Billy Horschel might otherwise have been preparing to play in last week’s PGA Tour event in Utah. Perhaps practicing at TPC Sawgrass, home of the PGA Tour, where he lives. Or maybe he would've already been on site at the FedEx Fall event.
But Horschel was in Bradenton, Fla., early last week at the Concession Golf Club, site of an Advocates Professional Golf Association (APGA) event that bears his name.
Horschel, 38, an eight-time PGA Tour winner, became involved in the developmental tour that gives opportunities to players otherwise without the means several years ago, when he saw the APGA playing a concurrent event at Torrey Pines in California. He’s now been part of the circuit for five seasons.
“I was obviously thinking about how to give back to golf and I don’t like using ‘grow the game.’ I think it’s thrown around a little too much,” Horschel said on the pro-am day prior to the 36-hole tournament. “Golf has given me a lot and I wanted to give back to what it’s given me over my career and my life.
“And if I wasn’t as successful in college as I was and I wanted to chase my dream of playing golf professionally, where was that financial support going to come from? I didn’t grow up with a lot of means. My parents, when one of them was out of a job for a couple of months, there wasn’t going to be money coming from my parents, maybe a few dollars here and there from them or family or friends. But not a lot of money to chase it for a period of time.
“These mini-tour guys who are trying to chase the professional game ... it’s very expensive. And so any financial backing to help them maybe achieve their dream goes a long way.”
The APGA Tour has 16 events this year that will conclude Nov. 11–13 with the Farmers Fall Series, a 54-hole tournament.
The Billy Horschel Invitational presented by Cisco offered a $150,000 purse with $50,000 going to winner Everett Whitten Jr., who prevailed by two strokes over Wyatt Worthington, who earned $25,000.
That’s a significant sum for a “mini tour” that has no PGA Tour affiliation.
It is one of the bigger purses on the circuit, which allows players who qualify to hone their skills and earn prize money that might help them in future golf endeavors, including attempts at the Korn Ferry Tour and eventually the PGA Tour.
The program is meant to appeal to—although is not limited to—minorities.
“It’s tough for me to connect with a lot of the players because they don’t see themselves in me,” said Horschel. “So the APGA Tour gives these guys the opportunity to chase a dream of playing professionally, but they have that ability to connect with the kids, the youth that I’m not able to. And so that’s where we have our greatest growth, the potential for growth in the game of golf.
“So giving these guys a bigger platform, giving these guys an opportunity to be successful and to hopefully get to the PGA Tour one day ... and I do believe it’s going to happen. It’s just going to become a conveyor belt of guys coming in because once they understand, a lot of these guys are really good. It’s giving them the access, the means of resources to be successful. And from that platform it helps attract greater diversity in the game of golf.
“And if they are not successful [playing], it gives them the opportunity to transition into something else, into the business of golf by creating the various relationships.”
Horschel, who won the 2014 FedEx Cup title and its $10 million bonus and has more than $40 million in official career earnings, said he can remember when winning $20,000 in a mini-tour event meant “I felt rich beyond my means. It allows you to be able to reinvest in yourself. And that’s the only way you are going to get better.”
Horschel’s Current Status
His own game was trending nicely after a solid 2024 season that saw him tie for second behind Xander Schauffele at the British Open and win the DP World Tour’s BMW Championship. Horschel looked to build on that this year before a hip injury sidelined him.
After experiencing discomfort, Horschel learned he had a torn labrum and elected for surgery following the RBC Heritage in April. He didn’t return until his title defense at the BMW, where he missed the cut. And he then tied for 54th at the Baycurrent Classic before a tie for 11th this week at the Bank of Utah Championship.
“I felt this was going to be the year I get over the hump and make the Ryder Cup team, win a major, check some things off of my career goals,” Horschel said. “And I wasn’t playing bad but look back and swing-wise, it was a little bit of a struggle and I didn’t know why. And the Monday after Hilton Head I woke up with a sudden pain in my hip that I had never felt before.”
