Billy Horschel remembers watching the BMW PGA Championship as a child.

Unlike this week’s tournament, the event was played in May, which coincided with the first week of school summer break in Grant, Fla., a fishing town midway down the state’s east coast where Horschel, 37, grew up.

Instead of heading to the golf course that week, the 10-year-old Horschel said he asked his mother to let him stay home and watch the televised golf at the Wentworth Club in Surrey, England, where the idea of the Ryder Cup was born in 1926.

And it was good golf to watch. Some of the greats of the European Tour (now the DP World Tour) were winning the event in the 1990s: José María Olazábal and Bernhard Langer, both two-time Masters champions; Ian Woosnam, a Masters champion and force on the European Tour; and Colin Montgomerie, the Ryder Cup great who won the tournament in 1998, 1999 and 2000.

“I was a golf fanatic as a kid and I still am,” said Horschel, who now lives up the Florida coast in Ponte Vedra Beach. “I remember saying I want to be part of that tournament one day.”

In 2019, when the BMW PGA Championship was moved to the fall, Horschel played in it for the first time because there was no conflict with his PGA Tour schedule.

“It was amazing to be able to walk on that course,” he said. “Like any tournament, TV never really does it justice. Right away I fell in love with the golf course. I understood what it required.”

Horschel did not play the BMW PGA Championship in 2020, but when he returned the following year, he won the tournament by a stroke.

“I was chasing the leader and had to birdie a few holes coming in to have a chance to win,” he said. “I had to be aggressive. It wasn’t until after Laurie Canter missed his putt that it sunk in that I just won this amazing event, the fifth or sixth best event in the world, that I’d watched as a kid on TV.”

In the span between when Horschel watched the tournament as a boy and won it as a professional golfer, much changed at Wentworth. But the 1990s and the 2020s serve as two points on a bridge between the old European Tour — a largely cloistered collection of western European players — and the more international DP World Tour of today

Wentworth, long the home to the European Tour, has gone from hosting a tournament that was the premier event for European pros at a time when far fewer were crisscrossing the globe, to being an elite stop for the best international players.

One thing that is consistent is the course, originally designed by Harry Colt, an esteemed British architect. It presents a stern test of golf for whichever players qualify, as it has for decades through different restorations and times of the year.

“The normal European Tour players always looked forward to the PGA Championship a lot, maybe more so than the [British] Open because it was ‘our’ championship, run by our tour staff at the home of the European Tour,” said Peter Teravainen, an American who was a member of the European Tour when Horschel was watching as a child.

He played the event for 14 consecutive years, from 1984 to 1997. His best finish tied for 13th in 1991 when Seve Ballesteros beat Montgomerie in a playoff.

Teravainen, who lives in Singapore today, recalled a much different course with much different conditions from what the players will see this week. The old third green in particular still sticks out for him.

“It was one of the craziest greens I ever played,” he said. “There was a massive false front to an elevated green. But once you got to the top of the false front, the green fell away from that point down to the back of the green.” (It has since been changed.)

Yet in the 1990s, not just the course but the players and how they lived were so different from today.

“The European Tour was much more rough and tumble than the U.S. tour back then,” said Michael Bamberger, who caddied for Teravainen and wrote about the experience in “To The Linksland: A Golfing Adventure,” which was recently rereleased. “Some of these players had five or six different currencies in their wallet. They were paying cash money for their caddies and their digs. If you got a free dinner in the clubhouse, you took advantage of it.”

“Nick Faldo and those guys were elites, and they had the best of everything,” Bamberger said. “The rest were just hopeful they could play good enough golf to stay in it. The main thing was you loved this game and you loved to travel. The whole thing was windblown and I loved that part about it.”

Today, Wentworth is more manicured than windblown. But it’s become an annual social event for people coming from London, similar to what the Masters is to Augusta, Ga., and the Players Championship is to Ponte Vedra Beach.

This has not happened by accident.

“The event has changed a lot since I first became involved in 2006,” said Kit Gartrell, the championship director for the BMW PGA Championship. “There’s been major redevelopment at Wentworth that has had an impact inside and outside the ropes. There have been two renovations of the course — the first was significant but too harsh; the second changed the profiles of the greens.”

Gartrell said moving the event to the fall had allowed the course to be in better shape, which in turn had helped to attract international players. “In the old May date, they had some challenges with the greens that didn’t help bring in players,” he said. “But they also amended the old Harry Colt design of 18. Before there was no jeopardy in it. Now there’s the water hazard, with the cauldron of fans we create around it. The roar is really special.”

When Alex Noren hit a six iron to within inches of that hole in 2017, to shoot the course record and win the tournament, the sounds reverberated throughout the property, Gartrell said.

The other part of the tournament that is different today from Tervainen’s playing days and Horschel’s TV watching is the fan experience. It’s more like a major sporting event than a golf tournament, with better food, a celebrity pro-am and bands to entertain at night.

“We were trying to diversify the product so we’re not just relying on what’s going on inside the ropes,” Gartrell said. “When that final putt goes in, everyone is enjoying themselves. It’s a nice family atmosphere with its history; the golfing tradition is at the center of that.”

The DP World Tour’s partnership with the PGA Tour has helped across both areas. “We look at it as a rising tide lifts all boats,” said Christian Hardy, the senior vice president of international at the PGA Tour. “When a player on the PGA Tour says I want to go compete in the DP World Tour’s PGA Championship, before it would have been, ‘we wish you would play in XYZ tournament.’ Today it’s, ‘we’re glad you can go over and play there.’ ”

Horschel, who will be playing this week, loves the fan support and the roar of the crowds. But he credits the event’s placement on the calendar with bringing in international pros and elevating its status.

“It’s always had its place on the European Tour as a marquee event, as their Players Championship,” he said. “Moving it to September gives it bigger recognition. There is no big event on the PGA Tour at that time, so it’s elevated the BMW PGA to another level.”

“Players,” he added, “are realizing how great this course is now.”