The PGA was supposed to be at Quail Hollow this week. Max Homa must wait to defend title

This was the week Max Homa had been waiting for, eagerly anticipating a return to Charlotte’s Quail Hollow Club, where he was the surprise winner of the 2019 Wells Fargo Championship. Memories of that victory — the first of his career — are still fresh.

“I remember walking up (the 18th fairway) and how electric it was, how much fun it was,” Homa said Tuesday. “In real time, that’s very rare to be able to have that feeling. It felt like a dream.”

It was a feeling Homa had hoped to replicate this week, before the Wells Fargo tournament was scuttled by the PGA Tour due to coronavirus concerns.

“It’s the most disappointing thing that has happened for me during all that’s gone on, during all this turmoil,” Homa said. “This was the biggest one that hurt. I was really excited to try and defend at Quail Hollow.”

Homa will have to wait another year to defend his title. But there’s another twist: The 2021 Wells Fargo Championship will be supplanted at Quail Hollow by the Presidents Cup and will instead be played at TPC Potomac in Maryland.

“It’s not going to be the same, not getting to play Quail Hollow in my first time back at the Wells Fargo,” Homa said.

Homa has been at his home in Arizona since mid-March, when the Players Championship became the first tournament to be called off by the tour. Among the others that have been canceled or postponed was the Masters (rescheduled to November), which Homa was to play in for the first time thanks to his victory at Quail Hollow.

“It’s hard to get caught up about your sad feelings about not playing the Masters when people would do quite a bit to just to be able to go back to work, or to be healthy,” Homa said. “So it’s hard to be down for too long. Fortunately, I’ll be able to play another one fairly soon.”

Homa said he hopes to play when the tour starts back up, tentatively in June at the Charles Schwab Challenge in Fort Worth, Texas. The tournament will be held without spectators.

“It will be weird,” Homa said. “I imagine for the first person to win a tournament (like that), it’s going to be the strangest win of their life. It sounds selfish, us not wanting to play in front of fans because it’s not going to be electric. I’d play in front of nobody and carry my bag if I needed to.”

Quail Hollow, which won’t see competitive golf until the Presidents Cup in the fall of ’21, continues to sit mostly empty.

“For the first time, the disappointment really hit me this week,” said Wells Fargo tournament director Gary Sobba. “There’s been so much upheaval and, while we understand the decisions our officials have made, it’s been tough. We’d be working on the pro-ams right now, our women’s day, the celebrity putting challenge, all of that, right now. Then we’d turn it over to the Tour on Thursday.”

Sobba said there was plenty of firepower scheduled for Wednesday’s pro-am, including Golden State Warriors and former Davidson star Stephen Curry.

“The wonderful thing is we’ll still have an impact on the community,” Sobba said. “The tournament will still give about $500,000 to multiple charities and Wells Fargo will give a combined $1.2 million to the local community. We were set up to have our most successful tournament yet.”