An ailing back kept Justin Thomas from competing in golf tournaments for six months, a stretch that reinforced the two-time major winner's passion and diligence about his sport.
"Probably, honestly, I think the longest I've gone not playing a tournament since I started playing tournaments like when I was 7 or something," Thomas, 32, said Wednesday in Orlando from Bay Hill Club, site of this week's Arnold Palmer Invitational.
Thomas, whose most-recent stroke-play tournament was the Procure Championship and last competition was the Ryder Cup, both in September, is making his season debut on the PGA Tour following back surgery on November 13. He is excited after the long layoff and is relatively healthy.
"Obviously, everybody keeps asking me how I'm feeling, and I've been joking, but it's true, I must be feeling better because other stuff's starting to hurt again, so I feel like I'm pretty back to normal," Thomas said.
Normal is a relative term for the winner of 16 PGA Tour events, including the PGA Championship in 2017 and 2022.
"I'm going to be rusty in terms of competitive (ability)," Thomas said. "I mean, my golf feels really good. I feel like I can do anything I want with the golf ball at any given time, and it's just going to be the, you know, the concentrating for four and a half, five hours on a very difficult test four days in a row, a lot of the little things that I haven't done in a long time that I just have to be nice on myself and give myself a little bit of grace.
"So, yeah, just trying to do that mentally the best that I can this week."
He described a recovery process that allowed him to start chipping and putting in the new year, with improvement measured in 50-yard increments.
"Kind of slowly progressed through that," said Thomas, who turned pro in 2013. "It's basically kind of 50 yards add each week essentially was kind of like the formula that we used."
Monitored on a daily basis, Thomas said it was a matter of paying attention and listening to everything while being smart and conservative in his approach to keep the back from being an issue later. Patience was in big demand as well as being in a positive frame of mind.
One strange aspect to him was trouble with his right leg and hip, not his back as he played late in the season before taking time off after the Ryder Cup.
"... It's weird, it really is," Thomas said. "It's like I had zero back pain during all of this. My back never hurt, it was never, I mean, yeah, it got tight like I'm sure everybody else's in this room does at times. But it never hurt."
Aside from the physical rehabilitation, emotionally tough was not being able to pick up his 1-year-old daughter Molly when she wanted him to. He could only stare back, he said, without being able to give an infant an explanation.
Asked on Wednesday what he learned about himself, the quick-witted Thomas gave a thoughtful answer.
"That I'm going to need a job when I retire," he said. "I definitely am not good at doing nothing. Yeah, I'm going to need to find something whenever I stop playing golf, because when you have nothing to look forward to or nothing to feel like you can improve and get better for, when you're kind of wired that way, it's a hard thing to step right into. So I would say that."