PONTE VEDRA BEACH, Fla. — Max Homa and the game he loves are not getting along.
Twenty-seven minutes had passed before Homa emerged from the scoring room at the Players Championship on Friday night, on the heels of his fourth-straight missed cut on the PGA Tour. As he paused on his way to the locker room at TPC Sawgrass to answer a handful of questions, his eyes, glossy for the entirety of the five-minute interview, said it all. His words — they spilled out in circles.
“It’s frustrating because it’s like you’re in a very toxic relationship. I might be the toxic one,” Homa said after shooting 79-71 to miss the cut by seven shots.
It’s been like this for months now, long enough to feel uncomfortable and increasingly difficult to escape. Homa, a top-10 player in the world a year ago, feels gaslit by his profession. Hundreds and hundreds of swings in practice, so many that feel good, solid and capable of being replicated when it comes time to perform. Then, they’re gone.
“The drives I hit — like this week on No. 1, was about as good as I’ve ever hit a golf ball in my life,” Homa said. “I know it sounds stupid, it’s one tee shot. And then I didn’t do it again for 35 holes.”
It takes Homa an extra breath to get the latter half of that sentiment out of his throat.
In this cycle, the progress isn’t just failing to appear — the game is moving in the wrong direction. Homa’s high point of last season — a tie for third at the 2024 Masters, his first career top-5 in a major — has been followed by a dramatic fall out of form. He has not contended at a tournament since, with three times as many missed cuts (six) as top 10s (two).
It started off the tee. Homa’s strokes gained statistics went from steady in the stretch leading up to last year’s Masters into negative territory by the time he missed the Tour Championship. This season to date, Homa is comparatively driving it better, but he’s losing 1.07 strokes on average with his irons and .19 on the greens.
It’s a game of Whack-A-Mole, and when things get bad, they get bad. This week, the driver went sour again — Homa lost nearly a full stroke off the tee at Sawgrass and almost two with his irons, which are typically his weapon. He’ll fall outside of the Official World Golf Ranking’s top 70 when it updates on Monday.
Without a turnaround soon, Homa’s major season could look different: He’ll need to be in the top 60 to automatically qualify for the U.S. Open and the top 50 for the Open Championship.
Once the backbone of his game, Homa’s success rate with his irons has decreased dramatically. (Richard Heathcote / Getty Images)
Yet, Homa says he’s on the right path, even if he realizes how ridiculous that sounds.
“It’s hard to care this much about something and just not get anything out of it, I guess,” Homa said. “But I am of the mind that it will happen. And if I win the Masters in three weeks or four weeks, I’ll be dying laughing at all of this. I don’t know. I just really care about golf. I care about my golf. … I feel like I deserve to be, the way I work, I feel like I deserve to be the best player in the world at some point.
“That sounds crazy, but that’s what I approach each day, is to be the best at it. And I’m going the complete opposite direction.”
It’s not uncommon for an elite golfer to be asked to explain the state of their game, whether it’s a point in time that they take pride in or one that makes them want to crawl into a hole and never come out. Ask Homa, and he just can’t tell you. He’s following the road map in his mind but also feels like he’s in a vicious loop.
“I wouldn’t lie and say I’m going the right direction if I wasn’t, I’m sure I’d get made more fun of by saying how great I feel shooting 80, or whatever. That’s not blowing smoke, but I’m also not scoring at all. So it’s hard,” he said.
This isn’t the first time Homa has had the look of a man hitting bottom. His rise to PGA Tour stardom was not linear — before he was a six-time PGA Tour winner with $27.6 million in career earnings, he lost his card twice, including the 2017 season in which he made two cuts all year and took home $18,008.
On the “No Laying Up” podcast years later, Homa remembered the quote that got him through it: “Look at a stonecutter hammering away at his rock, perhaps a hundred times without as much as a crack showing in it. Yet at the hundred-and-first blow, it will split in two, and I know it was not the last blow that did it, but all that had gone before.”
Originally written by American journalist Jacob August Riis, the same message once hung in Kobe Bryant’s locker. For Homa, a Los Angeles native with a die-hard fandom for its sports teams, it resonated.
Homa’s recent blows to the stone have included more than just hours on the driving range. He made a coaching change in the fall, from Mark Blackburn to the director of instruction at Congressional, John Scott Rattan. He signed a new endorsement deal with Cobra, switching from the Titleist equipment he had used since his amateur years and college play at Cal. He’s wearing new threads: Lululemon came on as his clothing sponsor to start 2025. Joe Greiner, his longtime caddie and childhood best friend since the age of 6, had to step away for several weeks this season due to a family matter.
It’s been a lot of change. In February, Homa also stopped using his account on X, a social media platform that he used to build his profile, explaining, “I think I’ve finally had a come-to-Jesus moment that it’s for the sick. I was sick. I’m just trying to get healthy now.”
Homa might not be able to unravel it all — clarity isn’t something that he seems close to right now. But the work is there. The effort is apparent. The problem is that on tour, the line is inexplicably fine between great, good and Friday night flights home.
“I don’t know how to explain it, I know people probably think I’m crazy, but the work I’m doing is right. It’s just I’m not doing a very good job on the golf course and making that show. That’s where the frustration comes,” Homa said.
(Top photo: Romeo T. Guzman / Associated Press)
