by Shane Ryan
* * *
* Although, as chronicled in Adam Schupak’s excellent Deane Beman: Golf’s Driving Force, they didn’t become completely separate entities until the early nineties.
23
EAST LAKE, GEORGIA
The FedEx Cup Playoffs: The Rise of Billy Horschel; Rory and Billy at the Tour Championship
“Matt Every just used to abuse poor little ol’ Billy Horschel when Billy was a freshman. Billy loved to talk, and sometimes his mouth runs faster than his brain, and when he got into any sort of debate with Matt, it was kind of like candy from a baby. Some of those conversations were absolutely comical to watch. They’d argue about anything…it just didn’t matter. Matt could get him rolling in the wrong direction, to the point that Billy would sometimes take both sides of an argument.”
—Florida coach BUDDY ALEXANDER
On the 18th hole at the Deutsche Bank Championship, trailing Chris Kirk by a single shot in the second of the four FedEx Cup playoff events, Billy Horschel bombed his drive 318 yards down the right side of the fairway. From there, he watched Kirk miss his birdie putt, and turned to his caddie Micah Fugitt.
“I’m going to hit this on the green, I’m going to make eagle, and we’re going to win the tournament,” he said.
He took dead aim with his 6-iron from 211 yards away. Deep down, he understood that this shot gave him not only a chance to win, but to make the Ryder Cup team as a captain’s pick—unlike the reserved Kirk, he had exactly the kind of energy that Watson coveted. The ball was below his feet, but on an uphill lie relative to the hole. Before he hit, Horschel reminded himself “stay in the golf shot”—not to rise too soon and risk pushing it right.
It was a sound piece of strategy, but as it turned out, he overcompensated and caught the ball fat. Horschel immediately knew it was his worst shot of the day—a total chunk. It landed with a dull thud in the thick native area guarding the front of the green. He took the penalty drop, made bogey, and finished in a three-way tie for second.
Horschel had always struggled with his anger, and after conquering his rage for most of 2013, it had started to creep back over the summer. I’d watched him violently kick a trash can in Greensboro, and when he came into the scoring room after his chunked 6-iron and heard from Tom Alter that he had dropped in the FedEx Cup standings, he let out an anguished scream and punched his own hand.
Horschel’s rage is the kind that looks very frightening up close, and Alter briefly wondered if he might punch a wall and break his hand.
He didn’t—he collected himself in time to talk to reporters, and all he could say was that standing over the 6-iron, he had believed.
—
If you had to use one word to describe Billy Horschel, you’d start with “excitable.” The twenty-eight-year-old plays with a raw, unfiltered energy, and his emotions are always on naked display. Sometimes, that entails thundering war cries and violent fist pumps. Other times, it comes in the form of intense, self-directed anger. Horschel’s rage comes on fast, and when it hits, you sense that he’s not entirely in control of himself. But these episodes pass as quickly as they arrive. Where an emotional player like Sergio Garcia might have trouble separating his self-image from what happens on the golf course, Horschel bounces back in an instant, reverting to his natural state—he can’t stay in one place for very long, so why should his emotions be any different?
There’s something innocent about Horschel—he has the body of a great athlete, but the open face of a curious child. He moves in fits and starts, fascinated by everything, chattering like a bird, and there’s no pretense to his personality. He’s the kind of person who hangs out with the caddies more than the other players, for the simple fact that they feel like his kind of people.
He’s also one of the Tour’s quintessential restless wanderers. He has trouble staying calm when the pace of play is slow, and his natural temperament is designed for sports that involve running and jumping—he snowboards in the off-season, potential injuries be damned, and when we spoke, he lamented the lack of a flag football league on Tour.
This hyperactive style makes him unique in golf, and it’s why Buddy Alexander’s story about him and Every is so funny. They’re perfect foils, and you can imagine how it played out—Every with his sly, cynical intelligence, quietly prodding Horschel as the younger player bounced wildly from idea to idea, barely keeping track of his own thoughts as the senior led him around in circles. And you can picture Horschel returning with renewed energy the next day, unfazed and undeterred, convinced that this time he was armed with the logical ammunition he needed to win.
