Michael Thornbjornsen: Challenges & Strategy on PGA Tour
Stephen Sweeney, Michael Thornbjornsen's putting coach, discusses his previous battle with putting woes and his strategies to enhance his play on the PGA Tour.
Video Transcript
You know, Michael Thorbjornsen is a player who's led the greens in regulation stat last year on the PGA Tour.
This year he's up there as well.
When you think about, how you coach, a player like Michael, who's maybe a little bit similar to, you know, a Scottie Scheffler, right?
This is a guy who's gonna be in a lot of fairways, a lot of greens, and necessarily equivalent- when Michael goes and looks at his, his putting statistics, he may get frustrated being like, "You know what?
I'm- I feel like I'm a better putter than 115th in the, strokes gained data."
But, is it working against him a little bit that he's got so many more looks of outside 20 feet, give or take, because he hits so many greens in regulation?
Is that tough, as- on you as a coach sometimes?
I think yeah.
Yes and no.
I, you know, we, we obviously were excited to kinda scrub, the stats and go into this season pretty fresh and sort of get a f- you know, we'd, we'd done a good body of work over the winter and sort of see where can we get to stats-wise.
Um- Mm-hmm and then, you know, he came off a great week in Phoenix, went to Pebble, was pretty tired.
And he just had a, a really, really bad week on the greens in Pebble.
Um- Hey, not the first guy.
Not the first guy to have a bad week on the greens there.
Yeah, he's, he's not the first guy at all.
I never putt those greens well.
To, to the point that he, he basically ruined his season's stats with just, like, one, like, crazy bad week.
Mm-hmm.
So that was, that was a little bit unfortunate for his stats and, you know, we've talked about it.
Like, he's putted much better than his stats would suggest that he's putted based on the fact that, you know, he, he, he then followed it up with another bad week at the PGA at, up there in Philadelphia at Aronimink, so.
Which was another tough week.
And guys were, like that statistically weren't making as many putts inside of 10 feet.
Exactly.
So there's two weeks that you kinda just throw out the trash as, you know, unusual weeks that these guys don't typically face.
Not, not giving an excuse, but it's also something that was well-documented that week particular.
E- exactly.
So he, you know, I mean, I think for good players you always know when you're putting good and when you're putting bad regardless of- Mm-hmm what the stats say.
And, he's been putting good for a long time and, you know, you just have these anomalies that kind of statistically, you know, kind of block, block your scorecard a little bit.
But, you know, the, the short putting has been phenomenal.
He's, he's really done well there.
And, and the speed, we've, we've done a lot of work on trying to, trying to negate, like, the three-putts and then- Mm-hmm you know, just like you said, because he gives himself so many looks or, you know, day in, day out, it's, it's just, it's hard to convert them from, from, from that distance b- especially when you're dealing with, with so much slope from 20 feet all the time, you know?
Mm-hmm.
No, that makes total sense, and I can understand why you guys would target speed because it's not easy percentage-wise to make putts outside of 10 feet, give or take.
Also, commend you guys.
Looked at the stats, the four to eight feet range, much improved in 2026.
