Max Homa and the cruelest game

New York Times

21-05-2025

CHARLOTTE, N.C. — 'It's hard,' Max Homa said, eyes moving, looking nowhere. 'It's hard just to not want to do this anymore.'
We were standing in the breezeway beside Quail Hollow's clubhouse, a spot Homa knows well. Six years ago, in May 2019, he stood right here, processing equal levels of disbelief and self-actualization. Then 28, Homa won his first PGA Tour event, legitimizing what had otherwise been a middling career. Outside Quail's clubhouse that day, fellow tour pros stopped one after another to congratulate him. A few years later, in 2022, Homa walked through here again, this time as the fist-pumping, ripping-and-tearing action star of the U.S. Presidents Cup team. After one particularly raucous afternoon that week, he said that, at long last, he finally felt like he belonged among the game's best.
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Now it's 2025. Homa is 34. He is a six-time winner on the PGA Tour. He has been ranked as high as fifth in the world and played in the Ryder Cup.
And yet, even here, even now, this game is as unsparing as ever.
'To be completely honest — I don't know what I'm getting out of this,' Homa said Sunday. 'But it's my job. So I'll keep trying and hopefully something great happens. But yeah, I'm not really sure what's the point.'
Homa arrived at last week's PGA Championship with 160-to-1 odds to win. Mostly an afterthought, the result of months spent in deep struggles. He opened with a first-round 2-over 73, playing the part.
Then Friday. Some kind of dreamscape. Six birdies and a tap-in eagle on the par-4 14th highlighted a 7-under 64, his best score in 70 career major championship rounds. Homa sat for a 22-minute press conference afterward. Three shots off the lead, fresh off the round of his life, it was tempting to think his fates might once again be aligning. The only line missing on the résumé is major champion. Maybe this was finally it.
Then came the weekend.
A round of 76 on Saturday, 12 shots worse than the day prior. Homa not only imploded, but spent the afternoon playing alongside Scottie Scheffler; the world's best player, the eventual tournament winner, the guy who finished Saturday eagle-birdie-par-birdie-birdie. Homa signed his card with a faraway stare. A hard day included some overaggressive play, some bad choices, and some bad shots on a hard course. Homa trudged from the scoring area to the driving range. He tipped over a bucket of balls and hit 'em into a fading sky. Walking off an empty range, he said, 'Today just beat me.'
And Sunday. Homa pulled into the parking lot a little before 9 a.m., nearly six hours before the leaders' tee times. Back to the range. Back to the course. A round of 77 — four pars, five birdies, seven bogeys, two double-bogeys. Homa missed left, he missed long, he missed everywhere. On the third hole, after pumping a drive into the trees, he laid up short of the green. Putting an easy approach in the right greenside rough, Homa reached back and flung his wedge forward, chucking it in the general direction of the green, sending it bounding down the fairway.
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Come day's end, less than 48 hours removed from that Friday 64, following a week of extremes, Homa stood despondent, sounding like a man ready to walk away from it all. He pushed sweat off his forehead and said: 'I've never been good at just saying f— it, but I'm getting pretty close. To be honest, I'd really just rather hang out with my kid.'
This is what the game can do. Golf, perhaps more than any other sport, has a way of most heavily taxing those who love it. When Homa tossed that club on Sunday, the mini fit of rage made for a kitschy little video clip of a player reaching a boiling point. What gets left out in such moments is all that comes before it. Homa has had a trying year. There was an equipment change, a switch to a new swing coach and a plummet in the rankings. His longtime caddie and childhood friend, Joe Greiner, ended their partnership amid the strain of shabby results.
Worst of all, though, perhaps? A search for the one thing he's supposed to control.
Every swing.
Around 1:30 p.m. on Saturday, a little before his tee time at the PGA, Homa pulled back an iron and sent a ball sailing high and pure into the Quail Hollow driving range. Behind him, John Scott Rattan, his swing coach, stood holding a phone a few inches from his belt, recording a video.
