Justin Thomas went and took his 1st major from one of the PGA Championship’s toughest spots

The Bermuda rough at Quail Hollow is a densely uniform loofah stitched together to ruin a golfer’s hopes and dreams. It’s the first thing you notice walking around this historic Charlotte course. It’s not particularly high — this is not some six-inch ankle-deep U.S. Open rough, the kind you always go to first when citing brutal major championship roughs.

This is different. It’s short — just a couple of inches — but it leaves you wondering how the hell even the best golfers in the world move a club through it to get the ball any great distance and with any kind of precision.

When Justin Thomas’ tee shot was in the air at the par-3 13th hole, set up at 208 yards for the final round of PGA Championship, there was a momentary tipping point tension akin to a Roman emperor holding his thumb at the horizontal position in front of the gladiators.

The ball was leaking left, but not so much that you could at once pronounce it a bad shot or a missed green. Left was where the pin was on Sunday, just eight paces from the edge. From behind the green, it looked like a powerful high ball coming in from the elevated tee box with the potential to slam into these new Quail Hollow greens and run out pin high. But it was going to be close — he was left of the already left located pin.

Instead of slamming into the green and safely running back for a birdie putt, it hit with a thud and slowly fell off a ledge on the left side of the green and into the Bermuda stuff. The shot wasn’t precise enough to label it a bad break or bounce.

The way the ball settled into the Bermuda, however, was fortunate. Once you get off the fairway or green at Quail Hollow, you’re at the mercy of golf gods or unseen forces or whatever you want to believe in that’s beyond the player’s control. On Saturday night, Jason Day, one of the strongest and most powerful players in the game, caught a brutal lie in the Bermuda that he could only muscle 55 yards in the general direction of the 18th green.

Other times, the ball bounced, swished around, and perched up on that bath loofah to give a player much more hope than Day ever had. While Thomas’ ball may have bounced off the green, he got one of those better fates as the ball finished softly atop the first cut of the Bermuda.

Thomas seemed so dialed-in at this point of the round on Sunday -- he had not made a bogey since the opening hole — that when his ball settled on top of the first cut, my immediate reaction was only “well holing out from off the green will make this more dramatic than another birdie putt.” He had some green to work with, what looked like a nice lie, and given his day, the moment seemed appropriate. It wasn’t that easy or automatic, of course, as Thomas described afterward. The first cut of this Bermuda, as he explained, can be just as tricky as the heavier stuff.

“That first cut is so tough to chip,” Thomas said with the towering Wanamaker Trophy at his side late Sunday night. “This entire course, it’s tough to chip out of the rough but that first cut you get, you can really look stupid in a heartbeat because it’s all into the grain and it’s really short to where you can just flub it. You can hit it right in front of you and if you try to play for that, it can come out hot and you can run it by.”

Thomas got through that first cut of Bermuda and paced it perfectly, hitting the kind of shot you’re capable of and expect when you’ve been a mega talent at every age level in the game. He started pointing at it with the ball still in the middle of its trip. The speed could not have been better. At the end of the trip, it turned onto its home block, came by the cup on the high side to take a look, and then pulled into the hole to add to his cushion on what had been a jammed top of the leaderboard. It sent a roar through one of the farthest corners of the course, and no one would match his score again for the rest of the day.

After pointing at it mid-trip, Thomas then turned to the cascade of fans on a sidehill for what he said was “probably the most berserk I’ve ever gone on the golf course.” It was an emphatic fist pump — not some grand Tiger uppercut, but still a reaction that met the moment from one of the brightest young stars in the game.

There were still five holes to go, but for the first time all day, it clearly felt like Thomas’ championship. The official dagger came at the 17th on a shot that was more challenging and nerve-exposing than the delicate chip at the 13th. Before making his way up to the 17th tee, Thomas found a quiet moment for himself.

Throughout the back nine, the scene around Thomas and his playing partner, Hideki Matsuyama, became more chaotic with each hole. There were swarms of American media and Japanese media. The crowds started to coalesce around just the Thomas hole as he made the big move, falling off other twosomes on the course.

At one point, the fans cut corners to race up ahead inside the ropes — CBS employees carrying cameras walking side by side with fans carrying tallboys, all scurrying together through the rough. Around the greens, they edged onto hills and crests that were not open for spectators, pushing closer and closer to watch and holler around Thomas.

The 16th green, however, provided a small break from that chaos. It’s on a peninsula that goes out into the massive lake running through much of Quail Hollow’s back nine. There were no crowds — just some of the media horde and a couple of TV towers. It was here that Thomas took a moment to himself after getting up and down for a critical par that kept it as his to lose with two to play.

The media was at a distance. His caddie was on another part of the green. It was just Thomas in a momentary bubble. He looked for his own space, crouched down, and never looked up as Matsuyama finished the hole. He examined his hands, fiddled and picked at them. After he won, he’d say he was more calm than he expected to be but did look at his hands during the round and saw them shaking.

Following that brief meditation to prepare for entering possibly the scariest tee box on the course, his 7-iron would twirl through those hands in admiration of the shot of the tournament. From 220 yards, Thomas drew a perfect 7-iron into a left pin with water all around the 17th green:

Only four birdies had been made there all day, and Thomas stuffed it close with the entire championship on the line. He converted the putt that would ignite the crowd one more time and lock up his first major.

It all happened quickly after so much of the front nine was spent positioning what looked like a Matsuyama and Kevin Kisner battle in the final two groups. Thomas was there, hanging around with the crowd entirely at his back. At times, it felt like you were at Bryant-Denny Stadium, the “Roll Tiiiiides” replacing the typical “Go [generic golf name]” shouts and coming every few steps as Thomas made his way off tee boxes and up fairways.

The “Jttttt” screams came even more frequently, with almost every step. Even with Thomas not in the lead and not yet making the run that would deliver his first major, you couldn’t help but feel like he was already a massive star, at least in the golf world. The constancy and intensity of support were what you’d see from a crowd pushing Jordan Spieth.

Thomas and Spieth are thrown together a lot, sometimes by their own choice, but often because the media needs something easy to fill up time. They’re the same age and grew up competing against and with each other at the absolute highest levels of junior, college, and now pro golf.

It wasn’t always clear that one was better than the other — they were both just at the very top together. Spieth had obviously separated himself in the nascent years of their pro careers, and when Thomas was asked on Sunday if that made him frustrated, he was pretty candid.

“Frustration probably isn’t the right word,” he said. “Jealousy definitely is.”

Now he’s got his first major and is the kind of talent who could be going for his own career slam at some point over the next decade. The major comes in a season which already boasted three wins, golf’s “magic round” of 59, and a 63 at the freaking U.S. Open that broke a 40-year scoring record.

Thomas is one of the many stars who are and will carry the sport in the post-Tiger era. There will never be another Tiger, and to get over that, we have a cadre of 20-somethings capable of Hall of Fame careers. They’re on display in front of the cameras on the course and also off it as kids of a social media age.

Thomas is one the main characters in both places. This was not some long shot out of nowhere or a journeyman pro finally breaking through. It was a stud prospect, a top young talent, and now likely player of the year taking his. And the moment he took it came from one of Quail Hollow’s strongest defenses: the Bermuda.