CHARLOTTE — After his spectacular 64 on Friday, which vaulted him into a tie for third midway through the second round at the PGA Championship, Max Homa described a tricky situation that happened about three weeks ago with his coach John Scott. His respect for Scott is off the charts, and he didn’t doubt any of his technical advice, but something didn’t quite feel right, and he almost felt nervous to bring it up. After all, Homa will be the first to admit his swing knowledge is no match for the “brilliant” Scott. But Homa gathered up his courage, and spoke.
“I got more honest with him about what we should do … I said, ‘I think I should swing like this,’” Homa remembered. “And he said, OK, show me.’ And I showed him. And he said, OK, let’s mold off that, let’s make that the model.’”
What Homa showed him wasn’t perfect, but it felt more like the old golf swing from 2022 and 2023, when he reached his competitive peak and rose as high as No. 5 in the world. Since then, Homa has been on a slow and painful decline, highlighted by five straight missed cuts this year between the WM Phoenix Open and the Valero Texas Open.
“I felt like I was so broken,” Homa said. “I feel like I was playing with a foreign swing at times. … Everything he says makes sense and it’s very right, but it didn’t feel like me … at some point you have to maybe get in there and just say, ‘hey, this technically might be right, but it just doesn’t feel like I’m going to be able to do this.’”
To Scott’s credit, he adjusted quickly.
“It was a situation of, how do we get Max feeling like Max again,” Scott told Golf Digest. “There were a couple of cues he went to, and it was like a light bulb went off in his head.”
Homa’s confidence began to return, and it happened with speed. Last week, at the Truist Championship, he felt like the “old” Homa for the first time in a long time, and he navigated his way to a T-30 finish. On Thursday at Quail Hollow—site of his first PGA Tour win back in 2019—he felt he struck the ball well, but misjudged some distances and got a bit of bad luck en route to a two-over 73. He was happy to play in the morning Friday, and had a feeling that things were on the verge of going well. But he didn’t quite dream of how well.
It started on the 10th hole, his first of the day, when he nearly reached the almost 600-yard par 5 in two (only four players have done so as of this writing) and made an easy birdie. A buried 22-footer on 13 gave him his second birdie, and then, on the short par-4 14th, he executed what will inevitably be the shot of the day:
It's a 347-yard par 4 and Max Homa did this… #PGAChamp pic.twitter.com/SY0tabOf6a
— PGA Championship (@PGAChampionship) May 16, 2025
That massive drive led to a tap-in eagle. He followed that with another birdie on the relatively easy 15th and a 49-foot chip-in on the incredibly difficult 18th to shoot a 30 on his front nine. He cooled off after the turn, but only slightly—a closing 34 brought him to seven under on the day, and his 64 tied Jhonattan Vegas’ opening-round effort for the best performance of the championship so far.
The massive drive on No. 14 was no anomaly—with the morning wave complete, Homa had gained more than three strokes on the field off the tee alone, by far the most eye-popping stat of his round. It’s probably no coincidence that a day like this comes on the heels of a driver change to match his new swing, courtesy of Cobra.
“The last six rounds I’ve driven it really well, going back to Philly,” Homa said. “We built a driver that wants to go left, and my golf swing makes me want to feel free to cut it. So it’s just matching up nicely. I feel like I’ve picked up on the misses. Getting to hit a hole like 18 and hit driver twice and bomb it down there is something I haven’t really done before. I feel comfy for sure.”
Besides getting comfortable with a new swing, Homa is also becoming familiar with a new caddie in Bill Harke. In their last three starts, they’ve made three cuts, including a T-12 finish at the Masters.
David Cannon
In a tough year, the ugliest stat for Homa has been his strokes gained/approach numbers, which stood at a woeful 184th out of 185 players heading into this week. He wasn’t much better on Thursday, clocking in at 128th in the field, but he turned it around in a big way Friday, gaining more than a stroke on the field and nestling comfortably in the top 20.
“I’ve been struggling getting the right distances and picking the right shot,” he explained. “Sometimes stats can be a little … ‘misleading’ is the wrong because the number is right and I needed to do better, but it’s not like I left [yesterday] and went and hit balls on the range and tried to figure it out. It’s just, you got to be a little bit more committed to your numbers, trust what you’re doing, pick the right spots to be aggressive.”
It all worked on Friday, and it worked with a new caddie in Bill Harke, who started on the bag with Homa at the Valero Texas Open. When his long-time caddie, Joe Greiner, decided to part ways with Homa, it took the six-time PGA Tour winner by surprise. Homa admitted Friday that he imagined finishing his career at age 60 with Greiner still on the bag. He was scrambling to find a replacement, but he knew just who to call.
“I ended up calling Bones, who’s a good friend of mine,” Homa said, referring to the legendary caddie Jim Mackay. “I asked him what he thought, and [Harke] was the first name he brought up. He thought he was a very underrated caddie and thought we would gel very well. Obviously, I put a lot of faith and trust in Bones.”
The first day they met, they were together eight hours—”not exactly a normal first date,” Homa joked—and though they missed the cut in San Antonio, he’s made three straight since, a stretch that included a T-12 finish at the Masters.
Jared C. Tilton
Homa’s even higher on the leaderboard here at the year’s second men’s major, and he was his usual conversational self after the second round, clearly enjoying what looks like a return to form. One reporter asked him about his manner with the press—Why is he so open, when many athletes are closed off or formal, and does he think it helps him?
“It probably doesn’t help me at all if I’m being honest,” he said, to laughs. “I grew up a fan of sports, as so many are, and I always found … interviews and things to be so thought provoking as a fan to get a little insight. … We are entertainers, and without the fans, we would be just playing golf with some buddies. I just try to be myself. Sometimes I wish I would probably keep some things in, but at the end of the day, we owe a lot to them. It’s not so hard to be transparent.”
We have seen more than a few false springs in golf, and Homa has a lot to prove before we can proclaim that he’s fully rediscovered his peak form. For now, however, armed with a new/old swing, he’s hopeful that the days of overthinking, of discomfort, and of having to explain to his wife why a great practice led to a disastrous round are over. It can take a lot of time to undo a stretch of poor play, but things seem to be happening fast for Homa in the past month, and he’s in a position this weekend to undo a litany of bad memories in one fell swoop.
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This article was originally published on golfdigest.com
