Justin Thomas has revealed that he picked the brains of rival Xander Schauffeler to improve his putting game.
Thomas ended a three-year trophy drought by winning the RBC Heritage last week.
He putted for a birdie to seal his victory. The moment was born out of a session he held with Shauffeler at the end of last year.
I called Xander at the end of last year because I think he’s one of the best putters in fundamentals – and not just putting, but everything. I was just like, ‘can I just pick your brain for like two or three hours, just talk to you about putting?’.
“He came out with me and he just was asking me a bunch of different questions. You guys obviously know Xander – he doesn’t leave any box unchecked. 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’.
“I just was talking to him about this process and how he reads greens and how he sees things and his practice and everything. Honestly was just being with him and he would kind of ask something and I was like ‘yeah, I used to do that’.
“Then he was like, ‘well, how about something like this?’. 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’. In 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 now 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. I feel like I used to have a very good home base of fundamentals and things that I did.
“While he helped, it was more the questions he asked me made me realise that I’m trying basically too hard and I’m trying too many different things.
“I think it’s a serious, serious, serious skill to continue to work on the things that you do really well and not doing it differently, and I think that’s been more of what it is. I have my fundamentals and things that I do and checkpoints, and I’m sticking to them.”