Horschel met with a hip specialist and decided not to wait, opting for surgery that put him out until September.
“I need to get some reps,” he said of his decision to play in Utah. “I need to get a little bit more comfortable.”
Because he did not play much this year, Horschel is in the position of having to qualify for the signature events, something he can address by moving up in the Official World Golf Ranking. A top-30 standing would get him into those events and he is now 40th after slipping back from 16th at the start of this year due to inactivity. He was 24th after the RBC Heritage and will be invited to the Masters if he can stay among the top 50 through the end of the year.
LIV Golf and the OWGR
While LIV Golf’s application for Official World Golf Ranking accreditation is apparently being considered by the OWGR technical committee and the board, the organization’s former chairman offered some interesting comments about the process.
Peter Dawson, the CEO of the R&A from 1999 through 2015, stepped down from his role earlier this year as chairman of the OWGR. A non-voting member of the board, Dawson nonetheless served in the role for nearly 10 years with very little fanfare—until LIV Golf’s emergence in 2022.
That is when LIV Golf first submitted a bid for accreditation, was turned down in 2023, then decided not to pursue the matter—until this summer when new CEO Scott O’Neil applied again.
In a lengthy profile on Dawson, 77, by John Hopkins of Global Golf Post, the former golf executive said he was speaking personally on the LIV matter and not in any official role, but expressed frustration that the two sides did not come together while also saying that the OWGR made the correct decision at the time to not include LIV Golf.
“The OWGR has a terrific record of being inclusive,” Dawson said. “It has expanded the number of tours it includes from five to 25. It goes out of its way to help tours become OWGR eligible. I was very disappointed that we could not do so with LIV.
“It is self-evident that players on the LIV tour are good enough to be ranked because they were before. But OWGR has a duty to ensure that all of the thousands of players in the system are ranked equitably. Some aspects of the LIV format made that impossible. In my opinion OWGR made the only decision it could at the time.”
“At the time” is a key phrase. Dawson said in October 2023 that “they’re just not playing in a format where they can be ranked equitably with the other [then] 24 tours and thousands of players to compete on them.”
Familiar Issues Keep LIV Golf out of the OWGR
In other interviews, Dawson said LIV’s 54-hole, no-cut format was not the overriding issue and that it could be accounted for. It was more about the lack of relegation and field variance.
LIV’s current 54-player field sees the same players every week. While six players were recently relegated, the league has yet to announce how they will be replaced.
Last year it promoted just one player from its annual Promotions (qualifying event) and no one came from the International Series because the leading player was already on LIV.
LIV was offered at least an outline of pathways to get accredited—and OWGR, as Dawson said, should have been guiding the league through the process. Instead, in the spring of 2024, LIV Golf announced it was abandoning the pursuit, only to reapply earlier this year.
It will likely require expanded pathways from the International Series and the Promotions tournament—still to be announced—which are areas that LIV is likely considering.
OWGR accreditation would be a boon to the league, which erroneously went down the path of believing it was too far gone to matter. Players such Joaquin Niemann, Bryson DeChambeau and Jon Rahm would be ranked considerably higher based on LIV performance, even with a points allotment far below that of a PGA Tour event.
For example: if LIV were accredited full OWGR points based on its fields, it would have had eight players among the top 50 in the world and three in the top 10 through August.
DeChambeau, who is 23rd in the current OWGR, would've been fifth. Niemann, 119th now, would have been sixth. Rahm would have been 10th, with Tyrrell Hatton 21st. The others in the top 50 would include Patrick Reed, Carlos Ortiz, Dean Burmester and Sergio Garcia.
As a further example, Michael Brennan, who won the Bank of Utah Championship on Sunday in his first PGA Tour event as a pro, played all year on the PGA Tour Americas—a developmental circuit a level below the Korn Ferry Tour. Winner points on that Tour would be less than half of a LIV Golf event in most cases. Brennan never earned more than 10 for any of his three victories.
