DUBLIN, Ohio — Never in my 40 years in the sports writing business has an athlete thanked me for making him cry.
Until Thursday, that is.
One year ago at the Memorial Tournament, PGA Tour player Billy Horschel entered the media interview area looking like the homeless guy I hand granola bars to at the bottom of the I-70 and Broad Street exit ramp. Horschel wasn’t holding a cardboard sign, but still looked sadly spent.
Horschel won the Memorial in 2022. He showed up in 2023 wanting to shoot a respectable score as the defending champion, but also knowing his swing was not to be trusted. Indeed, the Floridian went out and shot 84, his 12-over-par entering the Memorial record book as the highest opening round by a defending champion. When the day ended, he was 118th out of 119 golfers.
No wonder he looked like a baggie tossed into the ocean when he stepped in front of the media room microphone.
The media session began with awkward silence as Horschel pulled his hat over his face, trying to compose himself. How to open with an ice-breaker when the subject of the interview fell through the ice?
Seconds felt like minutes. Finally, I asked, “Is this a day you just hug your kids and move on?”
That did it. Horschel teared up.
“It’s tough right now,” he said.
Fast forward to Thursday’s opening round of the Memorial, when the 37-year-old Horschel shot a 3-under-par 69 that put him three shots off the lead after 18 holes.
What a difference a year makes. What a difference a disaster makes. What a difference addressing it honestly makes.
“If that question wasn’t asked, who knows if I had gotten to the point of where I needed to be?” Horschel told me Thursday after his interview session ended.
Let me be clear, someone would have asked the question if I had not. What’s important is how Horschel answered it. Honestly. Vulnerably. Cathartically.
“Sometimes (tour pros) need to be put back in the perspective of seeing what really matters,” Horschel said, his eyes dry this time. “Results are one thing, you have good results and bad results, but it’s more or less you work hard and believe if you do the right thing the results will show.”
And they’re showing. After missing the cut at the Memorial last year, Horschel discovered that the lie angle on his irons were off by 2 to 3 degrees, which caused the heel of his club to catch the ground. His left-to-right cut shot wasn’t cutting. Trees love when that happens.
“I hit golf shots I just haven’t hit in my entire PGA Tour career,” he said, adding that his confidence bottomed out at last year’s Memorial. “Shooting 84 when you’re the defending champion was the lowest of the low points for me.”
It took a few weeks to get past the trauma of his miserable round, but after putting things in perspective, and fixing his irons, his scores began to improve. Two months after the Memorial he finished fourth at the Wyndham Championship, a confidence boost that set him for a strong 2024 that includes a win (Corales Puntacana Championship) among three top-10 finishes.
Golf enjoys messing with your head
Still, golf being a mental maze of lefts, rights and dead ends, Horschel arrived at Muirfield Village this week feeling the scar tissue of that 84.
“I’ve been thinking about it since Tuesday,” he said. “Every hole I played this week I thought about how bad I played last year. “Even today I was nervous waking up because, yeah, I won here and have played pretty well here in previous years, but the 84 still lingers a little.”
Thursday’s 69 helped rid him of that ghost.
“I hit quality shots that sort of got me over the hump of what happened last year,” he said.
And if it ever happens again?
“At our level, very rarely is it that we shoot scores of that number, but at the end of the day, even though it’s a big number and one we don’t like to see, it’s just golf,” he said. “You have got to try to move on from it. We have to realize we’re always going to have bad days, and that was a really, really bad day for me. But I still got to go home and see my wife and kids, and my kids could care less if I shot 84 or 67.”
Maybe he would have reached that conclusion without carding an embarrassing score at Jack’s place. He’s not sure. What he knows for certain is that his tears were not wasted last June.
“I talked to my team (the next morning) about sharing where my confidence was, and how vulnerable I was (with the media) and how I felt relief in getting it off my chest,” he said. “And from there I could start moving forward again.”
That moving ahead comes with increased adoration and respect from a golf world that wants real people, not robots.
“I’ve always tried to be me,” he said. “I’ve always tried to be as human as anyone else.”
Keep being that way, Billy. We humans benefit from seeing it.
