Max Homa had a date in the penultimate grouping on Saturday, starting the third round only three shots behind the lead. But a 5-over par 76 with only one birdie saw him tumble down the leaderboard. He now enters Sunday’s final round 5 shots out of the top 10 and 11 behind leader Scottie Scheffler.
Homa’s swing coach since October, John Scott Rattan, PGA, who’s been a PGA Teaching professional since 2013, knows there’s a great opportunity for his pupil to play well on Sunday and gather some encouraging takeaways from the week.
“Got to keep driving home that he’s got a really big opportunity (Sunday). The leaderboard is really bunched up. So you want to have another big round out there,” Rattan told pgachampionship.com late Saturday night. “You have a great round, you could gain some more valuable experience on Sunday at a major. He gets to play with Wyndham Clark, a buddy of his, a major champion, and a chance to hone in on what he’s trying to get better at.”
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Homa mentioned while speaking with the media on Friday that a big thing for him is to feel like he’s owning his swing, and after a session on the range at his home club at TPC Scottsdale about three weeks ago, Homa revealed to Rattan that he needed to swing toward a feel that he was comfortable with — not just go for a certain proper position on paper.
“It was close to like the positions and everything were on what I wanted to do, but I was like, I just said I want to try to do it this way and just let me know if that looks okay,” Homa said Friday.
Rattan, who’s the Director of Instruction at Congressional Country Club, gave Homa his vote of confidence and said it “100 percent” was what he wanted to see.
“In the downswing, the hands come in front of his body instead of behind, so the plane of the club was better,” Rattan said of what he was seeing in Homa’s move.
And in all of their work, Rattan feels he wants to empower Homa to trust his own intuition and what makes sense to his first impulse.
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“I want his voice to be super powerful and let him gain trust with it. When I hear people say they want to ‘own their swing,’ they want to trust what they’re doing under pressure. And not change day to day,” Rattan said. “I’m trying to empower Max in his belief system of what he needs to do to play his best golf. That’s what I’m trying to do with him.
I’m trying to make what his gut is saying about his golf louder, and trying to reinforce clarity in that.”
Though Homa only made one birdie in his round on Saturday, Rattan observed a number of factors that made it hard for his player to score well out there.
”It’s not like his swing totally changed, I think the course played extremely tough, and I think there were a couple things that got out of hand,” Rattan said.
“I don’t think the score reflected the quality of shots he hit. I think it was more picking the correct shot here, executing the right shot there. I think he missed a couple putts coming in. Hit in the water on 18, you’re trying to push when you don’t need to push.
You don’t get up and down on the par 5. So it was little things like that which turns what could be an even round into a 5-over round.”
After the round, Homa and Rattan headed to the range to do about 20 minutes of work in a light session. Rattan summed it up as more like a cool down session. “There was hitting and talking. It was more that it’s been a tough day, I’m going to go hit. It was more moving the body out there. We fixed it in the afternoon, we had a good range session in the afternoon and I’m excited to see if he can shoot another 64 (Sunday),” Rattan said.
Rattan likes what Sunday’s final round could represent in the context of the overall season and the experience Homa’s building towards.
“(Today) is another day for him to learn and build, and get more confidence in the feels that he’s created over the last month,” Rattan said. “He’s not hitting any shots where he’s underneath it through the ball. That’s really the shot we’ve been fighting for most of the spring.”
