TROON, Scotland — That shout had nothing to do with making the cut. It wasn’t about his chances of winning The Open Championship or even getting two more days of golf. Max Homa was releasing four months of pain.
As the 33-year-old star gallivanted around Royal Troon’s 18th green huffing and puffing and screaming “Let’s go!” to the Scottish crowd as his score stood 13 shots off the lead, he felt something he hadn’t felt in months. Maybe ever, he wondered. Because there’s no greater high than the one you forgot existed.
With The Open Championship cut seemingly out of reach — no, really, Homa says he assumed he wasn’t making it with the way he’d been playing — Homa birdied No. 16 Friday evening and went to the 18th green with 28 feet for birdie versus the fear of a completely lost season. Homa’s putt slowly rolled to the pin, fell in and he unleashed.
This year was supposed to be Homa’s time. He was a clear-cut top-10 golfer. He went 3-1-1 at the Ryder Cup as the lone American success story. He was one of the most marketable and likable stars in the sport. So by the time he finished T3 at the Masters in April, his first real chance in major contention, Homa had everything in front of him.
“Expectation is a hell of a drug, and it’s just been getting to me,” a rabid yet vulnerable Homa said minutes after his cut-making birdie.
There it is. He said it. The part athletes never, ever acknowledge but always lurks beneath the surface. Homa is online. He is popular. He is well aware of where he stands and what people say, and so, yes, he let himself believe what he was supposed to be doing.
“I played so well last year,” he said. “Finished at the Ryder Cup, played great, won in South Africa and just thought to myself that my game felt so good. Then this entire season, it’s been a roller coaster. Haven’t hit the ball well at all, minus Augusta and maybe one other week. Then those two weeks I did hit it well, I didn’t putt it well.
“It just feels like the game’s really getting to me. I’m on the wrong side of a lot of inches here. I guess at some point you just have to grow up and realize that it doesn’t get better with a bad attitude.”
It’s important to remember that Homa is not your normal star golfer. He was not the prodigy who won PGA Tour events before he could rent a car and racked up expectations and trophies in equal measure. He was a likable afterthought, a Cal product who spent four years back and forth between the tour and the Korn Ferry Tour. He had an entire calendar year when he missed 19 cuts and never finished better than 71st. And then, at age 29, he found something. He slowly but surely went from a golfer ranked in the 500s to winning signature events and thriving at the major international team events. He got put in blockbuster pairings and spoke each week at news conferences.
When Homa hopped up on the podium to speak to reporters late Friday night, it was the first time he’d been asked to speak to the media since the Tuesday before the PGA Championship in the second week of May.
Homa knows what it’s like to matter, and he knows what it’s like to be invisible, and that was the shout of a man who does not want to go back.
“I don’t know,” he said, “just been really not playing very well, and golf has not been very fun. I’ve been doing a poor job mentally.”
His driver fell off the face of the earth. Outside of a nice week at the Wells Fargo Championship, he followed the Masters by going T55, T35, cut, T22, cut, T61 and T70. And this week wasn’t going any better, to be clear. He opened The Open Championship with a first-round 76, and with the difficult conditions facing the afternoon wave of tee times, few expected him to play into the weekend.
Even he didn’t.
“Today I had already committed to (the idea that) I was going to miss the cut, and I was just hoping to find something mentally just to enjoy myself out here,” Homa said.
Then, two things happened. First, he thinks he and his team found something late Thursday on the range with those driver struggles (who knows how much they found, as he still lost 1.51 strokes off the tee Friday). Second, he made a decision within himself. He was not trying to win The Open. He was trying to beat himself.
That is where the shouting really came from. He won.
“I don’t know if I’ve been that happy,” Homa said. “It’s more like inward. Just sometimes you just win, like, a battle within. It’s a lot more — you get a lot more proud than even beating all these guys sometimes.”
He added that The Open is his favorite major, the one rooted in history and creativity that Homa loves. But it was not about that. He said he took the most pride in staying focused and never blinking. So even after his one bad hole — a disastrous triple bogey on 12 that included a shank — put him at 8 over and two off the projected cut, he didn’t worry about it. He just kept grinding, and that’s how it looked, too. When he missed a putt, he looked locked in. He didn’t get angry or upset. Just another shot. Keep going.
Then, that putt went in, and it reminded us of what this sport means sometimes.
“I had an out-of-body experience,” Homa said. “I didn’t really expect to yell like I won a golf tournament. It just felt really good. I felt like I fought all day.”
