{"id":21808,"date":"2017-10-17T10:38:58","date_gmt":"2017-10-17T10:38:58","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/andaluciagolf.com\/justin-thomas-and-the-young-guns-take-charge\/"},"modified":"2017-10-17T10:38:58","modified_gmt":"2017-10-17T10:38:58","slug":"justin-thomas-and-the-young-guns-take-charge","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/andaluciagolf.com\/en\/justin-thomas-and-the-young-guns-take-charge\/","title":{"rendered":"Justin Thomas and the Young Guns Take Charge"},"content":{"rendered":"

<\/strong>When the U.S. PGA Tour season ended in September, no fewer than seven players in the top-10 of the world rankings were in their twenties. Dustin Johnson (33) led the way but Jordan Spieth, Hideki Matsuyama, Justin Thomas, Jon Rahm, Rory McIlroy, Rickie Fowler and Jason Day dominated that elite group \u2013 with Henrik Stenson (41) and Sergio Garcia (37) completing the list. <\/p>\n

Twentysomethings are also triumphing in the majors, with Brooks Koepka (27 years old and 11th in the world rankings at the time of going to press), winning the 2017 U.S. Open to join McIlroy, Spieth and Day as Grand Slam champions.<\/p>\n

Then there is Justin Thomas. Born in Kentucky in April 1993, Thomas won five times in 2017, including his first major \u2013 the PGA Championship \u2013 and was named player of the year in a vote by his peers. <\/p>\n

His other victories came at the CIMB Classic, Sentry Tournament of Champions, Sony Open in Hawaii (where he became the youngest player to shoot 59 on the PGA Tour) and Dell Technologies Championship. He joined an illustrious group of Jack Nicklaus, Tiger Woods and Spieth as the only players since 1960 to capture five wins, including a major, in a season before the age of 25. <\/p>\n

In 25 starts, Thomas had a Tour-best 12 top-10 finishes (tied with Spieth) with 19 made cuts. In addition to his five wins, Thomas added four top-five finishes, led by a runner-up effort at the season-ending Tour Championship, took home the Arnold Palmer Award as the Tour\u2019s leading money-winner ($9,921,560) and concluded his season in grand style, collecting the $10 million bonus as winner of the FedExCup (even if he was annoyed not to win the Tour Championship in the process). <\/p>\n

PGA Tour members who played in at least 15 official money events this past season were eligible to vote for the player of the year award, which is accompanied by the Jack Nicklaus Trophy. Other main contenders were Johnson, Matsuyama and Spieth. <\/p>\n

Announcing the recipient of the award, PGA Tour commissioner Jay Monahan said, \u201cWith five remarkable wins and his season-long consistency that resulted in the FedExCup title, Justin is a deserving winner of PGA Tour player of the year. We also salute his excellence off the course, as he is one of the many young stars that have been tremendous ambassadors for the PGA Tour this year.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/p>\n

Meteoric Rise in 2017<\/strong><\/p>\n

Thomas turned pro in 2013, won the 2014 Nationwide Children\u2019s Hospital Championship on the Web.com Tour, and joined the main PGA Tour in 2015. He finished 36th in the FedExCup that year, then in 2016 secured his first title, the CIMB Classic, on the way to 10th in the final Cup ranking. <\/p>\n

In 2017 he raised his game to an entirely new stratospheric level, although most seasoned observers were not surprised. After lifting the FedExCup, he showed journalists a checklist in his iPhone Notes app, and read the items listed under \u201c16-17 goals\u201d. Some of the benchmarks were about technical aspects of his game, while others focused on tournament results. The latter showed (pre-season) that he wanted to win at least one tournament in 2017, play in the final two groups of a major, win one of the four majors, qualify for the Tour Championship and make his first Presidents Cup team. He eventually achieved all of those \u2013 and more. <\/p>\n

Winning the FedExCup wasn\u2019t on the list. Not because the season-long race wasn\u2019t important to him, but because he recognised the difficulty of the task. <\/p>\n

\u201cOne week versus an entire year is tough,\u201d Thomas said. \u201cThere\u2019s a lot of great players out here\u2026 If someone said, \u2018You may not win one of these for eight years,\u2019 it would (stink) but I could see it.\u201d <\/p>\n

Jay Seawell, Thomas\u2019s college coach at the University of Alabama, drove to East Lake to watch Thomas play his final round of the season. He remembered witnessing Thomas shoot a 30 on the final nine to win on his collegiate debut. \u201cHe loves to win. Yeah he\u2019s nervous, but this is what he loves. It\u2019s a gift. His gift is that he loves this moment. <\/p>\n

\u201cHis greatest attribute is that he wants to win. If something gets in the way of that, if it\u2019s him or a shot or a lack of being able to do something, he will always adjust and get better at that.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

When the U.S. PGA Tour season ended in September, no fewer than seven players in the top-10 of the world rankings were in their twenties. Dustin Johnson (33) led the way but Jordan Spieth, Hideki Matsuyama, Justin Thomas, Jon Rahm, Rory McIlroy, Rickie Fowler and Jason Day dominated that elite group \u2013 with Henrik Stenson […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":5,"featured_media":17048,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[125],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-21808","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/andaluciagolf.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/21808","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/andaluciagolf.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/andaluciagolf.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/andaluciagolf.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/5"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/andaluciagolf.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=21808"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/andaluciagolf.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/21808\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/andaluciagolf.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/17048"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/andaluciagolf.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=21808"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/andaluciagolf.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=21808"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/andaluciagolf.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=21808"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}