PONTE VEDRA BEACH — The second shot of the day took four hops before stopping, spinning and striking the stick, drawing a smile that was more of a sly grin from Max Homa. He played the angles of the 10th perfectly and the ball did what it was asked and a little more. A double circle on the scorecard tends to be the highlight of a round, a moment players reference long after the final putt drops.
Hours later, Homa walked off with a one-under 71, good enough to be on the board in the early wave of the Players. But to call what happened between opening and close one-under golf fails to encapsulate the ride.
“I’ve been playing really well, so it was very frustrating how erratic it was,” Homa said. “But it also made it somewhat easier to know that if you just kept swinging, it would go the right place. It was one of the weirder days I’ve ever had.”
https://twitter.com/PGATOUR/status/2032066371148779863
Should there be any doubt this course invites chaos—particularly in the gusts that swept through Sawgrass on Thursday morning—take one glance at Homa’s card. He followed that opening eagle with six birdies, two doubles and three bogeys, a scorecard that reads less like a round of golf and more like a ransom note. He went from three under to three over before reeling off five birdies in a seven-hole stretch, only to stumble on the par-5 ninth.
Incredibly, his only sustained run of pars came through 16, 17 and 18—the stretch that has swallowed careers and rounds alike and reminding everyone, no matter how well things are going, exactly where they are.
“I think the front is significantly easier in that wind,” Homa said. “You get to play kind of in the tunnels a little bit more.”
It mirrors the larger arc of Homa’s recent years. The six-time winner spent the better part of two seasons adrift, cycling through coaches and caddies, his game eroding in ways that were difficult to watch for someone who had looked so inevitable not long before. The cuts missed piled up. The results that once came easily stopped coming. Golf has a particular cruelty for players in that state; the game doesn’t announce when it’s leaving, it just quietly stops cooperating, and the harder you chase it the further it retreats.
He’s only recently started finding his way back. Not a full resurrection, not yet, but a pair of encouraging results suggesting the player he was might not be as far gone as it seemed. Which made the way he handled Thursday feel like something worth noting. A lesser version of Homa might have let the doubles become a spiral. Instead he kept swinging, kept talking himself back from the ledge, kept finding birdies when the round threatened to get away. The score was one under. The story was something else.
“You really have to have conversations with yourself that you’ve got to start over,” Homa said of recovering from the doubles. “Some of them I really didn’t do that much wrong. My second double I whiffed a three-footer. That was the painful part. But I didn’t hit an awful tee shot, didn’t hit an awful second shot—it buries under the lip, I do a good job giving myself three feet for bogey, and then I miss it. It’s easier said than done. You’ve just got to remind yourself it wasn’t that far off. This is a very hard golf course.”
That internal monologue is the part of the game nobody sees. No camera captures it and no statistic measures it. It lives entirely in the space between one shot and the next, in the few seconds a player has to decide whether the round is over or whether it isn’t. For Homa, learning to have that conversation and actually believe it has been the work of the last two years. Thursday was proof he’s getting better at it.
He has history here, a T-6 just three years ago. There’s a long way between Thursday and Sunday, and the road runs directly through the parts of this course that have no interest in sentiment or storyline. The big numbers will need to stay away. The monologue will need to keep working.
But he’s given himself a chance. And he knows where it began.
“I thought if I drew it three or four right of the flag, it wouldn’t go long,” he said of the opening eagle, “and if I hit it good, maybe it would work its way over there. It’s just rare that it actually goes in the hole. But it worked itself out perfect.”
Some rounds announce themselves early. The trick is honoring what they started.
This article was originally published on golfdigest.com
