Crouched over his ball, his face was a mask of concentration and his blue shirt stained with sweat. His cap looked slightly too large for his head. As he prepared to play from nearly 100 yards down the fairway, silence fell over the big grandstand cupping the 18th green at Wentworth. His ball arced away from his clubface, up over a guardian stream and landed on the green, rolling to within a hand’s width of the hole. A birdie 4 was a formality and a tidal wave of voices roared their approval as he walked briskly towards the green.
Who was this golfer who was being cheered so loudly at one of the great golf courses in the United Kingdom? You might have guessed Justin Rose, the well-liked Englishman who had grown up not far away and often played here down the years. Or perhaps Rory McIlroy because it seems that wherever he competes, but particularly in the United Kingdom, McIlroy is like Vera Lynn, the singer who was so famous in the second world war and known as a nation’s sweetheart.
But it was not Rose, though earlier he had nearly holed his second shot to give the gallery something to cheer about. Nor was it McIlroy, because the Northern Irishman was not competing in this event. It was instead, er, … Billy Horschel, a man born and brought up in Florida.
Why was Horschel getting a hero’s welcome at this most English of golf courses where the castellated clubhouse is enmeshed in Virginia Creeper and in springtime gorgeous rhododendrons line the roads leading in? What is it about Horschel that makes him so popular in the United Kingdom?
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