Max Homa has time to kill as another pop-up shower makes its presence known at Floridian National Golf Club. A whirlwind content shoot has been put on hold, allowing him the opportunity to ponder a question he’ll certainly get from peers and fans alike at PGA Tour’s season-opening The Sentry: Why Cobra Golf?
For more than a decade, Homa’s staff bag was filled with Titleist clubs that helped him go from relative unknown on the Korn Ferry Tour to one of the most marketable names on the PGA Tour. Five tour titles in a two-year stretch reinforced the belief that Homa was more than a social media darling.
Expectations were at an all-time high entering the 2024 season, but results didn’t match the forecast.
Homa failed to win for the first time in three years and missed out on the Tour Championship. In the aftermath, he started to take inventory of the game and noticed a worrying strokes gained/off-the-tee trend. After finishing no worse than 41st in the statistical category the previous two seasons, he struggled to keep it in play and plummeted to 164th.
A “weird year” led Homa to contemplate something he’d never seriously considered: switching club brands.
“I drove it poorly for the first time, so I just thought it wasn’t necessarily the golf club that makes the ball go straight,” Homa told Golf Digest. “My caddie [Joe Greiner] said it proves the golf club doesn’t make the ball go straighter every time. You make it go straight. Go find something that can do that. Go through the business process and see what’s what. I think that gave me the confidence to go shop around. So when the time came for the opportunity to look around, I did. It’s been a weird year. Making golf fun can be tricky, and sometimes change is fun.”
With myriad suitors rolling out the red carpet to land one of the biggest draws on tour, Homa opted to take it slow, go through the courting process for the first time in his career and embrace being the cynosure.
“I like to consider myself low maintenance,” he said. “I don’t enjoy being the centre of attention. Being truthful, I wanted to experience what that feels like [to be the centre of attention]. Feeling wanted is a nice thing. Even in my own family, I’m fourth in line behind the dog. So it feels good to feel that.”
Years prior, Homa admitted to daydreaming about being on staff with Cobra Golf, but he never considered pursuing the musing to see if it had merit. But as Homa started to seriously assess the equipment landscape, Cobra quickly stood out as a brand that checked plenty of boxes. Their gear more than held its own during head-to-head testing. A smaller, more intimate tour staff that already featured good friends Rickie Fowler and Gary Woodland was also a plus. So, too, was the opportunity to work with Ben Schomin, Cobra’s Tour Operations Manager, in an official capacity.
During Cobra’s initial pitch to Homa, the 34-year-old found himself interviewing Schomin to get a feel for how he fit pros in the past. The equipment was good, but Homa wanted to make sure the guy working on his gear had the chops.
“I was interviewing Schomin more than anybody in the room, just to make sure he could fit [clubs],” Homa said. “A lot people make really good stuff— I haven’t hit every club in the world—and everyone’s technology seems to be getting closer together. It makes the fitting process very important, and I learned that the last few years. I’m not really a gearhead. That’s why it’s so important that I trust Ben, because I’m going to put a lot of faith in his work. The two or three times we’ve worked together, I was keen to know how he goes about his business. I have talked to [Rickie] a lot about Ben and know he gets along with him and trusts him. I do think that’s a massive part of all of this.”
It didn’t take Schomin long to prove his bona fides after Homa and Cobra came together on a multi-year club agreement. As the duo kicked around ideas for new equipment that would best suit his skill set, the conversation eventually led to the irons, long considered the best part of Homa’s game. Initial testing with Cobra’s King MBs made Homa believe a change could be in the cards, but a few issues persisted. The toe profile, topline width and offset were a noticeable detraction from the Titleist blade profile he’d grown accustomed to seeing for nearly two decades.
Could Schomin and team replicate the old look in a Cobra iron?
Until a few years ago, such a request would have required a herculean effort. According to Schomin, a one-off forged product requires five tools to be made, pushing the turnaround time to anywhere from six to 18 months for an initial prototype. Homa’s timeframe was somewhat shorter at four weeks. It could be debated that no one has embraced 3D printing more than Cobra. When Bryson DeChambeau was on staff, Cobra’s R&D team created countless prototypes using 3D printing technology. Fowler and Woodland have benefitted from the rapid design process as well, along with recreational golfers following the release of Cobra’s Limit3d iron. In other words, the idea-to-creation timeframe wasn’t an impossible ask.
Instead of scoffing at the inquiry, Schomin and Ryan Roach, Cobra’s Director of Innovation, worked behind the scenes to bring Homa’s request to life. Two sets of blades were made from different metals (316 Stainless Steel and 17-4 Stainless Steel) to give Homa options in the feel department. Even better? The sets came to fruition in less than four weeks — just in time for Homa to test them prior to the President’s Cup. (Homa chose the softer 316 Stainless Steel heads during testing.)
“I wish I could’ve captured his reaction on video when we handed them to him,” Schomin said. “He was freaking out about the look, and he hadn’t even hit them yet. He was so stoked. Not only did we make him a bespoke set, we made two. One of the interesting things about the 3D stuff is the response on feel. Players can’t quite put it into words. It feels at least as good as forged, but there’s no other category. There’s nothing above that. Spin numbers were great, flight. This can be a complicated process, depending on how the player wants to make it. I want the player to experience and see what we have, but when you take the step, and he hits them and likes them, it’s a huge weight off your shoulders. We nailed it. To establish a baseline was a huge step.”
An early “win” on the gear front allowed Homa to see Cobra’s 3D technologies at work, opening the doors for future projects that Schomin believes could produce immediate dividends for their newest signee.
