Billy Horschel, back to defend WGC-Dell Technologies Match Play title, on his current ‘golden era,’ his affinity for Texas and how even PGA Tour families have issues

BH: It’s funny, because from the outside, looking in, people would say that a lot of the things that the Tour’s doing right now is sort of reactive to the Saudi League or the Premier Golf League. And that couldn’t be further from the truth. The only thing they may have done that’s been reactive is the Player Impact Program. Everything else has always been in the works. We knew we were going to increase purses on the PGA Tour, depending on how well our negotiations go with our media rights — our new TV contracts. We knew if that went really well, our purses were going to substantially increase over the next decade. And that is the plan — we knew we were gonna get an influx of money from many different sources.

Right now I don’t think the Tour needs to do a whole lot. I talked to Jay (Monahan, PGA Tour commissioner) and said, you know, we just need to make sure that the model that we have … do we think it is sustainable in 25 years? I think we do need to change some things up because as we go further down the road, we are going to be asking more from our sponsors and our partners, asking for more money that’s the only way we grow. You can’t stay stagnant. I think there are some things that we can do in the PGA Tour as a product, in the sense of changing up the schedule or changing up how many cards we have out on the PGA Tour, where we maybe take a few cards away, but we get more access to the guys coming from the Korn Ferry Tour.

We have such a great foundation and the players are so, so supportive of the PGA Tour, to me, I wouldn’t totally be worried about another organization coming in and trying to challenge us. And at the same time, I don’t fault any other player who wants to go play somewhere else if they think they can gain more financial benefit for themselves. I’ve never been against that at all. If that’s what some other players want to do, then that’s fine. I just don’t like when someone goes out the door or is wanting to go out the door who then wants to take shots at, as you said, the PGA Tour, which is my family.