Horschel, above all, is relentless and irrepressible, and it’s why the chunked 6-iron at the Deutsche Bank didn’t bother him for long, even though he called his shot and looked like a bit of a fool.
“Maybe it’s just the way I look at life,” he told me at the Tour Championship in Atlanta. “I didn’t think of it as that bad. I get over things easily and move on from it, and I think that’s why I was able to bounce back sooner than some other guys.”
He had put it behind him so thoroughly that it came as a shock when he logged on to his Twitter account to find that legions of so-called “fans” were piling on, calling him a choker and berating his game. It never occurred to him to think of it that way, and he hadn’t expected the onslaught. This just redoubled his determination—he knew he was playing well, and now he could stick it right in their eye by winning the next event.
At the third playoff event, the BMW Championship in Colorado, Horschel launched himself into the lead with a Saturday 63. On Sunday, he sealed himself off from the field, and finally relaxed on the 18th fairway—at which point he realized that he really, really needed to use the bathroom. And so, on national TV, he began sprinting toward the Porta-Potty. He made it in time, and emerged to win by two strokes. The win shot him up to number 2 on the FedEx Cup list, and gave him a good chance to win the ten-million-dollar FedEx Cup prize at the Tour Championship.
“I’m not going to go ahead and guarantee a victory right now,” he had told reporters in Colorado, looking ahead to Atlanta, “but I will say that I’m probably going to play very well, and I will have a chance to win on Sunday.”
* * *
“I think I’m very old school in the way I was raised. I think it’s the right way. I would say that any child should be raised the way I was. Maybe if there’s anything they could change, it’s that the parents had a few extra dollars around where it wasn’t so tight sometimes.”
—BILLY HORSCHEL
Horschel was born in Grant, Florida, an old fishing village on the Indian River Lagoon, just two miles from the barrier islands that separate Florida from the Atlantic Ocean. It’s a small town—less than four thousand people—and the local claim to fame is an annual seafood festival.
“I guess you’d say it’s in the woods,” Horschel told me. “It’s about twenty minutes to civilization, and all our friends lived that far away from me. So it wasn’t like they could just ride their bikes to my house.”
Billy Horschel Sr. was a carpenter’s son who had played a year of football at Carson-Newman College in Tennessee before quitting and making his way into construction. Two of his brothers had played D-1 football, at Cincinnati and Miami, and he was good enough at rugby to earn a contract offer from a team in England before hurting his knee. He worked in drywall and stucco, mostly, and he built his own house in Grant along with his two brothers, who owned roofing businesses. He and his wife, Kathy, had two boys together—Billy and Brian.
Neither parent had a college education, and depending on the state of the construction industry, money could be tight in the Horschel home. Kathy worked in the purchasing department at several different companies, but the minute she started to move up at one, they’d go under and she’d have to start over. They were forced to take out a second mortgage on their home, and they racked up credit card debt to stay afloat.
Billy remained unaware of the family’s troubles
in his younger years, when he’d spend happy days on their two and a half acres of land, playing just about every sport in existence, with one exception.
“We didn’t play soccer,” he said, “because my dad just couldn’t stand to watch it.”
Everything else was fair game: football, basketball, baseball, tennis, bowling, and even golf. As a three-year-old, Billy would follow his father outside to hit balls in the backyard, and he and Brian, then little more than a baby, would use their father’s clubs to hack in the grass. He begged his dad to let him play on a real course, and they struck a deal—if he could hit a ball from the backyard over a creek about a hundred yards away, then he could play with the big boys. Billy practiced by himself for weeks while his dad was at work, and one day, at age five, he finally managed it. The only problem was that his father was at work, and so he waited in the driveway for two hours, ecstatic, waiting to tell him the good news.
