Max Homa, asked about Garcia, says angry golfers look spoiled

Hours before Rory McIlroy‘s tap-in putt to win his second straight Masters, the talk out of Augusta National on Sunday morning was about Sergio Garcia‘s tee box and club breaking outburst.

Asked about the antics, Max Homa said it casts a bad look on professional golfers but also acknowledged that it’s a sport that can stir up those emotions.

“I don’t like when people break clubs. I don’t like when people beat up the golf course because we deal with it, and I think the breaking clubs makes us look very, very spoiled,” Homa said during a news conference Wednesday at the RBC Heritage on Hilton Head Island, South Carolina, as he discussed the topic without mentioning Garcia by name.

“… So I don’t know where I’d draw that line exactly, but I definitely think beating up a golf course would be probably tops just because the rest of us have to play it. But yeah, that’s a tough thing to handle or to decide upon because it is so subjective. If I do something where no one is watching on TV, that gets graded a lot lower than when it’s in front of everybody. So I don’t know how you would land that plane.”

Garcia was issued a code-of-conduct warning Sunday for his actions. Following a tee shot on No. 2 that landed in a bunker, Garcia slammed his driver into turf, causing apparent damage, before hitting his driver against a cooler and snapping the head off the club. Under the Rules of Golf, Garcia wasn’t allowed to replace his driver since it was damaged because of abuse.

“[I’ve been frustrated] through the year,” Garcia, who finished 52nd out of 54 golfers who made the Masters cut, said after his final round. “Yeah, just obviously not super proud of it, but sometimes it happens.”

Garcia issued an apology on social media Tuesday, expressing “regret” for his actions.

For his part, Homa acknowledged his own failings with bad language and throwing clubs out of frustration; that includes his being caught flinging a club down the fairway during last year’s PGA Championship.

“I say a lot of bad words. I very much try to do it not when a kid can hear,” Homa said. “So I do think there’s some, hey, don’t say it in front of the wrong person, like be a bit aware of your surroundings. Not saying I’ve never done it.”

He admitted his and others throwing clubs or slamming a tee box is a “bad look” but that it can sometimes happen while playing a frustrating sport.

The PGA Tour has been developing a code-of-conduct policy for competition, and the Masters was the first tournament to use it, a person involved in the process told The Associated Press on Sunday. The other majors are also likely to use the policy — which ramps up to disqualification on a third violation — this year.

“It’s never a bad thing to have that conversation being had. That’s good,” said Homa, who tied for ninth at the Masters for his third straight top-12 finish there. “Between that and pace-of-play stuff, there’s things we can address, and we can wait until we kind of figure it out until we implement it, but at least the conversation is going that way.

“We want to inspire the next generation to be better than us, so we need to be held to a higher standard.”