By: PGA
NAPA, Calif. – Michael Kim and Max Homa, who will play together along with Cameron Champ in the first and second rounds of the Fortinet Championship at Silverado Resort & Spa, sometimes regard their college years with a pinch of nostalgia.
The Cal teammates hit fairways, made birdies. It was a simpler time. They roomed together on the road, and when Kim, who moved to America from Korea when he was 12, spoke to his parents on the phone, Homa couldn’t catch a word of it. At other times, though, Kim would slow it way down as he dictated simple Korean phrases into his phone.
“He’s going to be so mad I’m telling people this,” Homa said with a grin. “… He starts recording something on his phone and it would be like me saying like – ‘I drove my car to the store’ in Korean. I was like, ‘What are you doing?’ And he said, ‘Oh, I’m in this Korean 101 class that I’m not supposed to know, I’m not supposed to be fluent in this.’”
Ah, the college years. But what followed for Homa and Kim was no laughing matter. Each made it to the TOUR only to fall apart in his mid-20s, lose his TOUR card, and slog through a bewildering odyssey in the golfing wilderness.
The game, once so simple, got complicated. Homa missed 15 cuts in 2015, played on the Korn Ferry Tour in ’16, and missed 15 cuts again in ’17, when he dropped to 244th in the FedExCup.
“He’s way too good a player to lose his card,” Rory McIlroy said of Homa at the Wells Fargo Championship in May.
True enough. Homa, the defending champion at the Fortinet, is still in the afterglow of a career-best two-win season and fifth-place finish in the FedExCup. Last week U.S. Presidents Cup Captain Davis Love III named him among his six picks to help round out the team that will take on the Internationals at Quail Hollow Club next week.
Now it’s Kim’s turn to come back. He parted ways with longtime swing coach James Oh to go with John Tillery just three weeks before the 2018 John Deere Classic, which he then won by eight shots. It was a happy day, with Kim having shot 27 under to lap the field, but when asked in his press conference afterward about the recent coaching change he burst into tears.
“You feel like you’ve gone to war with a guy for years,” Kim said Wednesday, “and I started seeing (Oh) when I was 15, and he’s the one who had really helped me get on TOUR. That was three weeks after I had told him, and it felt like 90 percent of the work we had done for that win was with James, and maybe the last 10 percent was with J.T., but it was going to be looked at as J.T. came in and fixed everything. I felt bad that people were going to look at it that way.”
What’s more, as Kim sat there before the press, the trophy won and a life goal realized, he harbored a bizarre secret: Other than that one week at TPC Deere Run, he wasn’t playing well.
“I was still struggling even that year,” he said. “I wasn’t playing great, I just got hot at the perfect moment and the stars aligned for me. I got caught up in the trendy thing in the golf swing and tried to quote, unquote take the hands out of it. Growing up, a lot of my feel was in my hands. Tiger Woods talks about his hands. I lost that.”
Kim’s freefall was dizzying. He made it to the weekend just once in two years, at one point missing 25 consecutive cuts. He fell outside the top 1,000 in the world. By abandoning the right-to-left tee shot that found fairways and allowed for the fullest expression of his above-average wedges and short game, he became utterly, hopelessly lost.
“It might have been a technical thing at first, but I think it became a mental thing,” said Michael Weaver, a Cal teammate who briefly played on the Korn Ferry Tour. “I was a fill-in caddie for him at the 3M Open in 2019, and he played with Smylie Kaufman and Austin Cook, and I felt bad for Austin because Smylie and Michael were hitting it all over the place.”
Kaufman is now a golf broadcaster, and for a time it was anything but certain Kim would make his way out of the williwags. He parted with Tillery and tried his luck with various other coaches, including George Gankas, but nothing stuck. His friends tried to buck up his spirits, telling him they still believed in him even as the cuts piled up.
“Every time I asked him, ‘Where are you playing next?’ I was prepared to hear, ‘I might not play for a while,’” Weaver said. “You work so hard to build up your confidence and then it all goes badly and you’re like, I used to be good at this and now I suck. I wouldn’t fault anyone for shutting it down; it’s a natural reaction to not being able to find your way out.”
Kim saw flashes of form, but they could vanish even as he made the turn. “I was really dejected because on the front nine you have that hope,” he said, “and then it’s a crash all over again.” He got a slight reprieve from Covid, the pandemic extending his status a year and saving him from a return to Korn Ferry Tour Q School.
After Monday-qualifying for the Fortinet last year, he tapped Weaver to caddie for him again.
“He hit it in the condos on one,” Weaver said.
It looked like the same old stuff, but just a few weeks earlier Kim had begun working with was Sean Foley, who diagnosed the problem: Kim had gotten away from his swing DNA and what made him great in the first place.
“Sean said, ‘We needed to get you swinging a little more like you did as a kid, with similar feels and tweaks here and there,’” Kim said, “and that’s how we started. We were still making the transition last year. It was all very new.”
Slowly, methodically, Kim clawed his way back. He started the 2022 Korn Ferry Tour season with a pair of missed cuts, but a T15 at The Panama Championship in February provided hope. He texted Foley: This was going to work.
Kim racked up 12 top-25 finishes in 25 starts to regain his PGA TOUR card. He also shared the first-round lead at the Puerto Rico Open (T16) and finished seventh at the Barbasol Championship. Today, he feels like he has a new lease on life.
“I mean obviously it would be great if I went to see Sean first,” he said. “I’ve come to believe it’s more about your fit with your instructor and does his swing philosophy fit with what you have.”
Without the last four years, though, he added, he might not be the same player he is today.
“I don’t think I’d be as excited and have a fresh perspective on playing the PGA TOUR,” he said. “You go through the ups and downs and you appreciate it more.”
Homa could say the same. His eyes got a little teary Wednesday as he talked about the journey from his very first PGA TOUR start to making his first U.S. Presidents Cup Team, and the ups and downs along the way.
For the two Cal Bears who will reunite at Silverado, the struggle makes it all the sweeter.