—
Billy Horschel Sr. was a tough man, and not just about golf—he and Kathy took an old-school approach to raising their children.
“They were very strict, and they would discipline us,” Horschel said. “We didn’t get away with anything. We never got grounded, or got things taken away, like our phone or TV. We never had that. We did something wrong, we paid the price…my dad spanked us with a belt once or twice.”
He can still remember the time he talked back to his mother, and caught her hand when she reached out to slap him. He thought it was a clever move, but then she uttered the words that scared him more than any other: “Wait until your dad gets home.”
At the same time, his parents were loving, and his father only pushed Billy in sports as much as he wanted to be pushed. As the boy grew up and showed immense talent at baseball and golf, his parents did their best to make sure he could play in local tournaments and travel as much as money would allow.
At school, Billy smothered his natural exuberance at first, ashamed of a speech impediment that the other kids would mock. When he said the letter “r,” it sounded like a “w,” and a word like “railroad” became “wailwoad.” From kindergarten through sixth grade, he would routinely get pulled out of class to work with a speech therapist. Despite this impediment, he couldn’t stay bashful for long, and was soon one of the most outgoing kids in school. Then, in sixth grade, a new school opened up closer to his home, and he inherited a whole new peer group. When he got pulled out of class for speech therapy, the new kids began to mock and tease him. The abuse was too much for Billy.
“I just went home one day and said, ‘Mom, I can’t do this anymore,’ ” he told me. “I said, ‘you know what? This is the way I talk, and I can’t fix it. It’s me, and it makes me a little bit different, but I can’t stand doing this again.’ ”
Kathy gave in, and Billy quit the speech classes. You can still hear the impediment today when Horschel talks, especially when he gets excited. You have to listen closely, though, and it’s subtle enough that many people, meeting him for the first time, just assume he’s from Boston.
At this point in our talk, I remembered Keegan Bradley, and how he still remembered the names and faces of everybody who had wronged him throughout his life. I wonder if Horschel was the same, so I asked him if he ever thought back to the kids who mocked him.
“No, no, no, no,” he said emphatically, demonstrating the difference between the two young golfers. “It was more or less good fun, because I was a pretty good sport about it. I never got in a fight, never got in trouble. I was just tired of listening to it.”
By the time he hit high school, he had a tough choice to make between baseball and golf, but a broken elbow made the decision a lot easier.
“I’m highly competitive,” he said, “and I couldn’t stand playing baseball and football and all these other sports where you have a kid just lollygag and they don’t care as much. And all these parents are saying, ‘It’s supposed to be fun.’ And I said, ‘there’s no fun! It’s fun when you win!’ ”
In some ways, golf was the game for which the energetic Horschel seemed least suited. Nevertheless, he began to improve rapidly, and his commitment turned serious.
Partying was not on the agenda, and it wasn’t allowed anyway—his parents enforced a strict ten p.m. curfew. While other high schoolers were out drinking and socializing, Billy read a book and drifted off to sleep. He worked at a golf course in the summer, and on weekends during the school year, his parents dropped him off to practice at six thirty in the morning, and he’d stay until sunset. He developed perfectionist tendencies in those days—the kind that both help and hurt. As his game improved, so did his capacity for anger when things went wrong. Like most Tour golfers, he became his own fiercest critic.
Florida had always been Horschel’s dream school, and Buddy Alexander made the trip to see him play at the U.S. Junior Amateur when he was seventeen. They chatted on the range, and Alexander walked with him for a couple of holes, but in a field of 156 players, Horschel beat only two of them. He failed to qualify for the match play rounds.
As with Every, the coach had no expectation that Horschel would become anything more than an average college golfer, and he only offered him an “itty bitty” scholarship. It created a tough decision for the family, because Horschel’s parents were just climbing out of debt, and four years at Florida would put a strain on their finances. In the end, they decided the education was worth the risk, and Billy was off to Gainesville.