'Did you get that one?' Homa asked.
The two dipped their heads, looking down at the screen. Both nodded. That swing? It was a good one; one to leave on. Exactly what they'd been working toward.
It was October 17 when Homa first reached out to Rattan. A text message, clear out of the blue. Rattan read it and, after spitting a stunned expletive or two, typed a response saying, yes, he'd be thrilled to work with Homa. Rattan is in his ninth year as director of instruction at Congressional Country Club, a top-100 course in Bethesda, Md. He works with some tour pros on the side, including current clients Stewart Cink, Joseph Bramlett and Danny Walker, among others.
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A variety of common ties connected Homa and Rattan. Homa knows Cink from their time together at the Ryder Cup, when Cink was an assistant captain. Rattan, additionally, is friendly with Homa's trainer, his physical therapist, and Greiner.
The two began working together. All this time later, Rattan still has reams of video clips from their first session together.
'It's funny,' Rattan says now, 'when someone as good as Max asks you to work for him, everyone says, 'Congratulations, that's awesome!' and it's like, no, you don't understand, this is going to be really hard. It's not like a player goes looking for a new teacher because he's playing great. That's never the phone call. It's only when they're really struggling, when they don't feel good. They need help and they might not even know why.'
Perhaps more than any other sport, these are the psychosomatic cycles of golf. Find something. Lose it. Search for it. Suffer. Find something. Success. Happiness. Wait, it's gone. Why? What happened? Oh, no. Lost again. Another search. Torment. Rinse. Repeat.
It happens. Sometimes over the course of a single round. Sometimes over days and weeks. Sometimes for far, far longer. No one is immune, even the best in the world.
To fix a golf swing is to marry a series of changes with reasons to justify them. If improvements come, ride them. When they don't, keep looking.
In March, more than two years removed from his last PGA Tour win (2023 Farmers Insurance Open), Homa shot an opening-round 79 at the Players Championship. The next day, following a fourth straight missed cut, he offered an agonizing look inside.
'It's frustrating because it's like you're in a very toxic relationship,' he said. 'I might be the toxic one, but it's still toxic.'
In the midst of Homa's move from Greiner to veteran caddie Bill Harke, he and Rattan went back to work on a broken swing, but little changed.
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One month later, following a 70th-place finish at the RBC Heritage, Rattan took a three-day trip to Phoenix. In the time since they started working together, Homa posted an outlier 12th-place finish at the Masters, but nothing felt sustainable. No direction. No solutions. Rattan watched as Homa hit ball after ball, growing only more and more frustrated.
'A really tough Tuesday morning,' Rattan remembers.
The two took a break. Homa stopped swinging and started talking. Rattan asked what bothered him most. Homa unloaded frustrations about his back swing, about how his body turned. 'My old back swing was so easy,' he told Rattan.
'OK, let me see it,' Rattan responded.
'I just did this,' Homa said, drawing the club backward, 'and this and this.'
Rattan stopped him, damn-near interrupting. 'That's it. That's what we've been talking about. Why don't you do that?'
Homa stood over the ball and unloaded a few swings. Good, comfortable strikes.
Rattan had already watched endless video of Homa's swing circa 2023, back when he first cracked the top 10 of the world rankings, and instantly recognized what he saw. When it comes to Homa, if the club face is a little more closed at takeaway, and his back swing is a little longer, and he has more time to get his hands out in front of him on the downswing and at impact — the magic happens. Better contact. Better control. An on-plane path.
'Max's ability to repeat a motion in rhythm, in sequence — that's what makes him great,' Rattan says. 'Doing these things brought out that sequence. You could see it right away.'
It all clicked. Like that, whatever other swing thoughts crowded his brain moved aside. Rattan recorded swing after swing after swing. Max Homa looking an awful lot like Max Homa. Those clips are all still on Rattan's phone. The good ones are saved as 'Favorites.'
