Rozner: Winner Homa still has Kobe, Tiger top of mind

When you spend time around professional golfers and their caddies, there is a single nagging reminder, one that never strays far from consciousness.

It's that championship glory is fleeting — and a trip to irrelevance is only as far away as a missed 3-footer.

Take the travels of one John Maxwell Homa, who missed a short putt to win on the 18th hole last Sunday at the very prestigious Genesis Invitational in Southern California.

It is the kind of miss that can send a player off the rails permanently.

But after tapping in for par and prior to the playoff, he spoke to his wife, Lacey.

“I called her after I signed my scorecard,” Homa said. “I said, ‘I think I choked a little bit,' and I laughed. She said, ‘No, you played great. Don't worry about it. Don't forget to forgive quickly.'

“It happens. I forgave myself. She was helping me remember the good stuff I did, which was a lot.”

A bogey-free Sunday at Riviera is plenty good.

Forced into a playoff with Tony Finau, Homa then needed a hero shot on the first extra hole when his tee shot came to rest next to a tree, but after surviving with par, he won it on the second play hole when Finau could not get up and down out of a greenside bunker.

Instead of disappearing forever like so many before him unable to recover from such a moment, Max Homa at age 30 had his second PGA Tour victory and a picture with his idol, Tiger Woods, the Genesis host.

“I don't know if I could ever do anything cooler in golf than this,” Homa said last Sunday. “Just for me, for my caddie Joe, we were raised 25 miles north of here. I mean, Tiger Woods is handing us a trophy. That's a pretty crazy thought.

“We grew up idolizing him, idolizing Riviera Country Club, idolizing the golf tournament. To get it done, it's almost shocking. But it just feels like it can't be topped for me.”

It was by far the greatest day of Max Homa's golfing career.

“(Tiger) told me, ‘Way to hang tough,' after I missed that putt on 18,” Homa said. “I told him I was embarrassed I missed a shortie in front of the most clutch athlete ever.

“I have looked up to Tiger my entire life, and to be standing anywhere near him, let alone with the trophy in between us, was pretty cool.”

Only 40 hours later, the 30-year-old Homa was landing in Florida to get ready for this week's WGC event when his cellphone blew up and he heard the news about Woods' horrific car accident.

To understand the depths of Homa's love for Woods is to merely have a conversation with him, something I did twice at Ivanhoe in 2016 when the Web.com Tour — now Korn Ferry Tour — was in town.

We spoke on the range early in the week and again on that Sunday after he charged from 7 shots back in the final round to win the Rust-Oleum Championship, a victory that earned him a PGA Tour card for the following season.

And both times we spoke, his thoughts never wandered far from his love of Los Angeles, the Lakers, Kobe Bryant and — of course — Tiger Woods.

Having lost Bryant in a helicopter crash a year ago, Homa feared something dreadful again when he heard the news Tuesday.

“My mind, like a lot of people, immediately went to the worst,” Homa told Golf.com at The Concession, site of the WGC-Workday Championship. “It felt eerily similar to the Kobe crash.

“If there were two people in the world, outside of my family, that I'd say, ‘Thank you' to, the first two would be Kobe and Tiger,” Homa said. “To say, ‘Thank you for building the lives you have, and for letting people like me look up to you, getting better at sports, at everything, because of you.'

“It was very weird the parallels, the way it was Kobe and then it was Tiger.”

When Homa finally got word that Woods had survived, he felt the relief one would upon getting news of a family member.

“Very thankful,” Homa said. “Forget golf. That's the furthest thing from what should be on anyone's mind. I just want him to be able to live a normal life with his family.

“It's weird to feel like this about somebody you don't really know, but that's the effect that someone like Tiger Woods — or Kobe Bryant — can have.”

Homa has mentioned before that among Woods' greatest triumphs is his streak of 142 consecutive cuts made, another of his unbreakable golf records.

“He comes to compete. Even when he doesn't feel great, he grinds it out,” Homa said. “We can honor him by coming here to compete. We'll play golf, the kind that would make him proud.”

For those who have never heard of Homa, the way he played the West Coast swing made it apparent that he was on the verge of winning for the first time since Quail Hollow two years ago.

In that regard, it was not at all shocking that he took down the best field of the year so far in Los Angeles, but for any professional outside the Top 20 in the Official World Golf Rankings — Homa has jumped to 38 — a victory anywhere is life-changing.

But this one, well this one isn't just the biggest of his life. Until he wins a major championship, first in his mind will always be last week's win at the Genesis.

It's the one where he got a trophy from Tiger Woods.