The tournament, long a staple for European players, has become an international event for the world’s top golfers.
Billy Horschel remembers watching the BMW PGA Championship as a child.
Unlike this week’s tournament, the event was played in May, which coincided with the first week of school summer break in Grant, Fla., a fishing town midway down the state’s east coast where Horschel, 37, grew up.
Instead of heading to the golf course that week, the 10-year-old Horschel said he asked his mother to let him stay home and watch the televised golf at the Wentworth Club in Surrey, England, where the idea of the Ryder Cup was born in 1926.
And it was good golf to watch. Some of the greats of the European Tour (now the DP World Tour) were winning the event in the 1990s: José María Olazábal and Bernhard Langer, both two-time Masters champions; Ian Woosnam, a Masters champion and force on the European Tour; and Colin Montgomerie, the Ryder Cup great who won the tournament in 1998, 1999 and 2000.
“I was a golf fanatic as a kid and I still am,” said Horschel, who now lives up the Florida coast in Ponte Vedra Beach. “I remember saying I want to be part of that tournament one day.”
In 2019, when the BMW PGA Championship was moved to the fall, Horschel played in it for the first time because there was no conflict with his PGA Tour schedule.
“It was amazing to be able to walk on that course,” he said. “Like any tournament, TV never really does it justice. Right away I fell in love with the golf course. I understood what it required.”
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Source: Golf - nytimes.com
