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Following two back-to-back designated events, the PGA Tour is returning with the 2023 Honda Classic. The event is set to be played at the PGA National Members Club in Palm Beach Gardens, Florida, from February 23 to 26.
Ahead of its start, the Honda Classic has already received an underwhelming response owing to its limited field. PGA Tour star Billy Horschel has now come out to state the same. The golfer claimed that he was “disappointed” by the field. Stating that the PGA Tour has over “47 different sponsors”, the American asked the tour to get more of the biggest names back to the event.
Speaking to the media ahead of the Honda Classic’s start, Billy Horschel said, as quoted by Sky Sports:
"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.”
He went on to state that it wasn’t always like this.
Horschel added:
"But when I was out on tour early in my career, this was a hot event. You had 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."
It is pertinent to note that the Honda Classic returns this week without a single top-10 player in the world competing. Unlike last week’s Genesis Invitational at the Riviera Golf Course in California, the Classic misses star names like Tiger Woods, Rory McIlroy, and Jon Rahm on the field.
The event, which will end Honda’s 42-year run as a title sponsor on the PGA Tour, is headlined by the likes of Sungjae Im, Shane Lowry, and Sepp Straka. Several golfers, including the world's top 10, have taken the week off to rest ahead of the Arnold Palmer Invitational and The Players.
Horschel calls on PGA Tour to change things
Billy Horschel, a South Florida native, stated that several golfers live in the area. He called on the PGA Tour to find a solution to get the star names back on the field.
The 36-year-old said:
"You've got 30 to 40 PGA Tour pros that live within a couple miles of this place and I think you've only got a handful of them playing this week. That's disappointing, it really is.”
He added:
"The (PGA) Tour needs to understand that, that when you have 40 guys here that could stay in their bed, hop in their car and drive 10, 15 minutes to a tournament, they need to make sure that they're putting this in the right spot (in the schedule) so they get all those top players playing here on a regular basis… We used to have two tournaments down in South Florida, here and at Doral. Now we only have one. We're not going to lose this one. I've been told that we're going to stay here.”
While he raised some concerns about the event’s future, Horschel also claimed that the PGA tour had guaranteed a better spot for it in the future.
