PGA's stars indeed are coming to New England, at Travelers Championship in Connecticut

If you’ve ever considered attending the Travelers Championship at TPC River Highlands in Cromwell, Connecticut, this is the year to do it.

The Travelers Championship is the only PGA Tour, PGA Tour Champions, LPGA Tour or LIV Golf event in New England in 2023, and it will be a designated event, assuring the tournament of a star-studded field.

The top PGA Tour players are allowed to skip only one of the 17 designated events, each of which has a purse of at least $20 million. Rory McIlroy will be docked $3 million for missing his second, the RBC Heritage, last month.

McIlroy, Scottie Scheffler, Patrick Cantlay, defending champion Xander Schauffele, Max Homa, Collin Morikawa, Justin Thomas, Cameron Young and Tony Finau already have committed to play in the Travelers, which will be held June 22-25. No. 1 Jon Rahm has yet to commit, but still has time.

Andy Bessette, executive vice president and chief administrative officer at Travelers, and Nathan Grube, Travelers Championship tournament director, traveled to the Wells Fargo Championship in Charlotte, North Carolina, this week to try to recruit more top players.

The tournament does everything it can to develop relationships with the players, their caddies and families. After Rahm won the Masters, Bessette texted him a note of congratulations, and Rahm replied with a heart.

Schauffele spoke remotely at the Travelers media day on Tuesday, but the tournament still managed to surprise him by placing a gift of cigars and a humidor under his table.

Last year, McIlroy told Bessette that a few other tournaments had coffee bars on their ranges, and he recommended that the Travelers add one. So this year, the range at the Travelers will have not only a coffee bar, but a coffee and ice cream bar. Yeah, PGA Tour golfers are spoiled, but they’re fun to watch, and TPC River Highlands is less than an hour and a half drive from Worcester.

Designated event enhances draw

The PGA Tour staged designated events with their elevated purses this year in an attempt to prevent more golfers from jumping to the big money, no-cut tournaments of LIV Golf.

The $20 million purse and first-place check of $3.6 million this year are by far the most in Travelers’ history. The previous highs were last year when Schauffele pocketed $1,494,000 of the $8.3 million purse.

Last year, the Travelers took place the week following the U.S. Open, which was held about a two-hour drive away at The Country Club in Brookline. There also was an LIV Golf event in Massachusetts at the International in Bolton on Labor Day weekend. LIV Golf is not returning to the International this year.

This year, for the third time in the last four years, the Travelers will provide the only opportunity for golf fans to watch the PGA Tour stars in person in New England.

Pleasant Valley CC in Sutton hosted 45 PGA Tour and LPGA Tour events from 1962-1999, and TPC Boston in Norton was the site of PGA Tour events from 2003-2018 and again in 2020.

Next year, the Travelers won’t have a monopoly on the New England golf fans because the U.S. Senior Open will be held at Newport CC in Newport, Rhode Island, June 27-30. The 2024 PGA Tour schedule has not been announced yet, but Grube expects the Travelers to continue to be held the week after the U.S. Open. Next year, the U.S. Open will be held June 13-16 at Pinehurst No. 2 in North Carolina, so the Travelers would be held June 20-23. The Travelers hasn’t been officially informed if it will remain a designated event.

“It’s important to us to be designated beyond 2023, very important,” Bessette said during the Travelers media day on Tuesday. “So we’ll see how that all ends up, but I feel good about it.”

Grube ranked becoming a designated event as one of the milestones for the tournament, along with appearing on national television for the first time in the 1970s, moving from Wethersfield CC to TPC River Highlands in 1984, attracting Travelers as title sponsor in 2007, and Travelers signing the first 10-year extension as title sponsor in PGA Tour history in 2020.

Grube pointed out that the Travelers beat out markets three and four times larger than Hartford to land a designated event.

Awaiting word on 'designated' decisions

Designated events may become limited-field, no-cut events next year. Grube said if the Travelers became a no-cut event, he thought the fans would benefit because they’d be assured of being able to watch the top players for all four days.

PGA Tour commissioner Jay Monahan said Wednesday that the 2024 schedule would be announced in late June or early July and that the designated events in 2024 would remain that way for the long term, disputing media reports that designated events would rotate from year to year.

Last August when Monahan announced that the PGA Tour would determine the sites of the last four designated events in 2023, Bessette wanted to make sure that Travelers would be one of them, and he got his way.

Bessette said at a tour meeting last fall, McIlroy and Tiger Woods told him that the Travelers had earned the right to be a designated event. That was high praise from Woods, who has never played at TPC River Highlands and won’t this year as he recovers from ankle surgery.

In the inaugural year of designated events in 2023, non-designated events haven’t drawn many of the top golfers because they are not obligated to play in them and the purses aren’t nearly as high.

“It’s serious money, but the thing that’s driving the players,” Bessette said, “is they all want to compete against the best.”

“It’s the best part of sports for me,” Schauffele said of competing against the top golfers. “It almost feels like we’re at the playoffs every time we’re at these elevated events.”

Longtime golf fans from the Worcester area may recall that in 1977 Jack Nicklaus played at PV for the first time in 12 years because it hosted a designated event. Nicklaus preferred bentgrass to PV’s bluegrass, but was required to play, and he drew huge crowds.

Grube said as a designated event and as the only golf tournaments in New England, the Travelers has seen an increased corporate support and ticket sales from as far away as Boston and New York. That also amounts to increased donations to charities.

The Travelers Championship donates 100 percent of its net proceeds to charities and has raised more than $25 million for nearly 900 local charities since 2007 when Travelers became title sponsor. Last year, the tournament donated more than $2.5 million to more than 100 charities and expects to top that this year.

Grube said the title sponsor and the PGA Tour share in the increased cost of the purse and that the charitable contribution will not be affected.

The Travelers usually draws some of the largest crowds and corporate support on the PGA Tour, but the numbers fell off during the height of the pandemic. They didn’t return to normal last year, but Grube expects them to this year. Being a designated event will help.

Last year, Schauffele trailed by a shot with one hole to go, but he ended up winning by two when he birdied 18 after Sahith Theegala double-bogeyed it. J.T. Poston shared second with Theegala. Schauffele finished at 19 under to post the sixth of his seven PGA Tour victories.

Michael Thorbjorsen, a 20-year-old amateur from Wellesley who had just completed his sophomore year at Stanford University, finished fourth on a sponsor’s exemption.

Last Sunday, Thorbjorsen was medalist at the Pac-12 men’s championship and led Stanford to the team championship by 13 strokes. He became Stanford’s 11th Pac-12 medalist, joining the likes of Woods (1996), Patrick Rodgers (2014) and Maverick McNealy (2015).

Thorbjorsen won the 2018 U.S. Junior Amateur and the 2021 Mass. Amateur and 2021 Western Amateur.

For tickets and tournament updates, visit TravelersChampionship.com.

Welcoming ideas

You can suggest story ideas for this golf column by reaching me at the email listed below. Comments are also welcomed.

—Contact Bill Doyle at bcdoyle15@charter.net. Follow him on Twitter@BillDoyle15.

This article originally appeared on Telegram & Gazette: PGA's finest stars are coming to Travelers Championship in Connecticut