Thomas Detry closes in style for first PGA Tour victory at 2025 WM Phoenix Open
Thomas Detry closes in style for first PGA Tour victory at 2025 WM Phoenix Open
Thomas Detry could sense his lead slipping away. Winless in his career on the PGA Tour, his five-shot advantage on Sunday had momentarily been trimmed to two but the 32-year-old Belgian was determined this time would be different.
'This one," he said, "nobody was going to take it away from me.'
He stepped up to make a clutch birdie putt at 15 and then hit the shot of the final round at the par-3 16th to secure his first PGA Tour victory at the WM Phoenix Open. Detry dialed in a 9-iron from 180 yards that bounced once on the green, hopped and spun to a stop inside 2 feet from the hole to set up a birdie.
'Everything he's doing is obviously very good. He should keep doing that,' said Justin Thomas, who called Detry "freakishly talented" while serving as a guest commentator on CBS Sports. 'That's why he's leading the tournament and I'm sitting here done for the week.'
Detry closed with birdies on the final four holes to shoot 6-under 65 at TPC Scottsdale and beat Daniel Berger and Michael Kim by seven strokes. In doing so, Detry became the first Belgian to win on the Tour. Detry, the 2016 Big Ten champion, had followed fellow countryman Thomas Pieters to University of Illinois, where men's golf coach Mike Small beat into his team's head to play by the mantra of 'poor, hungry, determined."
'That's the way to approach a tournament and approach golf,' Detry said.
Detry has steadily improved since turning pro but victory had been elusive. The two-time Olympian's only previous wins? By 12 strokes on the DP World Tour's Challenge Tour and at the 2018 World Cup. But he couldn't get over the line on the PGA Tour. Every time he was in the thick of the trophy hunt, his heart raced and he had a bad habit of jumping ahead and thinking about what a victory would mean to him. For the past two years, at the advice of his wife and his sports psychologist, he's been meditating and he noticed a calmness and comfort level this time after shooting 66-65-65 to build a commanding five-stroke lead. However, the likes of Jordan Spieth and world No. 1 Scottie Scheffler were lurking and Detry's lackluster final-round scoring average meant it was too soon to inscribe the Belgian's name on the trophy. Add in the fact that he struggled through a fitful night of sleep, waking at 4 a.m., and failing to get back to sleep and it wasn't setting up to be a walk in the park at the tournament affectionately known as the People's Open.
Scheffler birdied four of his first six holes to jump into contention but he bogeyed No. 12 and the wheels fell off. He came home in 41 to finish T-25. Spieth closed in 68 and finished T-4, his best result since the WM Phoenix Open a year ago, but never got closer to the lead than four strokes.
'All in all, it was a big progress week for me,' Spieth said. 'I didn't feel like this was a one-off. It felt like this is just trending the right direction.'
Detry birdied two of the first three holes – a 12-footer at 1 and a left-to-right bending 14 footer at 3 – around a bogey at the second. He strung together seven pars in a row before a birdie at 11 and looked to be waltzing to victory. But not so fast. Berger, winless in four years during which he was sidelined for 18 months, birdied three holes in a four-hole stretch beginning at No. 12, the last of which reduced Detry's lead down to two strokes, momentarily.
'In the back of your mind, you've got a five-shot lead, don't blow it, don't blow it,' he admitted thinking.
Detry responded at 15 by stroking in his 7-foot birdie putt. Then he didn't even realize he had stiffed it at 16, brushing in his birdie putt while Berger made bogey and the lead returned to five. Game, set, match.
"Every time I felt like I made a birdie, he made one back," Berger said. "He was playing really great golf today, and he was deserving to win this."
Detry tricked his mind into staying in the present and had a magician's touch on the greens. He closed out the round with two more superb birdies. He signed for a 72-hole total of 24-under 260 and romped to a seven-stroke victory as if this winning thing was old hat. For the week, he ranked first in Strokes Gained: Approach the Green, second in SG: Putting and third in SG: Tee to Green.
'Deep inside of me, I kind of really trusted myself,' he said. 'I felt like I've been doing a lot of really good things in the past to put myself in that position, and I felt like I was kind of ready to win.'
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