes advantage the most and does all the right things, and I just haven’t been that person this year, and hopefully it happens sooner rather than later.”

“I stand by what I’ve kind of said a little bit this year, like I feel like my mechanics are more sound than they have been in a long time. I feel like I’m driving the ball better maybe than I’ve ever driven the golf ball. I feel like I’m playing better than my results,” Spieth said. “It’s just kind of been a couple shots here or there where I’m either playing the wrong shot or I took out too much club or not enough club, and it’s just really costly mistakes at wrong times.”

Both players seem to lean on the fact that their games feel good at the moment, or that they are making things harder than they need to for themselves. But the reality is that consistency is the hallmark of any golfer who has enjoyed success throughout their career. Neither Spieth nor Thomas seems to employ that consistency.

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NO ONE PUTS more pressure on Justin Thomas than Justin Thomas, and he knows it. That doesn’t make things any easier, however.

“It’s tough. It’s a lot harder than improving your wedge game,” Thomas said. “I think at least I’ve learned that you can’t just want it to get better and it magically gets better. It’s one of those things you can’t just flip the switch, and I think all the greats … that’s what they did better than anybody else. They stayed in the moment and processed better than anybody, and they also can’t explain how they do it because it’s just all they know.”

Spieth, for his own part, has also recently been dealing with a different kind of pressure, given his position on the tour policy board.

If there’s any sign of the changing of the times in Spieth’s career, it’s this: He now gets as many questions about the tour’s future and the negotiations of a deal with the Public Investment Fund of Saudi Arabia as he does about his game. It’s impossible to quantify how, if at all, that has affected Spieth — who joined the policy board last year — but it has certainly brought a different kind of pressure.

If patience is a trait Thomas and Spieth are trying to rely on, then having that ability to perform and stay within themselves under said pressure is one they’re constantly searching for. No one embodies that better right now than Scottie Scheffler, and Thomas and Spieth can’t help but envy the approach that has fueled his recent run.

“I play a decent amount of rounds with him here in town. I’m constantly seeing it and trying to beat him at home, and when he’s playing better than I am, it sucks,” Spieth said. “I don’t enjoy it when I’m side by side because there were however many years of our life it wasn’t that way.”

“I look at Scottie and how he plays, and I think he does that better than anybody in the world,” Thomas said. “And not only is his golf unbelievable, but that I think has a lot to do with how well he plays because he just stays in his own world and stays in his process no matter what’s going on. He trusts in his ability, that kind of thing. So that’s what I’m continuing to work toward for myself.”

The gap Scheffler has created between him and his peers feels as wide as ever. For players like Thomas and Spieth, Scheffler’s dominance also serves to highlight not exactly how far they’ve fallen from their peaks but rather how much more they now have to do to be able not just to beat a player like Scheffler — and all the young talent that’s coming up behind him — but to simply compete.

“It’s kind of the first time I’ve ever looked at somebody younger than me and I’ve driven inspiration, like, I am inspired by what he is doing,” Spieth said. “It makes me want to go out and get better.”

Once upon a time, the golf world believed Thomas would continue to win at a high clip and Spieth’s ceiling could be the highest since Woods’. Now, all these years later, the external belief may have waned, but whether it is a chance to complete the Grand Slam or to win a hometown major, the two players at the center of it all are not lacking conviction.

“I just have to kind of keep trusting what I’m doing,” Thomas said, “and understand that I’m working on all the right things and know that it will happen.”

Said Spieth: “I have nothing in my way of being able to make that happen but my own self. I’ve got enough. I believe in my ceiling, and I believe my ceiling is as high as anybody’s.”

Spieth and Thomas will forever be linked in golf history, but at this moment, they are bound by this: They are not searching for a way back to their glory days. Instead, they’re trying to hold on to the belief that they can create new ones.