Healthy Justin Thomas makes his return at the API, and this celebrity athlete got a taste of the ol' JT swagger

ORLANDO — Justin Thomas is back. He is back with more than just a surgically repaired back.

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Sidelined after surgery in November, the two-time major winner and one of golf's most mischievous personalities makes his season debut Thursday in the Arnold Palmer Invitational. But he already has proven to be in mid-season form, delivering a clear signal Wednesday when he delivered a withering insult to a "reporter" at the end of his press conference at Bay Hill Club.

Question: “We're glad to have you back. My question is … first of all, you lied, you don't know how to read. [Thomas said he read Matthew McConaughey’s book ‘Greenlight,’ during his convalescence.] You went to Alabama. But my question is, when Alabama was getting rolled by Indiana [in the College Football Playoffs] where exactly were you at?”

The questioner was former NBA star and ESPN basketball analyst Charles Barkley, who played in the pro-am Wednesday morning with Brian Campbell. Barkley played at Auburn and he couldn't help but take a dig at Thomas, who attended rival Alabama.

“Yeah, I was at home, probably just looking at my phone waiting for some kind of sarcastic text from you, or, all of a sudden, all of these huge Indiana football fans that were friends of mine that I had no idea about,” Thomas, renowned for his biting sense of humor, responded. “So, yeah, I should have reached out to you how you deal with big losses like that. I mean, you've gone through that more than I have, so I should have just asked you.”

Barkley, seated in the back of the room, could only smile.

Yes, Thomas is back, confident as always in who he is even if he feels a bit of trepidation as he returns to the PGA Tour. It was only a few weeks ago that Thomas was finally able to start hitting drivers after undergoing microdiscectomy surgery Nov. 13. Continuing weakness in his right hip and leg followed by nerve pain that traversed into his foot were the only signs that something was wrong.

“It was never anything that I felt like an injury or it wasn't something of at all last year of ‘I can't play in this tournament because this feels like that,’” Thomas, 32, said. “It just was, you know, some days it would just feel like a little more tired than others and it's a long season, it's a busy season, I just kind of figured it was just maybe a part of that. But, yeah, the body's a weird place, man. There's a lot of weird things going on.”

Before that setback, Thomas enjoyed a successful season that included his first win in three years at the RBC Heritage, a berth in the season-ending Tour Championship and a spot on the U.S. Ryder Cup team.

His expectations for this week, where he makes his fifth appearance at Bay Hill, are modest, but that doesn’t mean he isn’t thinking of ramping up rather quickly.

“I’ve got to be realistic. I haven't played a tournament in six months,” said Thomas, ranked eighth in the world. “Probably, honestly, I think the longest I've gone not playing a tournament since I started playing tournaments like when I was 7 or something. So, yeah, I'm going to be rusty in terms of competitiveness. My golf feels really good. I feel like I can do anything I want with the golf ball at any given time, and it's just going to be the concentrating for four and a half, five hours on a very difficult test four days in a row, a lot of the little things that I haven't done in a long time that I just have to be nice on myself and give myself a little bit of grace.”

Grace for a little while. He has targets in sight. Guess where.

“My main goal is really to get myself in a place where I feel like at Augusta I'm good to go,” he said, referring to the Masters. “Not in terms of my golf game, but just, I don't feel rusty, I don't feel like I'm still kind of getting comfortable, course management, whatever. Like physically, conditioning, my biggest goal up until then is to feel normal there.

"Like I said, I fully have belief between the golf I've been playing and how I feel like my game is. I am playing well enough where I can do things physically, golf-wise, to play well and contend this week. But it's all of the other factors of the physical and the conditioning of not losing steam on 15 or 16, and how am I going to feel the next day and so on and so forth that I just don't think I can be too hard on myself in that sense the next couple weeks.”