Monday Finish: Kuchar has killer instinct to go with killer smile

There was trouble in the Bahamas. And at the Presidents Cup. And again this week, when his lawyer tried to silence a TV analyst. What will all this mean for Patrick Reed in 2020?

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Lacey Homa was brushing her teeth when the baby arrived. No, not that baby, the boy she and husband Max expect in early November, whom they have already named (it’s not yet public). Not the baby whom, if you follow Max on social media, you know he’s crazy about already. No, this pertained to the delivery of that other bundle of joy he has nurtured and obsessed over for most of this year: a berth on the U.S. Presidents Cup Team. It was 10:30 p.m. and they’d just gotten back from dinner at Tamarind Thai in Atlanta. They were in their hotel room, and Lacey was about ready to call it a day. “Max was on the phone,” she said, “and I wondered who it was at that hour, but he was sort of giggling, and that’s when I knew who it was, and that it was official.” It would be hard to overstate the importance Homa put on making the U.S. squad that will take on the Internationals at Quail Hollow Club this week. He had won twice last season (Fortinet Championship, Wells Fargo Championship) and advanced to the TOUR Championship for the first time. He thought he’d done enough, so when U.S. Captain Davis Love III called to make it official on the eve of the TOUR Championship, he was ecstatic and relieved. “It was odd when I got the phone call,” he said at last week’s Fortinet Championship in Napa, California, where he picked up his fifth PGA TOUR victory when he pitched in from 33 feet and Danny Willett three-putted from 3 1/2 on the last hole. “I still felt so much relief and happiness because for a month I would talk to Joe (Greiner, his caddie) all the time and he was like, ‘You’re on the team, you made it.’ But I was like, ‘But have I made it?’” He had, and the exhilaration and relief spread to everyone in his inner circle. “I don’t think anybody on the team talked about making the team more than Max,” Lacey said. “I’ve never seen him will something into existence, but he might have done that. He’d been fitted for a Ryder Cup uniform last year – a lot of people are – but he didn’t finish the season that well, so all this year it was: ‘I am making that Presidents Cup team.’” A new level of self-belief Homa was skeptical of his own greatness, and it fell to his coach, Mark Blackburn, and Greiner to keep selling him on it. But making it to the TOUR Championship – he tied for fifth with 2013 Walker Cup and 2022 Presidents Cup teammate Justin Thomas – and making the U.S. Team that will be favored at Quail Hollow has added new layers to his growing self-belief. He’s been ratified, certified, validated. Homa was the betting favorite to successfully defend his title at the Fortinet, and when it was over, he admitted there was a time that would have freaked him out. Not anymore. He just won, baby. “Oddly, it felt OK,” he said Sunday. “It didn’t feel like too much pressure.” Earlier in the week, he was asked if he could write a letter to his former self, the guy who finished T9 at the 2013 Frys.com Open in his first PGA TOUR start, what he would say. Tears welled in his eyes. “Keep going, I think,” said Homa, who along with Sam Burns, Billy Horschel and Cameron Young will be one of four true rookies on the U.S. Team. (Collin Morikawa and Scottie Scheffler haven’t played a Presidents Cup but were on the 2021 U.S. Ryder Cup team.) “If I had to write a letter … and say you’re going to make a Presidents Cup team, that would have been like almost unthinkable,” he continued, “but the beauty of this game is that you go one shot at a time, one range ball at a time, and you add up, I don’t know, almost like a million golf balls I’ve hit since then, and you can like quantify it and you can say, dang, like, I made this. “The ‘keep going’ thing is important,” he added. “… I don’t know if it’s a meme but there’s this picture of a guy picking with an axe and he’s just like hammering it, digging for diamonds and gold or whatever, and he gets to where there’s like one more hit and he would have got to it and he turns around and leaves. It’s like you might as well just keep going. Failure is in quitting.” Told of this exchange, Lacey laughed. “He loves the guy with the axe,” she said. “It’s a Kobe Bryant thing.” In any event it’s not so easy to keep going when you miss 30 cuts from 2015-17, as Homa did when he lost his TOUR card and wound up on the Korn Ferry Tour. Back then he would sit in his hotel room and wonder just how good he really was. He summoned the golf gods to tell him. “Tell me I’m 22 in the world if that’s what it is,” he said last week, “or is it 1,000?” The gods were silent, Homa resolved to find out himself, and while it’s still an open question, his stated goal to reach world No. 1 is very much in play. He’s up to 16th after his wild title defense at the Fortinet. “I didn’t have as many lulls this season,” he said at the TOUR Championship, where he shot 71-62-66-66. “I was proud of that. I haven’t played in a team event since the Walker Cup and it was about as fun a time as you could possibly imagine, so I’m looking forward to getting back into it. I think when you’re around the best, you learn something about yourself.” Getting a laugh out of Love Homa, Lacey, Greiner and his fiancé, Mayla, took a charter flight after the Fortinet and landed in Charlotte at around 2 a.m. Monday. Love was there to meet them at the airport, congratulate the winner, and even carry his bag. Homa was so intent on making this team that word sometimes made its way back to Lacey that he had dropped a subtle hint – You know, no one looks better in red, white, and blue than I do – to Love or one of his assistants. The captain got a kick out of it. “Max Homa is the voice for trying to make the team all year,” Love said. “He’s been one of the voices in support of the PGA TOUR. His best line of the year was when he (was asked), ‘If you could be anybody for a day?’ And he said, ‘I would be Davis Love III and I would pick me for the Presidents Cup Team.’ So, I’ve known since the start of the year Max had a passion for playing on this team and a passion for the PGA TOUR.” Asked what he likes best about Homa, U.S. Assistant Captain Webb Simpson spoke at length about his relatable, everyman persona, which will make him easy to pair with, and his sense of humor, which could come in handy in tense situations. “You know, if he asks me for any advice,” Simpson said, “I would just tell him to be yourself, be funny, have fun with Joe, his caddie. I think he’ll do just fine. And the other thing, I think he’s going to be very comfortable on that golf course after winning there and just the way he drives the golf ball. You have to drive it well at Quail.” Added Homa: “It’s a big golf course; it suits my game a lot.” The course, a par 71 of 7,576 yards, with feature three par 4s measuring 500-plus yards. And while the routing will be different – Nos. 16-18, the so-called “Green Mile” holes, will be Nos. 13-15 – it’s basically the same place where Homa began to make his name on the PGA TOUR when he won the 2019 Wells Fargo Championship. He’s only become a more complete player since then, working on the trajectory, spin and distance of his short irons by playing games with caddie Greiner on TrackMan. “I’ve become a much better wedge player,” said Homa, who practices at Silverleaf and Whisper Rock in Scottsdale, Arizona, among the likes of Jon Rahm and Tony Finau. What’s more, he added, he has begun to embrace his identity as a player, which includes making the driver his default choice off the tee and using it as a weapon like Rahm or Rory McIlroy. “Feel like if it’s between driver and 3-wood,” Homa said, “might as well just hit the driver because I hit it straight enough and with like a little bit of above average distance. “Learning that that’s how I’m going to play this game and just using that for the whole season helped,” he continued. “I drove the ball great last year, my short irons were good, so I felt like I had a strategy when I went to each event. That was a big change for me.” Making the U.S. Presidents Cup Team – “That’s what matters to my soul,” he said – and impending fatherhood are big changes, too. Good ones. Someday he’ll tell his son about the player who lost his game in his mid-20s but heeded the RELENTLESS tattoo on his wrist and made it all the way back to the upper echelon of American golf. All those early struggles, the hours in the Arizona heat—it was all worth it. The Presidents Cup starts Thursday, but Max Homa is already winning.

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