On Thursday at the 2025 PGA Championship, Justin Thomas’ high hopes were dashed with a rough start. But one bold, miraculous chip from beside a rocky creek may have saved his PGA chances, and it wowed all the analysts in the ESPN TV booth, too.
Heading into this week’s PGA at Quail Hollow, Thomas was high among the players expected to contend. After all, he won the 2017 PGA Championship at this course, his first of two PGA Championship wins.
He also won the RBC Heritage in late April among a string of great finishes so far this season.
But right from the start, Thomas’ 2025 PGA campaign went sideways.
Thomas’ disastrous PGA Championship start
On Thursday at Quail Hollow, Thomas started on the front nine, and he opened with a tidy par at the 1st. But at the 2nd, things started to go haywire.
He lost his tee shot on the long par-4 to the left, with his ball ending up among some trees. That forced a chip out. After finally reaching the green, Thomas three-putted for a double-bogey 6.
He immediately followed that crooked number with a bogey-5 at the 3rd hole. When he added a second bogey at the lengthy par-3 6th, he’d fallen all the way to four over.
But the rest of Thomas’ round would look much different, highlighted by his heroic shot on 18.
Thomas charges back, make miraculous creek shot
Thomas earned his first birdie of the day at the 8th, though he dropped another shot at the 9th for a front-nine 39. Then on the back side, his game turned around.
A birdie at 10, followed by three consecutive red numbers on holes 14-16, brought Thomas’ score all the way back to one over.
Then came the par-4 18th hole.
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Thomas striped his drive into the fairway, though his ball may have been impacted by some mud amid the mud-ball controversy that roiled the PGA Championship on Thursday. That showed on the next shot, when his ball tailed way left of his target toward a rocky creek that borders the left side of the green.
When Thomas reached his ball, he may have been relieved to find it dry in a patch of grass. But where it came to rest may have been even worse than the bottom of the creek. Somehow Thomas’ ball found its way into a few inches of long rough directly in between a large rock and the flowing water of the creek.
Then Thomas took off his left shoe and sock. It appeared he was going to attempt the hit the seemingly impossible shot rather than take a drop, and the ESPN TV broadcast crew were beside themselves.
Curtis Strange even pleaded with the two-time PGA champ, saying, “Don’t do it.”
“There’s a lot of things that can go wrong here,” ESPN on-course reporter John Maginnes added, “and very few that can go right.”
No matter, Thomas pulled wedge anyway and set up to the ball. Anything could have happened in this situation. He could have duffed it into the creek, leading to a penalty stroke and drop. He could have impacted the rock on his downswing and invited disaster. Given the steep swing trajectory required, he could have whiffed.
But he didn’t. Thomas took a short, steep swing and chopped his ball out of the rough, miraculously sending it onto the green, settling just 12 feet from the hole.
Check it out below.
If the ESPN reporters were beside themselves before the shot, they were nearly speechless afterward. Nearly.
Strange and fellow ESPN analyst Scott Van Pelt added an exchange that captured the moment perfectly.
When Van Pelt called the shot “incredible,” Strange replied, “No, it’s better than that.”
Unfortunately, Thomas was unable to make his mid-range par putt, finishing with a bogey-5 on the hole that could have been far, far worse. He ended Round 1 at two over, far better than his position at the turn, and lives on to fight for the cut on Friday at Quail Hollow.