“I think those irons showed him we were not only serious about working for him, but doing it in a unique way,” Schomin said. “Max has a great brand. He’s very unique in that he has a great personality, he’s funny, good socially. He checks all the boxes. Anyone would have been lucky to have him. When you have someone who’s that good across the board, you need to give them a reason to pick you. I think our design capabilities give us an edge.”
Nailing the mid and short irons paved the way to explore different options in 4- and 5-iron, where Homa generally transitions from traditional blades into more forgiving offerings that don’t penalize mishits nearly as much. While the exact combination remains a game-time decision for Kapalua — it will likely include King CB and Limit3d — Homa noted the Limit3d long irons offered several jaw-dropping moments during recent testing with Schomin.
“[The Limit3d] 4-iron feels like a rocket ship when you hit it,” Homa said. “Every time I hit it I tell Ben it feels like it’s going too far. But then he shows me the numbers and I can see it isn’t going too far; it’s nailing the numbers. I think that’s one that’ll make its way into my bag. It just feels so good—like more of a driving iron than one you’d hit into a green. That area of the bag has been pleasantly surprising since we started working together.”
As for the club that eventually led Homa to begin the equipment brand search in the first place, the driver has many layers.
First and foremost, it needs to sound a certain way. Homa describes the sound of Cobra’s DS-Adapt LS as a “dull hollow with some meat behind it” — a sensation that meets his audible requirements. It also needs to perform when called upon, something that occurred with regularity during head-to- head testing between Titleist and Cobra. The Cobra wound up producing comparable numbers with a tighter dispersion and improved spin rates on mis-hits, leading Homa to believe it was ready for a tournament setting.
“You assume what you’re using is the best thing, and that almost means you think the [performance] gap is bigger,” he said. “At least that’s how I saw it. Once I started hitting the Titleist and Cobra in a head-to-head, I saw the speed wasn’t down and the spin seemed similar. We still have to tweak a few things, but the speed and audio doesn’t seem far enough off to think this can’t be as good, if not better. I love the feel, but it feels like it can be the total package.”
If there’s one aspect of the driver Homa’s still getting acclimated to, it’s Cobra’s new Future Fit 33 hosel technology. With 33 distinct loft and lie angle settings (that’s not a typo), Homa has the ability to dial in his driver to the nth degree — without switching heads. During the content shoot, Homa was alternating between 10.5-degree DS-Adapt LS heads set in the A1 (standard) and A3 (one-degree flat and one-degree lower loft) but felt the “A3” was giving him the best results.
“It does seem like we’re moving in this new direction where you can make a driver as custom to yourself as you want,” said Homa. “For the everyday golfer who doesn’t have the luxury I do — I have people to make a club for me — they can grab a driver, and once you understand all the clicks and settings, make it how they want it. That’s a massive thing. The more options the better, for sure.”
While the gear has performed well at home, Homa won’t know how it works in a game setting until he steps foot on the tee at Kapalua. It’s natural to feel some trepidation when breaking in a new set of clubs for the first time, but Homa is fully prepared to embrace the experience of putting each club through the ringer in a punishing environment that requires him to go through his entire arsenal of flights and shot shapes.
“Getting to go to Kapalua will be the best way to hyper speed [the acclimation process],” he said. “If I were to do this for the first time in Palm Springs where it doesn’t blow and everything is flat, it’s easier to play practice round golf. Getting to go to [Kapalua] will teach me quickly to trust it, because you’re hitting downhill shots off crazy lies with a lot of wind. Especially with the driver. I’ll have such a massive amount of internal data on how it performs in a bunch of different situations.”
One thing that will help ease the anxiety of a full-on club transition is the golf ball. Unlike other brands with a ball in the equipment lineup, Cobra only offers hardgoods, which allows Homa to keep playing the same Titleist Pro V1x and maintain a relationship with the manufacturer. Compared other gear opportunities that would have required him to make wholesale changes across the board, Cobra offered a best-of-all-worlds scenario. Plus, Homa wasn’t interested in going through rigorous ball testing again after switching from the Pro V1 to Pro V1x last season.
“Even the noise off a putter is drastically different [during testing],” he said. “To have to do that all over again with a different company, it just sounded like a headache. We did a little bit of it, but I didn’t love the process. I love the Titleist ball. Getting to maintain that constant when we were changing a bunch of other stuff was good. Rickie’s doing something similar, so it wasn’t like I was breaking the mold here. I get to mix a couple things I really like.”
As the rain begins to subside, Homa prepares to head back to the range. But there’s still one more question that needs to be answered: Has he considered the reaction to his signing on social media? With more than 1.4 million followers combined across Instagram and X, Homa has a loyal following tracking his every move. As much as he’d like to believe the commentariat will embrace his decision for a fresh start on the equipment side, Homa isn’t naive. He knows the Monday morning quarterbacks will surface.
Homa’s been working hard on trying to care less about what others think, and he views this particular change in scenery as an opportunity to put on his Teflon armor, block out the noise and prove last season was a fluke through strong results on the course. And, hopefully, a win or two follows.
“If it’s on social media, it’s going to be negative,” he says. “We can sit here and question [the move], but at the end of the day, it’s not like I did this just because I wanted to do it. I like playing good golf more than anything, outside of being with my family. I like playing good golf more than any amount of money. I like playing good golf more than damn near anything in my whole life. I did my due diligence. I’m very pleased with what I’m hitting now. I’m excited for the change and to see where it takes me.”
