Max Homa takes his star at the US Open

Max Homa has regretted it for ten years.

A viable birdie on the sixth hole at the Los Angeles Country Club had eluded him. At No. 8, it took him three putts to find the cup.

He finished that round in 2013 with a track record of 61. In his mind, his scorecard could have read – should have read – 59. little, might enable him to push just about all of that aside by Sunday evening.

If Homa can go beyond the past. If he can lessen his internal insistence on impeccability when he plays golf’s most formidable tests. If he can bear the pressures and distractions and expectations of a Los Angeles County man in a position to shine at a US Open just a few traffic nightmares away from the public court, he grew up playing in Valencia.

“I’m good enough to win what I want – that’s what I’ve decided,” Homa, who finished Thursday with a 2-under-par 68, said in a recent interview. “I have to go out and do that.”

Few players have been this good during this PGA Tour season. Homa has won twice, most recently in January at Torrey Pines, and had seven other top-10 finishes, including a second-place finish at the Genesis Invitational played at nearby Riviera Country Club.

But the major tournaments were the scene of stumbling blocks. He tied for 43rd at the Masters Tournament and fared even worse at last month’s PGA Championship. Last year, the PGA Championship was the site of his best major tournament outing, tied for 13th.

Going into this week’s Open, however, Homa saw the course as favorable to his game, given his particular skill in high hitting and comfort, dating back a decade, with the four and five irons LACC can demand.

No, he knew, his problem this week probably wouldn’t be technical or mechanical. His most pressing dilemma was to put his mind at rest enough to allow him to play a major without punishing himself for this or that mistake.

“It feels like the majors, when I’ve done a bad job, I feel like I’ve tried to be perfect,” he said. “I don’t have to feel and play perfect to participate.”

The approach worked well enough on Thursday, the day that has so often frustrated Homa on the biggest stages. His performance equaled his best opening round at any major tournament; he first played one in 2013, when he missed the cut at the US Open in Merion.

In a more familiar setting, Homa recorded his first birdie on the third hole. On the sixth hole – a 330-yard par-4 that can thwart players with a blind tee shot and a green that can feel remarkably tight for a region so familiar with sprawl – Homa made the birdie that didn’t happen on his legendary Pac-12 Championship round. A bogey on the seventh hole brought him back to one under before making a birdie on number 8, the other source of his woes that could have been better. He played the back nine to even par.

When he stepped off court early Thursday afternoon, he was close to the top of the standings, but trailing Rickie Fowler by six strokes, who shot a 62, the lowest single-round score in US Open history. (Xander Schauffele turned in the same score soon after: 62, equaling Branden Grace’s major tournament record from the 2017 British Open at Royal Birkdale.)

Scottie Scheffler, the world’s best player and member of Homa’s group, finished his round at three under par. Collin Morikawa, the two-time major tournament winner and another Southern California star, was one left.

Bryson DeChambeau, the winner of the 2020 US Open, who was in a different group, ended his day tied with Scheffler, Paul Barjon and Si Woo Kim.

“There are going to be times when people struggle, and I think the person who is going to win is going to hit the most fairways and make the most putts and hit the greens as well,” said DeChambeau, who at the Open the same year Winged Foot won Homa went eight over par in the first round. “It is of course a simple formula. But then again, you have to run it, right? That’s the whole point of a US Open.”

It is, DeChambeau added, supposed to be rigorous.

Homa, of course, enjoyed his Thursday, even though he warned it was far too early to bring anything close to victory. He had a tee time on Thursday morning, when the track was in the realm of soft, to begin with. By Friday afternoon, he warned, the place could be hellish.

The US Golf Association is hardly known for giving in to easy Opens.

However, the devilish fabrications of the association will be Friday’s problem. Thursday, with greens undemanding and a course receptive to strong iron play, was just a start.

“From the first tee to the last putt I was very accepting and just viewed today as a round of golf that set me up for the rest of the week,” Homa said after finishing his round. “I think they have the old cliché that you can’t win it the first day, you could lose it, and I lose a lot of these things on the first day.”

Perhaps something clicked in recent weeks as he pondered how to handle the atmosphere that comes with playing a major tournament close to home.

“There’s more pressure, of course, in a way, but it comes from beyond the expectation that because a championship is in my backyard, quote-unquote, I should now be a favorite to win,” he said in the interview. “It’s just cool inside.”

So he focused on the simple things, like smiling. What would happen, he wondered, if he treated the preparations for the Open as if they were as enjoyable as those for an ordinary lower-stakes tour event?

There was nothing he could do, he admitted, to fight off what everyone else would think, the cheers that would rumble from the galleries, the moans that might also be lurking.

Carefree, or at least as carefree as a professional golfer can get at a US Open, was the strategy.

After all, he said, “I’m going to do something that would have driven me crazy as a kid.”

On Thursday afternoon, he recalled that 2013 Pac-12 Championship had felt like “the greatest in the world.”

“This,” he added, “is a lot bigger.”