Since winning two major championships nearly half a decade ago, Collin Morikawa is seeking to recapture his form after a winless two-year period.
Golf is a mental battle, and that is most apparent in golfers looking to recapture their past form. Xander Schauffele’s game has left him in 2025 following an injury, and he’s been open about his struggles in getting back to his brilliant best.
Life on the PGA Tour can be lonely. Rory McIlroy said he wanted to hide from the pressures of golfing in the States after he won the Masters, and he’s enjoying one of the best seasons of his career.
But it’s also a community, and players on Tour will occasionally lend a hand to one another. Morikawa revealed the advice Justin Thomas once gave to him that could allow him to escape from his slump in form.
Justin Thomas’ advice to Collin Morikawa
Justin Thomas, a two-time major winner like Morikawa, once gave his now Ryder Cup teammate some advice when he was rising through the ranks of professional golf. That advice is needed as much now as it was back then, for both players.
Morikawa said to the PGA Tour, “JT told me if you’re good enough, you’re going to make it out here at some point. Everyone is always in a rush to get somewhere, and I get that; that’s how today’s world works. But you just have to keep believing in yourself.”
Doubt can creep into the mind of any player. Take McIlroy, for example. He went 10 years without winning a major before completing the career grand slam this season.
Thomas recently broke his two-year winless streak, taking a victory at the RBC Heritage after two second-place finishes earlier in the year. But his form has since dropped, going into the Ryder Cup in New York.
Luckily for Thomas and Morikawa, recent form doesn’t correlate to Ryder Cup success, and a win with Team USA could be exactly what they need to reignite their respective careers.
They have plenty of inspiration from other players teeing off at the Ryder Cup who regained their feet in 2025.
J.J. Spaun should inspire Collin Morikawa’s comeback
In 2024, it looked like J.J. Spaun’s professional golf career was over. He missed the cut in 10 of his first 15 events, ranked 169th in the world, and was in serious danger of losing his PGA Tour card.
Now, he’s a U.S. Open winner and is ready to tee off at Bethpage Black as an automatic qualifier for Keegan Bradley’s Ryder Cup team. After winning the U.S. Open, he revealed how he found the strength to rediscover his form.
He said, “I think it’s just perseverance. I’ve always kind of battled through whatever it may be to get to where I needed to be and get to what I wanted. I’ve done this before. I’ve had slumps at every level.
“I’ve always went back and said, ‘You’ve done this before. You’ve been down before. You got out of it.’ There’s kind of like a little pattern, so hopefully I don’t do that pattern again.”
Morikawa’s form isn’t as poor as Spaun’s was by any stretch. He was firmly within the top 12 Americans in the Ryder Cup standings before Bradley selected him as a captain’s pick. But after winning two major championships, more is expected of the American.
But leaning on the advice given to him by Thomas, and learning from the stories of players like Spaun, Morikawa can get back into contention for some of the biggest prizes in the sport.