Justin Thomas thanked Xander Schauffele for helping him turn his putting around.
Schauffele, though, feels that praise is mostly undeserved.
“I don’t think I really have anything to do with him winning,” Schauffele said Monday during a conference call for next month’s PGA Championship at Quail Hollow. “He maybe gave me too much credit.”
Thomas ranked third in strokes gained putting en route to winning the RBC Heritage in a playoff over Andrew Novak on Sunday at Harbour Town. Thomas’ strong putting week bumped him up to No. 24 in that stat on the season, a drastic improvement from last season, which Thomas ended ranked No. 174.
In his winner’s presser afterward, Thomas credited Schauffele for showing Thomas late last year that he was “trying basically too hard” on the greens.
“I think he’s one of the best putters in fundamentals – and not just putting but everything – and I was just like, ‘Can I just pick your brain for like two or three hours, just talk to you about putting?’” Thomas said. “So, he came out with me, and he just was asking me a bunch of different questions. You guys obviously know Xander, but he doesn’t leave any box unchecked. Like he said that day, he’s like, ‘If it has anything to do with you potentially improving in golf, I’ve probably done it or tried it.’ … The more I was talking, I’m like, I don’t do any of the things that I used to do in my best putting years. 2017-18, I was very, very regimented of the things that I did, and how he said it is I had a home base, and I had no home base. I had things that I did, but it was a very vague bag of things and there was no consistency to it.”
Here was Schauffele’s version of events:
“He was pretty up front and asked if I could kind of tag along for practice one day. When I’m in town here [in Jupiter, Florida], J.T. is a very familiar face that I compete against. It’s one of the ways us folks here in Jupiter like to sharpen up before a tournament. It was simple. He started asking me questions, and it ended up me being the one asking him all the questions, sort of how he thinks about putting, what he’s done in the past. You know, I think more than anything, it was just sort of he was searching and maybe trying too hard, and he’s done so many good things in the past that it was sort of like maybe an eye-opening, sort of like, ‘I used to do, three, four, five of the things we were talking about, and I stopped doing them because I was down this crazy rabbit hole of trying to get better.’
“Felt like all the answers were right in front of him.
J.T. is so good that he figured it out pretty quickly.”
