Justin Thomas Returns to the Travelers Championship

The Travelers Championship features the best field in tournament history and that includes world No. 3 Justin Thomas.

Ahead of his return to TPC River Highlands, Thomas met with the media to discuss his seventh start at the Travelers Championship.

Below are some highlights from Thomas’ press conference:

Q: You’re a 12-time winner on the PGA TOUR including two this season, No. 2 in the FedExCup right now. When you came on-site at the Travelers Championship this week, how different was it for you? Obviously you’ve played the first two events already since the pandemic; how different has it been arriving on-site at each of these tournaments?

JUSTIN THOMAS: Yeah, it’s very different. For me this is the event that I’ve played the most, of the three events that I’ve come back to. For me, it’s so weird seeing everything. When we first get here and you just look out and you can see 1, you can see 15, 16, 17, 18. I didn’t even know what that was in the middle of 1 and 18. So all that stuff is bizarre. When you’re on 15 tee — I played the back nine yesterday morning, and you can literally just see straight up 18 fairway, you can see 17 green, you can see 16. That stuff for me is different because I heard that at Colonial but I never played Colonial so I didn’t know, and then Hilton Head I had only played a couple times.

So I’ve always loved coming here, but it is definitely different.

Q: You’re coming in here off a 63 at RBC Heritage in the final round. I know you shot 62 here one year, I believe the year you finished third. Can we expect more of the same here from you this week?

JUSTIN THOMAS: I hope so. If I could predict how I was going to play, I’d probably be doing something different than playing golf. But yeah, I mean, I feel very good about my game. I’ve been working really hard. I’ve been trending the right direction I feel that and continuing to just get a little bit better and better each and every week. Yeah, I’m excited to come here. I absolutely love this golf course. I have not played it very well for how much I enjoy it other than one year I feel like, but it’s usually the week after the U.S. Open, so maybe I’ll blame a little bit on fatigue from that, but for the most part I just haven’t performed very well. Yeah, I’m excited to give it a shot this year, and hopefully we can have a chance.

Q: Has it been difficult at all mentally preparing for these tournaments week in, week out, but also having to consider, like you said, no more fist bumps, little things like that that you also have to now actively think of that you never would have had to think of before?

JUSTIN THOMAS: Yeah, but I will gladly swallow my pride and get over that if that means playing competitive golf and having a chance to win tournaments. I think that was kind of my main message to some people when we were trying to figure out when we were going to start back up is like, hey, I think we all are well aware that 2020 has been a bizarre year and it’s very far from normal, and for us to be able to play golf on the PGA TOUR, we need to get over the fact it’s not going to be normal, it’s going to be different, and if we want to wait until everything is totally normal, we have no worries of anything, we could be waiting another year and a half at least.

Me personally, like I said, I’m fine with that. I’m fine with — it’s so many little things, like taking my own club out of my bag, trying to minimize my touch with my caddie. Obviously we’re going to have times just because of how it works to where I touch my towel and he has touched it at some point, but having myself getting my clubs out of my bag, me getting my own range balls. It’s just so many little things that it’s really not that big of a deal to make an adjustment and do on your own, and like I said earlier, for the betterness of the TOUR and everybody else involved, we’ve just got to do it.

Q: Just wondering if you had a chance to see “The Last Dance,” and if you did, what you learned about Michael Jordan? You had a relationship with him going back many years, what you learned about him and if you also see any similarities between him and Tiger and if you have a good story about the two of them.

JUSTIN THOMAS: I see scary differences between him and Tiger. I’ve never been more motivated watching anything in my life than I was watching “The Last Dance.” For me, I loved it so much because I’ve been very fortunate to get to know him just from living in the same area and playing a lot of golf with him, so like I see the golf side of him when we go out and mess around, I’ve seen the fishing side when we go fishing or just the fun side. But that’s the only side to him that I’ve never seen. I haven’t seen — I’ve seen highlights, but like I’ve never heard — I don’t ask him about basketball. I don’t want to be that person when I’m around him. But to just hear and see how that team went about and to understand the trades that happened and why they happened and why his decisions were doing what he was doing. But just his will to win, and he was going to do anything and everything possible, it’s something that you can’t — you’re not just — you don’t just learn it. It’s not something that just happens overnight. I think you’re really just born with it.

He wants to be better than everybody else. He wanted to be better than everybody else, and he was going to work hard and do everything he could to get there.

I have a buddy who’s going through the fundamental tours, and he’s a really close friend of mine, and I’m very hard on him, but because he’s a good friend of mine, I’m very honest with him. After him watching that, I think I was able to like say, you know all that crap I give you, this is the same exact thing. The way Jordan was giving his teammates, the way he was giving them jabs, the way he was poking fun at them, the way that it seemed like he was talking down to them, it was to get them better, it’s to toughen them up, it’s to see how they were going to rise to the occasion. It was kind of little things like that to where — man, it was unbelievable.

I told him — I saw him after I had finished up, and I said that you’re going to wish I never saw that because I’m going to ask you so many questions now, it’s going to be out of control. But it’s very crazy how similar him and Tiger are and just their warrior mentality, if you will, and they’re just going to go above and beyond anyway they can to beat you, and they don’t really care what happens along the way and how many feelings they hurt.