“I’d rather be lucky than good” was one of my late father’s favorite sayings, but what’s hard to beat is someone who’s both—and that sums up 8-year Tour pro Max Homa’s final round at the Fortinet Championship pretty well.
Opening the tournament with a 5-under 67 was a good start for the 2013 Cal grad, but following the 67 with an even-par 72 must have made for a tense Friday evening—he was not to know this, of course, but no one else who carded an even-par round on Friday finished better than T-22, and 18 of those who did, missed the cut.
Still, Homa’s five-under standing was good enough to make the cut with a shot or two to spare, and a Saturday pairing with fellow SoCal native and notable positive-thinker Phil Mickelson may have been just what the doctor ordered for him. After a so-so one-under opening nine in which he balanced two bogeys against three birdies, Homa and Mickelson had a chat and decided that they both needed to get something done on the back nine.
It worked. Mickelson ran off a string of five birdies after a bogey on the 12th, and Homa birdied six of the nine holes, including a string of three to close out the round, with no bogeys, for a back-nine 30. The “moving day” 65 put Homa in a five-way tie for 3rd, two strokes behind co-leaders Maverick McNealy and Jim Knous.
Homa and McNealy ran off identical 33s on the front nine on Sunday, and Homa slipped back by a stroke with an untimely bogey and the par-4 10th hole—but it was at the 12th, a relatively straightforward 393-yard par-four, that things began to get interesting.
Homa’s drive strayed right and ended up in a reasonable lie in the right rough, leaving him 94 yards to the back-center flag. Trusting in the advice of his caddy, Joe Greiner, Homa lofted a shot to the center of the green that took three hops and rolled on a curving left-to-right path right into the cup for an eagle—and all of a sudden he was one back of the leader McNealy. Skill? Yes, but even Homa admitted after the round that it was a lucky shot.
Stanford grad McNealy, whose game had cooled off after a second-round 64, opened his fourth-round back nine with a string of six pars, while Homa followed the pitch-in eagle on 12 with a birdie on 13 to tie the lead. For the next three holes nothing changed, as the two carded identical pars on holes 14 through 16—and then came the 17th hole.
Max Homa hit two pure shots, one from the tee and one from the fairway that landed 18 feet above the hole, and rolled in a tricky right-to-left downhill slider to make birdie, and take over the lead, by a stroke, from McNealy.
McNealy, on the other hand, fared rather less well on the 17th hole than his namesake automobile—a nondescript compact marketed by Ford in the 1970s—ever had in the marketplace.
Coming over the top with probably the only bad swing he had made all day, McNealy’s tee shot at the 361-yard par-four hit a tree on the right and dropped well short, leaving him farther from the hole—189 yards—than he was from the tee. His second flew the green, and his chip from the trampled-down rough behind the putting surface raced by the hole on the downslope and ran off the front of the green. Another chip, from the front apron, left him an 11-foot bogey putt down the hill, which narrowly missed, followed by a two-footer for double-bogey that finally dropped.
And just like that, Max Homa was the tournament leader by three strokes.
A sloppy but routine par at the 18th by Homa put McNealy in the unenviable position of having to hole out from the fairway to tie the round and force a playoff. That fairytale scenario didn’t pan out, but the young man who literally grew up on Pebble Beach Golf Links before his family moved to Hillsborough, on the San Francisco Peninsula, when he was a teen, and who was more interested in hockey than golf before walking on to the Stanford Men’s Golf team, showed his fortitude on the final hole. With a calm that showed that he had put the relative ugliness of the previous hole behind him, he striped a center-cut drive down the final fairway, followed by a beauty of a shot to the back of the green at the par-five 18th, rolling in a 32-foot eagle putt to cement a solo second-place finish.
It was an exciting final-round tussle between a SoCal kid who came north to play college golf for public university Cal-Berkeley, and a NorCal native who made his mark on the team for the exclusive private university across the bay. This was Homa’s third win, and second in his home state, and while McNealy is still looking for his first PGA Tour victory, this tournament, and his narrow miss to finish second at last year’s AT&T Pebble Beach Pro-Am, show that his fans are not likely to have to wait long before he hoists a trophy on the PGA Tour.
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