A contender for this year’s Race to Dubai title has won seven times on the PGA Tour and is ranked inside the world’s top 20, but mostly goes unnoticed, writes GARY LEMKE.
When you’re the 12th-highest American on the World Ranking and you’re the 18th-best golfer in the world, and you’re not part of the 43rd Ryder Cup, it must rankle. Also to mention, being the No 2-ranked player on the Race to Dubai Order of Merit, the meat in a Collin Morikawa-Jon Rahm sandwich.
To call Billy Horschel unlucky to not be part of the United States’ roaring success at Whistling Straits in late September is an understatement. He certainly looked to be the forgotten man in all the fun and fanfare that accompanied the American victory, a resounding 19-9 defeat of a thoroughly dominated European team.
Below him in the World Ranking in September were Tyrrell Hatton, Paul Casey, Matt Fitzpatrick, Lee Westwood, Tommy Fleetwood, Shane Lowry, Sergio Garcia, Ian Poulter and Bernd Wiesberger. Yes, a staggering nine of 12 players representing Europe at this Ryder Cup were ranked lower than Horschel, who was considered not good enough to make captain Steve Stricker’s USA team.
Any wonder the hosts ran away with the famous cup, taking an 11-5 lead into the Sunday singles, and turning the final day’s play into a formality?
Stricker had stuck to the world rankings in picking his 12-man squad – until it came to Horschel. Instead of selecting the 34-year-old, he bypassed him and Patrick Reed and called up Scottie Scheffler. Beam me up, Scottie, indeed. But, as in everything Stricker did this year, his hunch about Scheffler was the right one, with the 25-year-old seeing off world No 1 Rahm 4 & 3 in the Sunday singles.
Now, before the season-ending DP World Tour Championship in Dubai, Horschel finds himself in second position behind Morikawa, whose half-point against Viktor Hovland in the Sunday singles officially won the United States the Ryder Cup.
‘Knowing no American has won the Race to Dubai, it would be cool to do that,’ he said as the Race to Dubai (aka the European Tour’s Order of Merit) entered its concluding stages. ‘Also, to say I was a Race to Dubai and FedExCup champion. Only one guy has won both, a big Swedish guy named Henrik Stenson. I would love to be able to do that.’ Actually, there have been two guys, Stenson and Rory McIlroy, but still, you get a sense of the achievement.
On the weekend of the 20th anniversary of 9/11 Horschel shot a final-round 65 to win the prestigious BMW PGA Championship, for his first victory in a ‘regular’ European Tour event. Speaking on the Saturday night before the final round, he said: ‘There are tournaments we, as pros, want to win. The Players, the Majors, maybe a few others. But as an American, you don’t usually say a tournament on the European Tour. But to win the BMW PGA Championship would, for me, be equal to a Players Championship victory. When I first came over here two years ago, I fell in love with the golf course, which I knew I would. The fans have been great to me, too. The support has been great this year. So to get that victory, if it happens, would be tremendous.’
Horschel duly closed things out on the Sunday, joining Arnold Palmer (1975) as the only other American to win the European Tour’s biggest event. Still, he had received no call from Stricker, whose decision was made before BMW PGA Championship week, and when Horschel was ranked 28th in the world.
‘Listen, I didn’t play well enough to make enough points to be an automatic qualifier. I didn’t play consistently enough over the past few months to really give myself a great chance to be picked,’ he told the media after the win at Wentworth.
‘But I was a little gutted I didn’t get a call. I didn’t think the call was going to say I made the team but I was a little gutted I didn’t get a call to say, “Hey, you know, you didn’t make the team.” In my mind, I thought I would at least get that, so there was a little more added motivation after that.’
Horschel was more miffed with the fact Stricker had completely ignored him. The Ryder Cup captain had explained that he ‘called a lot of guys. I felt like they deserved hearing it from me … You know, throughout this whole process I was keeping in touch with 20 to 25 guys throughout this whole deal. I probably called another five or six guys, I think, just to touch base with them to let them know where we stood.’
Horschel wasn’t one of those 20 to 25 golfers, or indeed, the other five or six. And it stung.
While he is American to the core, Horschel, who has often been described as a ‘veteran’, despite the fact he is only 35 in December, has often spoken up about how he appreciates golfing life the other side of the pond. ‘As I said two years ago, I grew up watching the BMW PGA Championship on TV,’ Horschel said before this year’s tournament. ‘It was the first week we were out of school and the European Tour comes on early so I was up early watching it and absolutely loved what I saw on TV, from the course to the crowds and just the history of the event.
I’d always wanted to get over here and I was planning on coming earlier than 2019, but it just didn’t happen, and when I came here in 2019, it was everything it lived up to be and more. It was just a blast.’
He has also aimed a pop at the nature of the American golf courses, which are often referenced as making for ‘target golf’.
‘Too many times in America, we just get up on tees, hit drivers. You don’t have to really think about where to hit it. You know, it’s the same thing into the greens – where you miss it on a green is really not that important a lot of weeks. Here, you’ve got to be smart where you put the ball in the fairway, especially going into greens – you can put it in some bad spots around the greens, you miss it and it makes it hard to get up and down. These are courses I absolutely love playing. They’ve just got a nice feel about them, built into and around the trees.’
Given his affection for Europe and for courses in the UK, it probably won’t come as a surprise to learn that Horschel is a big fan of the English Premier League. At this year’s Open Championship his bag was adorned in the claret and blue colours of West Ham.
‘During my sophomore year of college I moved into a new apartment and the cable wasn’t going to be hooked up for a couple of days,’ he explained, ‘so we went to Best Buy and bought a couple of DVDs, one of those was Green Street.
‘I loved the movie, I loved Charlie Hunnam as an actor. The film is about the firms at Millwall and West Ham, and from there I started following them. Since about 10-12 years ago I’ve been paying close attention to them since NBC Sports started showing Premier League games, so I’m always watching their matches – and any Premier League games actually.’
That in itself might sum up Billy Horschel. Most ‘foreigners’ attracted to the EPL are likely to cite Manchester United and Liverpool – and latterly, due to their success, Manchester City and Chelsea – as the Premiership clubs they support. Similarly, with Barcelona and Real Madrid in La Liga and Bayern Munich in the Bundesliga.
But Horschel’s choice of football club left him under the radar in that sense too, mirroring his real-life golf journey.
20 BEST FINISHES
2013: Zurich Classic of New Orleans (1st), Houston Open (T2nd), US Open (T4th), Texas Open (T3rd)
2014: BMW Championship (1st), Tour Championship (1st), Deutsche Bank Open (T2)
2015: Texas Open (3rd)
2016: RSM Classic (T2nd)
2017: AT&T Byron Nelson (1st)
2018: Tour Championship (2nd), Northern Trust (T3rd), BMW Championship (T3rd)
2019: BMW PGA Championship (T4th), ZOZO Championship (T6th)
2020: Wyndham Championship (2nd)
2021: WGC-Dell Technologies Match Play (1st), BMW PGA Championship (1st), WGC-Workday Championship (T2nd), Tour Championship (7th)
– This article first appeared in the November 2021 issue of Compleat Golfer magazine. Subscribe here!