“Going there is probably one of the biggest reasons I’m on Tour today,” Horschel said, “and that reason would be Buddy Alexander, the best golf coach I think that’s ever been in the history of golf coaches.”
Just like Every, he made incredible strides his freshman year, and in the spring, he won the West Regional in Arizona and finished tied for tenth at the NCAA Championships. He went on to win SEC Player of the Year as a sophomore, and had racked up three first-team All-America honors by the time he graduated.
The most memorable event of his amateur career came at the 2007 Walker Cup. There, on Saturday afternoon, he met Rory McIlroy, who was playing in one of the last amateur events of his life. It was a tight match throughout, and Rory lost 1-down on the 18th hole when he missed a three-foot putt. Horschel had behaved with his usual exuberance, and it did not sit well with Rory, who later told Golf Digest’s John Huggan that Horschel’s antics had infuriated him:
“For example, he had hit a bunker shot at the 14th in our morning foursome. It was a great shot and finished inches from the cup. But he came running down the hill hollering at the top of his voice. He was so loud and so obnoxious.”
Horschel, on the other hand, thought he was just having fun.
“I drew the hometown favorite boy,” he told reporters after his match. “The boy that everybody was rooting for. I had the big crowds and that was fine with me….I could hear that they were cheering for Rory, and once in awhile I would get a little joke in there and say, ‘Come on, Billy!’ ”
The next afternoon, they met again. This time, Rory purposefully played slow in order to antagonize Horschel. It was a sound strategy—if your enemy can be enraged, provoke him. Along those lines, Rory also gave him the silent treatment. For anyone paying attention, it was a sneak preview of the psychological mastery Rory would show later in his career as he climbed to number 1. He gained his revenge, beating Horschel 4&2, and neither knew the match would have echoes later in their careers.
“It was great to win,” McIlroy told the Irish Golf Desk’s Brian Keogh at the time. “Especially against him. I don’t really have much time for him to be honest…he wasn’t a nice guy to be around.”
Horschel turned pro in 2009, and at the 2011 McGladrey Classic, he started the final round one shot off the lead. He shot 75 that day, and became so angry on the course that family and friends took him to task afterward—an intervention that left him feeling humiliated at his own behavior. Even worse, he bombed at Q-School, meaning he would only have conditional status for 2012. It too
k time, but he regained his confidence. A fourth-place finish at that year’s Q-School—his third successful showing in four tries—put him back on the Tour, and now he was ready for the big leagues.
In January of that season, the Australian golfer Matt Jones enlisted Stephanie Wei, a journalist, in a prank. Because Horschel had been forced to go to Q-School so often, certain fans and reporters mistook him for a rookie every time he returned to Tour. It had been happening since 2010, and it was happening again in 2013. Horschel was sick of explaining himself, so Jones’s plan was simple—Wei would approach and ask if she could pick Horschel’s brain about life on Tour as a rookie. When Wei asked the question, Horschel bit his tongue, turned his head to the side, and tried to control his annoyance. Just as he was about to snap at Wei, Jones broke out laughing.
Lucky for Horschel, his anonymity was coming to an end. At the Zurich Classic that April, he began the rainy final round two shots behind Lucas Glover, and proceeded to tear the course apart. By the 18th hole, Glover had faded, and he led D. A. Points by a shot. After hitting his drive in the left rough, he heard a sound nobody with any momentum wants to hear—the weather horn. For a player with Horschel’s nervous energy, it seemed like the worst possible outcome. He sat inside the clubhouse with Matt Every and Chris DiMarco, two of his good friends, and waited it out. When they returned to the course, he laid up on the par-5, hit a wedge into twenty-seven feet, and watched as Points left himself five feet for birdie.
For Horschel, it meant one thing—if he didn’t hole his twenty-seven-footer, he was probably bound for a playoff. The putt was a right-to-left twister, breaking away from the water, and Horschel made a run at it. “Get there! Get there!” shouted CBS’s Nick Faldo, and it did—Horschel had won his first event, and he let out a primal yell before holding his head in disbelief.