But because he won three times among numerous other high finishes and received OWGR winning bonuses, Brennan had moved to 110th in the OWGR prior to his victory on Sunday. Now he’s 43rd and in position to earn a Masters invite if he can stay in the top 50 through the end of the year.
Dawson Takes a Few Parting Shots at LIV Golf
As for LIV Golf, Dawson was puzzled by the Public Investment Fund of Saudi Arabia’s goals and spending on men’s golf.
“I know that LIV has now reapplied to be included in the OWGR system,” he said. “I want all golf initiatives to do well and I can’t see that LIV has been a success by any measure. Yes, it has given great wealth to a very few people but in terms of engagement its format of team golf isn’t resonating anywhere near enough with the fan base.
“I really don’t understand why the PIF and Saudi Arabia are persisting with it. They are doing wonderful things for the women’s game with the PIF Global Series and they have terrific plans inside Saudi for expanding golf for their own people and for tourism. These initiatives deserve our applause but LIV seems to be the odd man out.”
When Dawson was the R&A’s CEO, he had a place on the seven-member OWGR board, now taken by R&A CEO Mark Darbon. New chairman Trevor Immelman does not have a vote and in 2023 both PGA Tour commissioner Jay Monahan and DP World Tour CEO Guy Kinnings recused themselves from the LIV/OWGR decision.
That essentially leaves the decision to the four major championships.
LIV Golf most likely needs to make public its format for 2026—something it is likely sharing with OWGR—before any decision will be announced related to the coming season.
Aloha, Hawaii?
Last week’s PGA Tour decision to not play the Sentry event, which was scheduled to kick off the 2026 season, has led to some ominous conjecture about the state of PGA Tour golf in Hawaii. The Sony Open in Honolulu, which has been played at Waialae Country Club in Honolulu since 1965, will lead off the 2026 season. But the sponsorship deal with Sony is up after the January event and there are rumblings that the Tour might not return to either location at all.
Why? Well, it takes some delving into remarks made by CEO Brian Rolapp at the Tour Championship in August and theorizing what they could mean.
“We’re going to focus on the evolution of our competitive model and the corresponding media products and sponsorship elements and model of the entire sport,” Rolapp said. “The goal is not incremental change. The goal is significant change.”
Rolapp also used terms such as “competitive parity,” “scarcity” and “simplicity,” with the belief that the Tour schedule might be contracted, meaning fewer events but more of the top players competing across the entire schedule.
The new CEO also mentioned TV ratings and said that in his old job at the NFL “I didn’t cheer for teams, I cheered for television ratings,” Rolapp said. “So whoever is behind, that’s who I’ll cheer for.”
Why is that ominous for Hawaii?
Because if there is a move to consolidate events, and TV ratings are important, Hawaii is an easy starting place, despite the beautiful vistas.
Had it been played, the Sentry would have been going up against the NFL wild-card weekend of two games on Saturday and three on Sunday. The Sony Open will face similar competition with the divisional round of two games on Saturday and two on Sunday.
In January, the wild-card round averaged 28.3 million viewers per game earlier this year. The divisional round averaged more than 36 million viewers.
Both the Sentry and the Sony did fewer than 500,000 viewers for the final round on Golf Channel.
Rolapp, who played a big part in negotiating current NFL TV deals, might already see what has been apparent for years: that going up against the NFL on those weekends is a tough ask.
If you start the season a week later—where the American Express is now situated—you could possibly begin on Wednesday, conclude on Saturday, and not face any football competition because the NFL championship games are played only on Sunday.
American Express is on board through 2028 but Farmers Insurance, which sponsors the event at Torrey Pines, ends it affiliation after the 2026 tournament. Perhaps Sentry, which is contracted through 2035, steps in there.
Regardless, Rolapp has promised change. Hawaii could be among the bigger moves.
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This article was originally published on www.si.com as Billy Horschel Sees the Big Picture With His Own Pro Golf Event.