Us open tickets1/30/2024 ![]() ![]() Open in the years that followed, including one particularly dramatic trek to Palmer, Alaska, the world’s smallest qualifying site. I’ve even written about a couple bids at the U.S. ![]() I’ve written before about my foray into professional golf and the (minuscule) successes and (significant, overwhelming) failures that came along with it. ![]() I vowed to put myself in that position again. I wilted in the next stage but was struck by the intoxicating realization that a literal major championship was just one good day of golf away. 18 to finish T3 and made it through by a shot. Open qualifier it was May 2015 and I, a newly minted mini-tour pro, teed it up at the Country Club of Troy in upstate New York. If you make it through that? You’re into the national championship, golf’s brawniest and most democratic major. If you finish in roughly the top five percent at your site (at Wine Valley, five players advanced out of 95) you advance to Final Qualifying, which consists of 36 more holes at a different location. It’s a pretty simple process: You play 18 holes at one of 109 Local Qualifying sites. I was here, in a town deep in Eastern Washington called Walla Walla, because I was one of 10,187 golfers who’d signed up to try to qualify for this year’s U.S. JUST 24 HOURS BEFORE Homa sidled up to the mic, I stepped to the first tee at Wine Valley Golf Club chasing the remnants of a discarded dream. In golf, joys and motivations change over time. A flushed 7-iron on its own might not bring much joy, but a flushed 7-iron with the chance to win a Presidents Cup match or a PGA Tour event or perhaps, next month, a major championship in his hometown? There’s plenty of joy there, still. But golf isn’t often at its worst, because the course and the weather and the variable distances and the adventure through the outdoor world provide a series of engaging and constantly evolving challenges.Īt Homa’s level, the central challenge becomes improvement getting incrementally better every practice day and bearing the fruits of that labor come tournament time. That would make golf more like bowling, and at its worst, golf is like bowling. Plus, golf isn’t just a 7-iron competition. As it turns out, playing a game against other talented pros in front of millions of adoring fans is … fun. Homa wasn’t suggesting that being a professional golfer is a joyless experience. You’re more disappointed if you fail to pull it off than you are joyous if you do. Eventually you get numb to the accomplishment. Flagging an amazing 7-iron, like knocking down all 10 pins, still brings some joy. Accomplishing the feat just once seems like wizardry.īut being a professional golfer means doing it again and again and again and again, gradually turning the miraculous into the mundane, stacking up soaring 7-irons like a pro bowler stacks up strikes. It’s a mastery of skill and an application of advanced physics. For Homa, hitting an “amazing 7-iron” means looking at a tiny ball on the ground and then, after factoring the effects of wind, slope, spin, temperature, turf and adrenaline, sending it in the direction of a target more than 500 feet in the distance, where it settles just a step or two away. Sadly, an amazing 7-iron doesn’t make me as happy as it used toĬonsider the miracle of golf. But that one bit hit like a shank to the kneecap: He said he wouldn’t trade his job for anything in the world. That was just a snippet of a lengthy reflection from Homa - the defending champ at this week’s Wells Fargo Championship - on his complex relationship with golf. “Now we’ve done so much in the game that sadly, an amazing 7-iron doesn’t make me as happy as it used to - which is sad.” “Back when I was a kid I loved golf because it was a way to hang out with my friends and try to make an eagle or a birdie and then wig out for a few weeks,” he said. On Tuesday in Charlotte, Max Homa remembered how golf used to be. Wine Valley served as Local Qualifying host.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply.AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |