Justin Thomas suffers a 9(!) on an awful day for he and playing partner Scottie Scheffler in Travelers Championship fade.
Justin Thomas of the United States watches his shot from the fourth tee during the third round.
Justin Thomas was typically blunt earlier the week about he’s played in this season’s majors. The two-time PGA Championship winner missed the cut last week in the U.S. Open at Oakmont after not reaching the weekend in the PGA at Quail Hollow. At the Masters, he mustered only a T-36.
“I still get pretty pissed off about it and … it weighs on me more than it should.”
It was looking as if Thomas had shaken off those concerns over the first two rounds of the signature Travelers Championship at TPC River Highlands in Cromwell, Conn. By opening 67-64, he got into the final group on Saturday with the man who has had little to fret over. This seemed to be just another weekend of heading toward a possible trophy lift for Scottie Scheffler, the reigning PGA champ and World No. 1 who’s won three of his last five starts.
What happened in the third round, no one saw coming.
Scheffler, on his 29th birthday, suffered a triple bogey on the opening hole and a double on the eighth to quickly fall off the first page of the leaderboard. Thomas was cruising along at even par through 12 until he hit a wall with his driving and chipping on the second-easiest hole of the day.
Pissed off? No doubt, after Thomas wrote down a quadruple-bogey 9 on the par-5 13th.
It all unraveled for Thomas on the tee of the long 509-yard hole. His first drive went way left and out of bounds, and in the process of releasing the club, he almost hit a marshal. After re-teeing, he found the fairway, but things didn’t get much better. His fourth shot came up short and barely avoided the water, stopping in some rough. With a steep slope in front of the green, his first chip wasn’t strong enough and rolled right back to him. He tried again — same result. Now lying 7, he finally got the ball close, leaving a seven-foot putt, but missed that too, walking away with a quadruple-bogey.
That one hole disaster dropped Thomas from a tie for 5th all the way down to 21st — a costly fall in both prize money and FedEx Cup points in the final $20 million signature event of the season.
Scheffler didn’t fare much better early on. He made a triple-bogey 7 on the first hole after blasting his bunker shot over the green and then watching his next chip roll back to him. He missed a 16-footer that would’ve saved him a double.
By the time they reached the 16th hole, both Thomas and Scheffler were three over — on a day when Henley shot a blazing 61 and Fleetwood posted a 63 to take the lead.
