Max Homa is No. 60 in the Official World Golf Ranking this week, which doesn’t sound bad unless you know where he spent the past four years.
It was in February 2021 when Homa won the Genesis Invitational at Riviera Country Club in Pacific Palisades, just 35 miles from where he went to high school in Valencia. The victory, his second on the PGA Tour, moved him from No. 91 in the rankings to No. 38.
Homa spent more than a year inside the top 10, rising as high as No. 5 in 2023, and he was still in the top 25 as of last fall.
But by his own ission he has not played a good tournament since finishing in a tie for third at last year’s Masters — one top-10 in 18 tries — and recently he dropped out of the top 40, then the top 50.
“Golf does not like me at the moment,” Homa said Tuesday morning.
He was speaking in a hotel ballroom adjacent to the 18th fairway at Torrey Pines South, where the Genesis will be played beginning Thursday due to the devastating fires last month near Riviera.
Just three weeks ago, Homa was at the same course, where his opening round began with a triple-bogey 7 and didn’t get a whole lot better after that. Eventually, with no chance to make the cut late in the second round, he withdrew when high winds delayed play. No reason to delay the inevitable.
And yet, the 34-year-old Homa talked Tuesday about Torrey South as if there was no place else he’d rather be on an atypically chilly morning.
“I love San Diego,” said Homa, whose sister lives here. “I love the golf course. To get to play the South four times is a fun challenge.”
Love? Fun? Most PGA Tour golfers every shot from every round they’ve played. Had Homa somehow erased something that happened just three weeks ago?
Apparently not.
“I played horrendous,” he said of the Farmers. The next week he “played awful” as well, finishing in a tie for 53rd at Pebble Beach. He also missed the cut last week in Scottsdale. And yet … he can’t wait to play the longest course — and one of the most difficult — on the PGA Tour?
Dismissing the suggestion his offseason switch from Titleist to Cobra clubs has anything to do with his struggles, Homa said his belief comes down to the work he’s been doing since late October with his new coach, John Scott Rattan.
“I’m pretty into the ‘trusting the process’ type mindset,” Homa said. “I know I’m getting better even if it looks like I’m getting worse. I think I know what I’m doing is right. It’s very difficult to continue to see bad, but last week I actually hit the ball incredible and I missed the cut by five.
“The first day … I shot 5 over, Joe (caddie Joe Greiner) and I were walking down like the whole day laughing to each other like, ‘What is happening?’ Because it didn’t feel like it, like we would be over par on a round like that. My coach astutely said afterwards I think you were 6 combined feet away from being like 2 or 3 under. It’s a hard game, man, and when it doesn’t like you back, it gets very difficult.”
So now he gets his shot at revenge, so to speak, at Torrey South.
“It’s very uncommon someone can go win swinging it like I did a couple weeks ago,” he said. “But I’m not swinging it like that anymore, so I look forward to playing this (week). … I hate playing golf courses that I love poorly, so it’s actually quite nice for me to be here only a few weeks later and kind of wipe the stink off a little bit.”
Posner is a freelance writer.
