Open Championship leader Billy Horschel has waited a career for this moment

TROON, Scotland – Billy Horschel has this way of prefacing sentences with a single word. A pop. He wants your attention. He wants you to understand him. So he begins.

“Listen,”

“Listen, I’ve done everything I could to be the best player I could be …”

“Listen, there are three things that I’m missing in my career …”

“Listen, I’ve been in the lead many times going into a final round …”

Horschel is 37 and his career is a contradiction, so yes, he wants to be understood. Maybe now more than ever because in this moment, at a time in his golfing life when every wavelength seems ready to come together for a climax, he’s self-aware enough to realize that this could very well be a final chance.

Leading the Open Championship by one shot with one round to play, Horschel, in the 342nd start of his PGA Tour career, is 18 holes away from his first major championship. He will be paired Sunday with little-known South African Thirston Lawrence in the final group of the fourth round of this 152nd Open. He is one shot ahead of a pack of players, including Lawrence, Sam Burns, Russell Henley, Xander Schauffele, Justin Rose and Daniel Brown. Looming, at two shots back, is World No. 1, Scottie Scheffler.

It won’t be easy, but that, Horschel said, is how he likes it.

“I’ve just always embraced the toughness of anything,” he said after a 2-under-par 69 on Saturday.

Horschel navigated Troon with a variety of bumping chips, creative approaches and accurate tee shots. The result was a move from a fourth-place tie to a solo lead and a radical moment in what this week could end up meaning to Horschel.

“It means a little bit more – we all know that, we know what this means to everyone,” he said early Saturday evening in Troon. “I know what it means to my legacy in the game of golf and what I want to do and accomplish.”

This wasn’t an admission, as much as it was an acknowledgement of the obvious. Listen …

Horschel finished last month’s PGA Championship in an eighth-place tie. It was what should’ve amounted to a nice week for a player of his caliber and station in the game. The $521,417 was a drop in the bucket for a 13-year pro with more than $37 million in career earnings, plus endorsements. Horschel was never particularly a threat to win at Valhalla, but a final-round 64 vaulted him up the leaderboard. It was a completely unmemorable result.

Except it wasn’t. Not for Horschel, at least.

The man’s résumé has never added up. A four-time college All-American at Florida. A top-five finish in his first U.S. Open as a pro in 2013. A FedEx Cup championship in 2014. Eight wins on the PGA Tour. More than 30 top-five finishes. A well-known name with a well-regarded game. All the fixings.

And, yet, completely irrelevant when it matters the most.

From his third-place finish at Merion in 2013 to his eight-place finish at Valhalla, Horschel appeared in 38 majors over 11 years. The results: Zero top-15 finishes, 17 top-50 finishes, and 13 missed cuts. For any elite player, not winning majors is one thing, but being a nonfactor is something else entirely.

Not long ago, in 2022, Horschel delivered a breakthrough, or rebreakthrough, of sorts, capturing the Memorial Tournament for his biggest win since his seismic 2014 summer. At 35, he appeared in the throes of a resurgence, saying that week at Muirfield Village, “Obviously, my major record is pretty abysmal, but I feel very confident with what we’ve done over the last two years.”

Then Horshell went and shot 73-71 over two days at Brookline, missing the cut by a stroke. In 2023, he missed two more major cuts while finishing 52nd at the Masters and tied for 43 at the U.S. Open.

It’s been the story of a career fir which most tour players otherwise would kill.

He’s been asked about the paradox endlessly over the years, and was asked once again Sunday.

“I want to win more than one major,” Horschel said. “I’m also content that, if a major doesn’t happen in my career, I can be satisfied with what I’ve done in the game of golf, that I’ve given it everything I’ve had. And if it’s not meant to be, it’s not meant to be.”

In so many ways, Horschel has long been an anomaly of sorts. A passion that can often boil over the brim has rubbed some people the wrong way over the years. The result has been the creation of a caricature. For a long time, that’s exactly what Horschel saw when he looked in the mirror. He’s spent recent years working to embrace and understand and use all the good and bad parts of his disposition.

His longtime swing coach Todd Anderson explained in 2022: “I think he’s just gotten to a point where he says, ‘You know what? I’m just gonna be who I am and not go out and try to please everybody and be this perfect person. Because I’m never going to be that person.’ ”

That doesn’t mean he’s not often reminded of hard times.

Like the one back in 2016. Then 29 years old, Horschel shot an opening 67 here at Royal Troon, landing in a fourth-place tie after at the 145th Open Championship. Some thought he might finally be on the verge of sniffing some long-sought major tournament success.

Then came the next day. Playing in 30-mph winds and sideways rain, Horschel trudged around Troon with 85 swings, each one seemingly worse than the last, and collapsed across the finish line, missing the cut by six strokes. He was a portrait of Open ruin.

During his round that day, Horschel swung his hat around backward, keeping raindrops out of his eyes, and was lambasted in some sections of the press and on social media. Horschel saw it all, read it all, and let it all get to him.

But that was a long time ago.

On Saturday, the skies again opened above Troon, pouring down throughout the third round.

Horschell flipped his hat around again. There would be no 85 this time. Horschell rolled in birdies on 4, 6, 7 and 9 to turn in just 32 strokes, taking advantage of the few opportunities the course afforded.

The back nine, meanwhile, was the march of a man who played through some things and embraces toughness. On a soft course with thick air and a heavy wind, he forced his way around, turning would-be bogies into pars – the kinds of pars that win major championships. With a short game that was, in Justin Rose’s words, “unbelievable,” he made five up-and-downs on the back nine, nearly chipping in on 15, 16 and 17, and posted a back-nine 37 that felt so much better than any number can say.

Now everything is in front of Horschel. He said Saturday that he’s changed his approach to major championships in recent years. He’s convinced himself that his game is just as good as those who win these events. He worked on visualization techniques and put it into action this week.

“Manifest seeing myself holding the trophy before I go to sleep every night,” Horschel said Saturday. “Envisioning myself holding that trophy on 18, walking out to the crowd and being congratulated as Open champion.”

It’s right there. He’s looking right at it.