Max Homa, Two Buckets, and an Empty Range

CHARLOTTE, N.C.—Once you stray from the top of the leaderboard, there’s something a little melancholy about the third round of a major championship. Sundays are for glory and history. Saturdays are mostly about regret. If you lose a major on the closing holes of the final round, at least you were there. You mattered. Fans will celebrate the effort. (Ask Justin Rose.) But letting a major championship slip through your grasp late on a Saturday is the worst kind of letdown. On the precipice of transcendence…only to fade into irrelevance.

Moving day at the 107th PGA Championship had plenty of pyrotechnics, as Scottie Scheffler (third round 65), Alex Noren (66), Davis Riley (67), Jon Rahm (67) and sundry others lit up Quail Hollow. Sunday will belong to them, especially Scheffler, whose relentless excellence pushed him to a three stroke lead at 11-under. The heartbreak is further down in the agate.

Ryo Hisatsune, trying to become the first player from Japan to win a PGA Championship, played the first eight holes in three-under to get within one of the lead…and then came home with four bogeys to fade to 23rd. “So much stress,” he said afterward. Taylor Pendrith began the third round only three strokes off the lead but bogeyed half of his first 12 holes (with two birdies thrown in) to plummet down the leaderboard. How does it feel as a boyhood dream slips away? “It sucks,” says Pendrith, who won last year’s Byron Nelson. “It’s a mental battle.” He eked out three birdies on the final six holes but still shot a one-over 72 to fade to 24th.

There was plenty of other carnage on a day when gusts touched 25 miles per hour. Christiaan Bezuidenhout, a two-time Presidents Cupper, shot 76 to fall from 7th place to 49th. Tommy Fleetwood, with seven career top-5s in the majors, didn’t make a single birdie en route to a 76 that sent him skidding to 57th place. “It was so hard out there,” said Fleetwood’s caddie Ian Finnis. “Mud balls and wind is a bad combination.”

The most painful ejection came by way of fan favorite Max Homa, who has spent the last 18 months in a mortal battle with his golf swing. After winning six times between May 2019 and January 2023, Homa sought to improve one of the silkiest moves on the PGA Tour. Sounds crazy, but it is the neverending quest for excellence that makes these guys world-class players in the first place. Last season was a wash so Homa blew up everything and started over with new clubs (Cobra), a new swing coach (John Scott) and a new caddie (Bill Harke). “I've hit a lot of golf balls in the last seven months, like an absurd amount of golf balls,” he says and yet he still felt “broken” and “miserable” and “playing with a foreign swing at times.” Homa used smoke and mirrors—his term—to finish 12th at the Masters and then shortly thereafter had an epiphany: instead of following his coach’s lead he would swing his swing. Homa opened this PGA with a 73 but then shot 64, the low round of the week, to surge into a tie for 4th. Afterward he said it felt like 2022 all over again. But Saturday loomed as the ultimate test. Would the epoxy hold on his reconstituted, back-to-the-future swing? Playing in the second-to-last group alongside Scheffler, a neo-Iron Byron, only raised the stakes. Homa hung in there for eight holes, staying even par for the round, but on 9 he drove it into the trees and made bogey. At the par-4 11th he sailed his approach shot miles long and left. Double bogey. On 18 he drove it left into the hazard and had to get up-and-down from behind the green to save bogey. His 76 was 11 strokes worse than Scheffler and left Homa in 36th place, 16 shots back.

Afterward he called his wife from the locker room and assured her in a gentle voice that he was okay. Homa grabbed a sandwich and a soda and consumed them while speedwalking to the range, all the while talking with Scott about the pronation in his wrist and the feeling of wanting to swing more “left.” The range was deserted and bathed in golden twilight. It felt meditative. Homa grabbed two large buckets and hit shot after shot. Scheffler came and went. So did Xander Schauffele. Homa kept sending balls to the horizon. The sun set and finally Homa was ready to put away the tools of his trade. On the way out he reflected on a brutal round. “It was a really hard day,” he said. “The golf wasn’t that horrible, it piles up when it’s as hard as it was.”

I tried to send Homa home on a positive note, suggesting the silver lining that golf fans tend to linger on Sunday stumbles but often forget about the bad Saturdays. “I can give two fucks what people remember,” Homa said, with a defiance that bodes well for his comeback. “ I’m gonna do it again tomorrow and if people don’t like it that is on them. I’m just trying to do my best and play well.”

The hard truth is that Homa will now be finishing his final round about the time that Scheffler is teeing off in his ongoing pursuit of golf immortality. On Saturdays at the majors, opportunities come and go that fast.