After clawing his way to PGA Tour stardom, Max Homa believes major championship success is coming

LOUISVILLE, Ky. (WDRB) -- There’s a side of the PGA Tour that you probably don’t know about.

It’s not the part you see on network TV and your Instagram stories — the superstar players, $25 million purses and eight-figure endorsement deals.

It’s the guys who are better than every weekend warrior has ever dreamed of but not good enough to make a living doing it. They fly from city to city, hoping this will be the week they play good enough to just pay for those flights.

There’s an undercurrent of grinders on the edge of the tour. And, far more often than not, they end up out of the game entirely. But one guy found something in that grind, and his success story — how lost he was and how much he found — is among the best you’ll hear.

His name is Max Homa, now a six-time PGA Tour winner who is among the top-15 favorites to win this week’s PGA Championship at Valhalla Golf Club in Louisville.

Homa turned pro in 2015, finished in the top 25 just once in 27 events and lost his PGA Tour card. Back to the drawing board on the quasi minor leagues of golf, he regained his card after a successful year on the Web.com tour and rejoined the big boys in 2017. But that was even worse, and Homa lost his card again after making just $18,008 all year. He hit rock bottom, missing 15 cuts in 17 events.

“It’s one thing to be bad at your job or to struggle,” he told the No Laying Up podcast in 2018. “It’s really hard to be legitimately embarrassed to be out there. I’m playing against Tiger Woods and Phil Mickelson and Rory McIlroy, and I’m shooting 80. I think, in one tournament, I lost 14 shots to the field in total driving. It’s just like, ‘What are you doing out here, dude?’”

But then, seemingly out of nowhere, something changed. The work began to pay off. Homa regained his PGA Tour card in 2018 and, in what was one of the feel-good stories of the year, won the Wells Fargo Championship in Charlotte in May. He accepted a $1.42 million check, earned a spot in the Masters and the PGA Championship as well as a two-year tour exemption.

“It was embarrassing at times,” Homa said that night in Charlotte. “But it ain’t embarrassing anymore. It’s a cool story now.”

And the story didn’t end there. Suddenly, the guy who was inches away from giving up professional golf was excelling among the world’s best. He won twice in 2021, twice more in 2022 and again in 2023. He made the 2022 Presidents Cup and 2023 Ryder Cup teams, going a combined 7-1-1 in his matches. Homa’s paycheck-to-paycheck life, gasping for air on the fringes of professional golf, was disappearing in the rearview mirror. He was a PGA Tour star, raking in life-changing money and living the life he’d always dreamed of.

“Nobody, I feel like, is in a better place than Max Homa out here,” two-time major champion Justin Thomas said last year. “There’s no other top player in the world that's gone through what he's gone through in terms of having a tour card, losing your tour card, having to earn it back and then becoming one of the top players in the world.”

But there are levels to all that success too. While he was racking up all those wins, Homa missed six cuts in the first seven majors he played as a pro. Four years after that breakthrough in Charlotte, he didn’t have a single top-10 finish in a major.

“I think I believed it's possible, but — I always say this about people who haven't won a tour event before or just a major professional event — you could have all the people in the world tell you it's possible and you can, but it kind of almost takes you doing it once to truly be able to confirm that to your own mind,” Homa told reporters Tuesday at Valhalla.

Things have changed in the last 10 months, though. A tie for 10th at the Open Championship at Royal Liverpool last July and a tie for third at the Masters last month have removed for some the “do-it-on-the-biggest-stage” tag that had begun to follow Homa.

And Valhalla fits his style. It’s not dissimilar from some other courses he’s won on — Quail Hollow (twice) and Torrey Pines — and the changes made to the course in recent years further accentuate those similarities. The course’s length and wide fairways demand precise iron play from its champions, and Homa has gained strokes against the field on approach shots — according to Data Golf — in 20 of his last 24 events. He’s long been hailed as an elite iron player, and his proximity to the hole on approach shots is in the 93rd percentile on tour in 2024.

Speaking to reporters Tuesday after a day of practice in Louisville, Homa spoke of a new process to his major championship preparation. Before last year’s Open Championship at Royal Liverpool, he flew to Europe a week early to play the Genesis Scottish Open. He acclimated himself to links golf but also learned that playing golf — not sitting at home practicing obsessively for the following week’s major — served him better when that major week arrived.

“I always feel like my game is the most ready (for the Open Championship) and my mind is in the right spot,” Homa said Tuesday. “And I started to realize, well, a lot of it is probably because I'm just playing golf the week prior.”

He copied that plan last month, playing the Valero Texas Open ahead of the Masters. He found himself with a great chance to win his first major with seven holes to play. But a top-three finish was further confirmation he’s found something that works.

“It's only one very, very, very small sample size, but it sure worked at Augusta,” he said Tuesday. “I hadn't played worth a damn there and went out there and actually played some real golf. … Everyone's different, but, for me, what I was doing at home was good for long-term success (but) not so good for the following week.”

Homa is a different player and a different person than he was five years ago. Will that translate to major championships going forward? He’s starting to believe.

2024 PGA Championship Coverage: