PONTE VEDRA BEACH, Fla. — You can tell a lot about a golfer by the way they walk. When playing well, they’re floating. Think Rory McIlroy, bounding down the fairway, shoulders upright, arms swinging. You wouldn’t need to see him smash a driver to know he’s in a groove.

The inverse is also true. A down-on-his-luck golfer looks like one. Head dipped, short strides, the occasional pause to rehearse a fake takeaway or downswing, desperately trying to translate the feels from the range into competition.

Max Homa has struggled for the better part of two years, and you could tell.

He’s one of the golfers most in touch with his emotions. It’s why so many connect to him.

It’s hard not to root for Homa, who emphatically fist-pumped his way through a standout Ryder Cup performance and let out a cathartic roar for a simple made cut at The Open Championship in 2024 when his game was starting to fall apart. He can’t hide how he feels, for better or worse.

It was common to see Homa carrying on by himself the last two years, stoic as he tried his best to put the pieces back together.

It’s why his demeanor stuck out during a random Wednesday pro-am at The Genesis Invitational last month, then again on Sunday, even during an even-par round. This writer became accustomed to seeing Homa in the doldrums. This version was noticeably different. It’s far from where he was a year ago at THE PLAYERS Championship, close to tears after missing the cut by seven strokes. “The way I work, I feel like I deserve to be the best player in the world at some point,” Homa said then, “… and I'm going the complete opposite direction.”

His results haven’t been convincing yet, but Homa believes better days are ahead. At the very least, he’s heading in the right direction. The buildup has been slow, and Homa has needed to remain patient. That’s increasingly hard to do when the best performance of your golfing life gets further and further away. He wants to see it all come together now, but there’s some solace in the fact that it’s happening bit by bit.

“I’m still getting over some scar tissue from hitting it bad,” Homa told recently, “but I’m hitting it really good.”

The progression began with a return to longtime coach Mark Blackburn. The two split after the 2024 season, with Homa seeking an outside perspective after years of working with Blackburn. Homa spent much of 2025 working with John Scot Rattan, but Homa reached back out to Blackburn just before the Bank of Utah Championship last October, hoping he would take a look. The two met up and reconciled any residual hard feelings from their split the previous year. Blackburn gave Homa a few tips to take for the week, and Homa parlayed that into just his second top 10 of the season. From there, the two were back together again.

“He’s probably the first player that ever gave me a lot of credit publicly, so I owe him a huge debt of gratitude,” Blackburn said. “When he left, I said, ‘The door's always open for you.’”

Blackburn never wanted it to get to a point where they split. In the throes of Homa’s disappointing 2024 season, Blackburn had tweaks he hoped to implement, but couldn’t find the right time to communicate them. Knowing Homa was making a push for the Presidents Cup team, Blackburn didn’t want to make any drastic changes that risked a short-term drop-off. But Homa was impatient with his progress as he closed in on the Presidents Cup and decided to part ways with Blackburn.

To Blackburn’s eye, Homa’s initial downturn under his tutelage stemmed from chasing speed. That was in early 2024. The two worked through a few subtle changes to help Homa add distance, but it predisposed him to get the club too far behind his body and too stuck under. Homa hit it a long way, but developed a two-way miss. He quickly lost all confidence off the tee.

It’s the cautionary tale of adding speed, which has become a prerequisite to consistent success in the modern game. Even the sport’s best driver, Rory McIlroy, went through a period of losing his swing as he chased distance. If it can happen to McIlroy, it can happen to anyone. And it certainly happened to Homa, Blackburn said.

One of Homa’s closest friends on TOUR, Collin Morikawa, has been tempted to chase speed. He ultimately opted against.

“If I do go down that road, more often than not, guys are just chasing speed with their driver," Morikawa said. "So then they forget their swing with their irons."

Homa lost his way with both the driver and irons. He ranked outside the top 80 in both Strokes Gained: Off the Tee and SG: Approach each of the last two seasons. Blackburn commended Rattan’s work in getting Homa “unstuck” over the last year. That led to flashes like the PGA Championship. Homa shot 64 in the second round and played his way into the penultimate group on Saturday. But he shot 76-77 on the weekend and finished in a tie for 60th.

“The problem was Max’s phobia of getting the club under– he overdosed, and it got so far out that now he was too far inside out,” Blackburn said. “So then he had the same thing. He had a two-way miss.”

Much of Blackburn and Homa’s work has been leveling out those two extremes. They are particularly focused on keeping Homa on plane. They also tweaked his grip, strengthening it slightly to help Homa’s most common mistakes. The other part of Homa’s progression has come in the gym with trainer Jason Glass. Homa is considerably fitter now, which helps achieve some of those marginal distance gains that Homa was trying to find by tweaking his swing. Now, Homa can hit 180 mph swinging smoothly, allowing what has always made his swing sing, the tempo, to stand out.

“He's much more apt to produce speed and handle it better,” Blackburn said. “What everybody gravitates to with his golf swing is his rhythm and his timing. Every golf swing has idiosyncrasies, but his looks really pretty, because he's got that really nice tempo. It's really trying to go back to understanding, that's what you do well. You don't need to be a proficient driver you're a very good iron player and a great wedge player. You just need to be functional off the tee.”

Homa’s improvements are subtle but substantive. He’s gaining strokes off the tee and on approach through the first two months of the season. His best showing came in his last start at the Cognizant Classic in The Palm Beaches. He finished in a tie for 13th and gained strokes in all four categories (Off-the-Tee, Around-the-Green, Approach and Putting). He hasn’t scored as well as he’s hit it, so he’s just waiting for one week for it to click.

“The days I hit it good, I putt it like s---, the days I put it good, I hit it like s---,” Homa said with a chuckle. “Just trying to put it all together.”

He has a chance at THE PLAYERS this week. There’s certainly scar tissue to overcome. He shot 79 in the first round at TPC Sawgrass last year, one of his low points. But he also has two top 15s in his last four starts at this event. So how will he fare? Our first indicator will be in his walk.