Jun 21, 2025; Cromwell, Connecticut, USA; Max Homa on the first hole during the third round of the Travelers Championship golf tournament. Mandatory Credit: Bill Streicher-Imagn Images The first thing you need to know about Max Homa is that he built a following by being genuinely funny and self-deprecating on Twitter over the years.
The second thing you need to know is that Homa’s going through it right now. He is in the middle of his worst PGA Tour season since 2017, when he wasn’t yet established and failed to keep his card.
“Had a few caddies hit me up recently hoping to team up,” Homa tweeted early that year. “They heard they usually get weekends off which is apparently a great selling point.” An A-plus line.
In the Elon era of Twitter — or X, if you absolutely insist — certain prolific posters have lost interest in the platform or drifted to other sites. One of the biggest subtractions for sports fans has been Homa, whose last post on that app came Feb. 3.
Speaking before the John Deere Classic last week, Homa explained he takes breaks from Twitter and Instagram because of the vitriol people send strangers’ way seemingly without hesitation.
“If you wouldn’t choose to, like, sit around a table with somebody who’s being that mean, I don’t know, you would always get up,” Homa said. “You would always get up. If you were right there and someone was being rude to you, you would either ask them to leave or you would leave.”
Like clockwork, Homa was proven right.
Thanks to an opening-round 63, he was in contention all week at the Deere. Homa briefly held the solo lead Sunday after three early birdies, but he missed crucial putts down the stretch and tied for fifth — still his best showing of 2025 by a mile.
Soon after posting a thank-you to his fans, Homa shared two messages he received — the first from his Instagram DMs. “I hope you (expletive) kill yourself dude,” was how it began, and somehow, it only got worse from there.
The second was a Venmo request for $1,900 “(because) you can’t putt under pressure,” and while that message is hardly as malicious, it gets to the core of what golfers and so many other pro athletes are dealing with. I’d wager — pun intended — that the vast majority of these hateful messages come from aggrieved sports bettors.
Excuse me, but you bet $1,900 hard-earned American dollars on Max Homa to win a golf tournament? The guy who hasn’t won in more than two years and dropped to 99th in the world rankings? Even Homa himself would have gladly advised you against such a foolish move. “Gamble like a big boy Carl and take ur lumps like the rest of us,” he commented on the Venmo screengrab.
At least one comment (predictably, on Twitter) implied Homa was a hypocrite because he used to roast his fans’ golf swings. Buddy, don’t hurt yourself stretching so far. His fans sent him those videos, begging to be featured. And Homa was way too funny and way too kind to stoop to death threats.
Others have said he shouldn’t be checking social media after a loss. Here’s the funny thing about golf: You lose basically all the time, if you subscribe to the “If you’re not first, you’re last” theory of sports. A T5 probably had Homa feeling better about his game than he has in ages.
More to the point, it shouldn’t be the athletes’ burden to resist looking at their phones; it should be on the platforms to better police hate speech and death threats.
I can tell this won’t be the last time I write about angry gamblers targeting athletes. In recent weeks, the Houston Astros hired security for Lance McCullers Jr.’s family because a gambler threatened the lives of his children. Sprinter Gabby Douglas was followed around a meet by a heckler who later bragged his actions “made my parlay win.” There’s that slippery slope, where the online vitriol trickles into real life.
Homa will be fine, and he’ll probably win on the PGA Tour again. But it’s a shame that someone whose popularity was built by social media now has to feel like engaging the way he once did is no longer worth the trouble.
