Billy Horschel has ‘scrapped’ swing changes after months of work

Billy Horschel has explained why he abandoned swing changes at last week’s Genesis Invitational.

The Florida resident was speaking before the Honda Classic, and explained why he and his coach decided enough was enough after he shot an opening round of 74, which led to a missed cut.

“We sort of scrapped it Thursday night of LA,” he said.

“Talking with TA (Horschel’s coach, Todd Anderson), we just tried to get back into a little bit of a similar posture that we were for the majority of last year. Really, we were just looking back at swings of 2013 and 2014, trying to get back to that.

“We made some changes this off-season to try and do that, and at home it’s been really good and on the range and in practice it’s been really good, it just hasn’t translated to the course.

“This past week we sort of abandoned what we’ve been doing the last couple months, realising it was more of an effort; it wasn’t as easy to do. We went back to some of the older stuff.

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“My tendency has always been to move off the ball with the upper half and we’ve been trying to stay centred a little bit more. That’s why we made some of the changes in the swing we did, and then just going back to an old setup and a few other things, my upper half stayed centred because of what we’ve done.

“It’s nothing new. It’s just in the game of golf you’re always trying to make improvements, trying to get better, and sometimes you’ve got to take chances and understand you may fail sometimes, and we failed. We’re back to what we’ve been doing the majority of last year and end of 2021.”

The 36-year-old’s most recent win came at last year’s Memorial Tournament, but since then he’s had a mixed run of form, including two missed cuts in his last three events.

Horschel also expressed his concerns about the future of the Honda Classic, after news broke that Honda, the PGA Tour’s longest sponsorship, would no longer be backing the event after 2023.

“It’s sad to see the Honda go, the longest sponsorship on the PGA Tour,” he said.

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“I’m sort of disappointed in the PGA Tour in the sense that, I’m not going to say they didn’t prioritise the Honda Classic; they prioritise every sponsor that we have. It’s always tough when you’ve got 47 different sponsors on the PGA Tour and you have X amount of partners on the PGA Tour to always please every one of them.

“But when I was out on tour early in my career, this was a hot event. You had the top 20, all top 20 players in the world playing here. This was an event to play at.

“Then eventually over the years it’s sort of been relegated to not as strong of a field anymore, due to reasons, scheduling being the biggest thing, where the tournament fell.”