Justin Thomas lucked to win the 10th hole and won a dominant 9-3 TGL playoff victory at Bay Golf Club on Tuesday night at Palm Beach Gardens, Florida.
Atlanta will play the New York golf club led by Xander Schauffele in the first three-game championship series next Monday and Tuesday. The winning team will be allocated $9 million in bonus.
“As you can see from tonight’s game, all the games in all the games seem to be completely different in everything we get, but I love our team, and I love our chances.”
Thomas’ Atlanta trio, Billy Horschel and Patrick Cantlay barely missed the attacks on Bay’s Irish Shane Lowry, Australian Min Woo Lee and Swede Ludvig Åberg.
Wyndham Clark has the best stats in the TGL this season but has been unable to get the Bay due to a neck injury that forced him to quit last week’s Player Championship game.
Atlanta led 4-2 as the game turned into a single in the fifth five-shot 10-shot match.
Both players discovered the virtual fairway, and Lowry hooked 3 iron heads into the green water before the ball disappeared into a water grave, causing his back to turn in disgust.
Thomas then hit a willful 4-iron that appeared in danger of green, but the ball brought an accidental bounce, and he then won the hole with a two-shot score.
“This is the luckiest bounce I’ve ever seen,” Rory McIrroy, the newly crowned player champion, said in a cameo comment to ESPN.
Cantlay birdied Aberg in 12 of the 3rd, when both teams “throwed hammers” to increase the value of the hole to three points.
“We have something tonight in our favor and sometimes you need it,” Horschel said.
Thomas added: “We all performed well tonight. We all contributed.”
