Max Homa’s new secret weapon? A sports psychologist
SAN DIEGO – Confidence is knowing your best golf is still to come.
Max Homa, who won the Farmers Insurance Open on Saturday for his second PGA Tour title of the young 2022-23 season, is off to the best start of his career and credited his recent success to his new secret weapon: a sports psychologist.
Homa began working with Julie Elion, who is best known in the golf world for working with the likes of Phil Mickelson and helping Jimmy Walker win a major, late last year and the results have been immediate.
“The confidence is becoming more steady. I’ve been working with a sports psychologist, Julie, who has – I mean the last two months have opened my eyes to a lot of things,” he said in his winner’s press conference. “Having a plan each day mentally. I didn’t go into a single round this week thinking about a technical goal or a statistical goal, it was I’m going to learn something today, I’m going to put in place what I’ve been working on, and today that’s what I did. I did a great job of it.”
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Speaking on the No Laying Up podcast, Homa detailed how on the 17th hole at Congaree in South Carolina during the final round of CJ Cup, his caddie, Joe Greiner, had something he wanted to address. He suggested Homa talk to a sports psychologist.
“I had tried that in the past and I didn’t like it,” Homa said. “The way he put it was I’m not tapping into a big facet of the game. Skill-wise, talent-wise, myself included, we’ve been working at this for so long there’s only so much I can better at incrementally I can get better at in this game.”
Homa has been open about how he can sometimes be his own worst enemy. Speaking at the Tour Championship in August after a round of 62 where the stars aligned, he said, “I felt like I deserved to play well, and I wasn’t even letting myself in the first place,” he said. “I get over, hit a great drive, a great 9-iron to 10 feet and think, ‘I have to make this.’ You just did two great things. Why don’t you just see what happens and trust that you’ve put in the work…
“This is how I am, unfortunately. But I think a lot of us are.”
Greiner, who is a childhood friend of Homa’s and has been on his bag for all six of Homa’s victories since 2018 (along with one win with Kevin Chappell), has witnessed the growth in Homa’s confidence in his own abilities.
“It’s really easy to fake-believe that you’re a really good player but now he walks around and you can just tell that he knows when he plays well he’s going to contend and he should be one of the best players in the world,” Greiner said. “He was always so hard on himself. He knows that his good is good enough and it is a lot easier for him to walk down the fairways and know he doesn’t need to be perfect.”
A key to Homa’s victory at Torrey Pines, where he shot a final-round 66 to win by two, was gutting out a 71 in the third round when he played solidly but couldn’t get the putts to fall. But rather than lose focus and mope, he did enough to hang around and trusted his game heading into the final round. When Elion texted to see if he wanted to talk, Homa responded that he was “all good.”
“Trust your game,” he said. “(Friday) was a bigger day towards the end goal than today really was because I had it, I had my game, I played awesome, swung it great, just did not make anything. Held it together and shot 1 under and gave myself a chance today to go play the same round of golf and let the ball go in the hole,” he said.
Homa is just scratching the surface in his work with Elion. Could it be the final piece in the puzzle for Homa to win his first major?
“I think it will be a momentous part of my journey in this game,” Homa said. “I had never worked on my mental game the way (Joe) was talking about it. He said, ‘I’m not telling you this because I think you’re broken, I’m telling you this because I think it can boost us real high in this game of golf.”
