Sky Sports
HOYLAKE, ENGLAND – Max Homa is still trying to find his biggest magic.
But he also tries not to try too hard.
The last time we saw the world number eight in a major, Homma was missing the cut in heartbreaking fashion in his hometown of the US Open, bombing before the weekend at Los Angeles Country Club with a triple-bogey double in his second round to miss the weekend by two.
I didn’t feel satisfied.
“Yeah, the US Open hurts a lot,” he said. “I played great. He had a three-hole stretch that was nasty and I didn’t feel like I deserved to miss the cut. Then I went to [the Travelers Championship] Next week in Connecticut missed it one by one – and played well.
“It’s just one of those ones where I feel like I’m gripping the wheel so hard. Especially since everyone knows my master record sucks. I guess I’m not who I am when I’m playing them.”
Those last three lines were particularly revealing. “Grab the wheel real tight” is a very telling phrase that I wish I was thinking of. Admitting his master record is “bad” means he pre-empts any outside criticism. And the idea that he’s not the same when he’s playing it is actually pretty empowering, because it suggests that if he’d been the same in a major, he’d have done so much better.
“I go to regular touring events and feel like I’m freeing up and playing great. I’m more consistent. Crazy things don’t seem to happen,” he said.
Homa’s been working on it, which is difficult given the fact that the business of being a little bit normal is unpredictable. But one strategy he used is a little message he wrote on his golf glove, three letters that are easily visible when he’s holding his club and easily visible to TV cameras, too: NFG.
So what does it stand for?
“It’s a kind of mantra,” Homa said. “It has a bad word in it, so I’m not going to tell you what it is. It’s just something I started doing in Detroit. Just stop caring so much and let myself be myself.”
We’ll let you decipher that for yourselves, just adding my personal guess that the phrase might rhyme with “no truck driven” but, again, who can tell?
Homa is something of a mantra man. He always relied on the Stonecutter credo, something he got from Kobe Bryant. Other messages, such as “Forgive Quickly,” punctuated his best performances.
“Sometimes you just need a reminder that it’s going to be okay. Just go play golf.”
He had a solid week in Detroit, finishing T21 in the Rocket Mortgage Classic. He followed that up with a T12 at the Genesis Scottish Open last week.
As for this week? So far, so good. He is now playing the 17th over of his career and has only one score better than T40. But Homa’s 68-year-old posted in the first round marks his career’s best run in a major tournament. It was particularly impressive given he was playing in the toughest conditions of the day, battling the afternoon wind and chill at Royal Liverpool and holding his own.
“It’s as good as I remember hitting it in a major,” he said. “I felt like I had a lot of control over the golf ball, and that was nice in that wind.”
Homa faced a particularly funny (though undeniably frustrating) challenge as he finished his first run. When he was pulling the wood for his second shooting on the par-5 18th, he heard some comments from the nearby TV.
“I don’t know if anyone mentioned this, but you can hear the commentators on the broadcast from the big TV, and I was watching the ball and someone said, ‘This is too much club,'” he said.
“You did an absolutely terrible job of not holding back,” he added, smiling. He grabbed his second shot well left of the green and into the grandstand next to it. From there it was just a matter of equality.
“It was like putting the ball in the field and let’s go home.”
Live to fight another day. Just don’t fight also difficult.