This was only three weeks ago.
Having something resembling a plan, Homa shot 66-68-70-71 in Philadelphia two weeks ago and finished T30 at the Truist Championship, his best tour-stop finish since The Sentry (T26) in early January.
Progress. Momentum. Something to finally feel good about.
After his second-round 64 at Quail Hollow, Homa said he has always imagined swing changes being 'some grand thing, like something I've never done before.' What Rattan did was give him permission to do what felt natural, instead of tacking one tweak on top of another, like clay lumped atop clay.
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'The goal of the teacher or coach is to empower,' Rattan said. 'It's so much more powerful if it's him saying, 'Hey, I'm gonna get my hands out in front of me and I'm gonna do this,' instead of me saying, 'Hey, what if you get your hand out in front of you and try this.' It's his swing. It needs to be his idea.'
The plan seemed to come together so perfectly last week. This was what they worked toward.
'It's been difficult,' Homa lamented last Friday, sounding thankful, 'because I felt like I was so broken.'
He didn't sound like a man about to lose a golf tournament by 17 strokes.
Homa and Rattan put in a few days of work in Charlotte last week before the start of the PGA. They felt good about things. Rattan left for the early parts of the tournament, tending to his day job at Congressional. He gave lessons to some members on Friday as, 400 miles away, Homa played maybe the best round of his professional career. Rattan checked his phone between lessons, seeing a scorecard turn red with circles. A stream of text messages followed, saying that Homa had praised him during a press conference.
'No one has any idea how hard Max works,' Rattan said later that day by phone, driving home from the club. 'He deserves this payoff.'
Rattan flew to Charlotte the following morning, coming in sideways through some nasty Saturday morning storms. The pre-round range session that day was sharp. It sure felt like it was going to be a weekend to remember.
But this is the other side of golf. For all the waxy stories of tournament winners overcoming this or proving that, so many others out there are in the stench. Far more bad than good.
The game is a minefield, every step more precarious than the last — self-discipline, self-confidence and self-delusion in all directions. There's no single explanation why Homa, one of golf's most transparent players, is deep in the throes of a callous game's cruelty, but he's knee-deep in it. Yes, he has nearly $30 million in career on-course earnings and is in what can feel like every other commercial on Golf Channel. But he's down to 161st in the world, per DataGolf, and 34th in the American Ryder Cup standings. There's a vast juxtaposition between his place and his play.
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Walking outside the ropes on Sunday, with Homa 5-over through 11 holes, Rattan watched Homa push his tee into the ground on Quail Hollow's 218-yard par-3 12th hole. 'There's progress, if you know where to look,' Rattan said. 'That's easier said than done.' Homa hit a shot to 22 feet. A birdie, one followed by bogeys on four of the next five holes.
Homa says that even while he's working to find parts of his swing that felt most comfortable when at his best, he isn't searching for his former self. He isn't trying to reproduce an exact swing from an exact time. He's smart enough to know that's impossible. 'I wouldn't say I'm trying to recapture anything,' he said.
Instead, he's trying to find what works now.
As it stands, once considered a likely lock for this fall's U.S. Ryder Cup team, Homa isn't even qualified for the summer's final two majors. He could be on the verge of missing a major for the first time since 2019, and at this rate, is fighting just to make the PGA Tour's FedEx Cup playoffs. Even while assured PGA Tour status through 2028, he's getting awfully close to where he started all those years ago, as a middling pro trying to prove himself.
Before heading into the clubhouse to grab his bags Sunday, Homa said he'd likely get back to the practice range this week, even though, after what was at Quail Hollow, he doesn't seem to know why. In truth, he planned to go back to work because it's all he knows. The cycle never stops.
Hey, maybe he'll find that swing, right?
'I guess these things just get easier with time,' Homa said Sunday. 'You give it a few days, and you find some fire again.'
(Illustration: Demetrius Robinson / The Athletic; Photos: Kevin C. Cox / Getty Images)