CHARLOTTE, N.C. — The ‘question’ in the headline is the same one pinging around in the gallery at Quail Hollow. And the same one popping off on social media. And perhaps even the same one circling Max Homa’s head.
Is he back?
Friday’s round of 64 at the PGA Championship is the perfect ember for that smokey question. Homa has felt “close” for a while, despite the five missed cuts that have piled up this year. He’s looked close in person, too. During practice rounds at the WM Phoenix Open in February, he said he’s never driven it better. But when the gun went off for the first round, he shot five over.
“It’s just a hard game,” Homa said on Friday, moments after making it look particularly easy.
During the second round, he drove it to a foot on the par-4 14th, he chipped in for birdie on 18, he made 100 feet of putts and bested his Thursday back-nine score by nine. Sixty-four was his best career tally in a major by three and his best score, period, since August 2023.
“It’s what a guy like him, who has been struggling, needs,” said his caddie of less than two months, Bill Harke. “You need that one round to tell you ‘you’re back.’ You can’t have your agent, your caddie, your wife and everybody telling you ‘you’re back.’ You have to know it.”
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We are going to learn how well he knows it these next two days. At five under, Homa has earned the spotlight of an afternoon weekend tee time, just three shots off the lead. It took two days of good work in Charlotte, and a helluva lot more at home.
Homa says he’s hit “an absurd amont of golf balls” in the past seven months, feeling “so broken” and searching for a swing feeling from his peak, when he was one of the 10 best players on the planet. For the past year, that feeling has been stuck exclusively in his memory, and it wasn’t until about three weeks ago that he decided to get real about it with his swing coach, John Scott Rattan. “I said, ‘I think I should swing it like this.’” Homa recalled. “And he said, OK, show me. And I showed him. And he said, OK, let’s mold off of that, let’s make that the model.”
The model looks really good up close. Homa hits it low and striking, soft fades that start left and gently move back to center. They’re easy to follow off the big white oaks of Quail Hollow. And yet, the model is still so new. Homa brought in Rattan during the offseason, while also changing equipment companies. (With hindsight, he said he wouldn’t recommend that new-coach, new-clubs combo.) Then his longtime caddie and friend, Joe Greiner, elected to move on in March before the weariness of this journey — from World No. 5 to outside the top 70 in 12 months — impacted their relationship. Homa called up legendary caddie Jim “Bones” Mackay for a recommendation on whom to lean on as a looper, and Harke was the first to come to mind.
