After unthinkable finish, Max Homa opens up on ‘the battle within’

TROON, Scotland — Max Homa stood on the 13th tee box at Royal Troon and inhaled.

In a few short moments, it would all be over. The pressure of Open Championship week. The latest downbeat in a “rollercoaster” season. The round that started with a brand-new swing thought.

In a way, it was freeing. Homa would soon become one of this week’s 155 losers, but he’d decided long before he reached the 13th that he was not going to be defeated.

“I had already committed to the fact I was going to miss the cut,” he said Friday evening, an unusually candid answer even from an unusually candid golfer. “I was just hoping to find something mentally just to enjoy myself out here.”

We can safely say that Homa had not enjoyed the 12th hole. He’d blasted his tee shot on the 12th 30 yards left, where his ball landed in a gorse bush. He dropped in the fairway, then smoked his subsequent iron shot 40 yards right into another gorse bush. They were his only two “bad swings” all day, but they were enough to douse any remaining hopes of reaching the weekend at his favorite major championship. Homa dropped a second time, chipped up onto the green, left his putt short and tapped-in for triple-bogey 7, leaving him 8 over for the weekend and safely on the wrong side of the cutline.

From the 13th tee, he faced five more downwind holes into the clubhouse, but with the breeze ripping on Friday evening and players ejecting every which way, his odds of playing the final five at 2 under or better (which would be necessary to stave off an early elimination) were long.

“It’s just the golf game hasn’t been great,” he said afterward. “Expectation is a hell of a drug, and it’s just been getting to me. If I wasn’t going to win the ball-striking battle, I was at least going to try to win that battle inside.”

Expectation, of course, is the kind of thing that happens after following up your first Ryder Cup team with the best major championship performance of your life, as Homa did in a Masters T3 finish in the spring of this year.

If you’d only paid attention to his golf at Augusta, you might be blind to how the last few months have treated Homa. He’s carded only one top-10 since the Masters, a T8 at the Wells Fargo, and missed cuts in two of his last five starts. His swing has fallen wayward, returning only in time for his worst putting performances of the year. He showed up at the Open, his “favorite golf tournament in the world” and felt the black clouds forming again. He shot 76 on Thursday, a five-over performance where everything seemed to be headed the wrong way. When he carded the triple on the 12th on Friday, he was certain it was over.

“I just thought to myself that my game felt so good,” he said. “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.”

And, with that thought in mind, a funny thing started to happen: Homa’s game came around. He carded gutsy pars on holes 13-15, stuck a brilliant wedge for an easy birdie on the 16th, hit one of the approaches of the day on 17 to five feet for a must-have par, and turned for the downwind 18 with a weekend-clinching three in his sights. His approach from the left rough had left a look at birdie, but a marginal one — a double-breaking 25-footer down a slope that few golfers had read properly all day.

After a long while surveying, Homa stepped up the putt and committed, hitting the perfect roll at dying speed that leaked down the ridge and toppled in. The crowd erupted, and Homa responded in kind, delivering a celebration topped perhaps only by his birdie on the 18th on Ryder Cup Sunday last fall.

“I don’t know, I had an out-of-body experience,” he said after, sheepishly. “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.”

As he stepped to the podium still flooded with adrenaline, Homa looked relieved. The putt had fallen, yes, but the birdie on 18 was about so much more than a made-cut.

“Golf has not been very fun,” he admitted. “Today for one of the first times maybe ever I just never really flinched, never blinked.”

Now, Homa had stared down the weekend at the Open Championship on the number and made it in.

“I don’t know if I’ve been that happy,” he said. “It’s more inward. Sometimes you just win a battle within. It’s a lot more against yourself, you get a lot more proud than even beating all these guys sometimes.”

It was small win, sure, and Max Homa’s week was still overwhelmingly likely to result in a loss.

But on Friday at the Open Championship, at least, it wouldn’t end in defeat — and goodness, that was nice.