Justin Thomas needed one par on the final hole Friday to keep his Memorial Tournament alive, and he got it the hard way. A flop shot from behind the green and a close-range putt saved him on the par-4 18th, leaving him at 3 over and right on the 5-over cut line.
That mattered because Thomas was not just surviving the day. He was the last player in the field to qualify for the weekend, which means he will go out alone Saturday at 8:50 a.m. local time. The unusual tee time is the price of a round that started badly and nearly ended his week at Muirfield Village, the Ohio course hosted by Jack Nicklaus.
Thomas opened the second round at 2 over after a first round that featured six bogeys and four birdies, then added three more bogeys on the front nine Friday to put himself in immediate trouble. He birdied the 15th, bogeyed 17 and then had to make the scramble on 18 to stay inside the number. Afterward, he posted on X that he was trying to figure out where and how he could make one birdie, and said Friday was probably the most difficult round he had played on tour. He added that it was the hardest round of golf he could remember, major or non-major.
While Thomas was fighting to extend his week, J.T. Poston was running away from the field. Poston fired a 7-under 65, the best score by four shots in the second round, using six birdies on the front nine to reach 5 under after nine holes before adding two more on the back nine to finish at 9 under. That left him one shot ahead of Ryan Gerard and made his round the one Thomas singled out as almost impossible to comprehend.
Thomas said he could not put into words how good Poston's round was, and the numbers back him up. On a day when one player was trying to find a single birdie and another was piling up eight of them, the cut line became the story for Thomas and the benchmark for everyone else. Rory McIlroy, who shot 74 and slipped to tied for 19th, was one of the players who watched the leaderboard shift around him, and he and Thomas shared a hug on the 18th green after the round. For Thomas, the task now is simple and strange at the same time: play alone, keep the scorecard clean, and hope Friday's survival was not the last hard-earned turn of his week.
