FORCE OF FIELD
Travelers next to benefit from roster of top golfers
THE TRAVELERS Championship is on the clock.
With the RBC Heritage Championship concluding play on Sunday, the Travelers becomes the third of the first four PGA Tour events on the 2020 reschedule due to the COVID-19 crisis to be played without spectators.
And, like the RBC Heritage and last week’s Charles Schwab Challenge, the Travelers will benefit from its strongest field in tournament history.
After three months with no tournaments because of the pandemic, the players have been hungry to return to competition. And tournaments like the Travelers, which always battled a difficult slot in the schedule as the next event after the U.S. Open, have been the beneficiaries.
The Travelers, which begins Thursday at TPC River Highlands, will treat golf fans to the top seven players in the official world rankings and nine of the top 10 in the world.
“We’re excited that Connecticut is part of bringing sports back to the world stage,’’ Nathan Grube, the tournament director, told The Post. “It’s obviously going to be different without our fans. But with the field that’s here, you give the best players in the world a stage and amazing stuff is going to happen. And we’ll remember this tournament for the amazing stuff that happened.’’
The Travelers is similar to the RBC Heritage in that, on the usual PGA Tour schedule, it follows a major championship. Those are the tournaments that generally have the most difficulty drawing the top players to their fields.
The RBC Heritage traditionally is the week after the Masters, and that usually leads to a mediocre field devoid of the top players in the world. The Travelers has gone to great lengths in recent years to draw stronger fields by offering an all-expenses-paid charter flight for players and caddies from wherever the U.S. Open is played straight to Hartford, Conn.
That has helped, but it’s never produced a field like it will have this year.
Rory McIlroy, ranked No. 1, will play this week. So, too, will Brooks Koepka, Dustin Johnson, Justin Thomas, Jon Rahm, Phil Mickelson, Patrick Reed, Justin Rose, Jason Day and Jordan Spieth, the 2017 champion.
“The guys are so excited to be back,’’ Grube said. “That’s the general feeling I’m getting when talking to players and their agents. The guys are excited about playing. We’re very fortunate how things are shaking out.’’ Fortunate yes. Deserving, too. For years, Grube and Andy Bessette, the executive vice president and chief administrative officer at Travelers, have been fixtures at a number of the tournaments leading up to the Travelers, visiting with players and their agents in an effort to cajole them into coming to Connecticut.
This is a regular behind-thescenes exercise that takes place at many tournaments during the year. Some tournament directors are more successful at attracting the top players than others. Grube and Bessette might be the hardestworking duo in the business, more present than many of their peers.
In the case of this current coronavirus-altered schedule, that kind of schmoozing hasn’t really been needed. Firstly, the Travelers this year does not follow the U.S. Open, because the U.S. Open was postponed from this past week to September. Secondly, the threemonth layoff has the players itching to play again.
It’s turned into a win-win. Tournaments like the Travelers win with the strong fields. And the players win because they’re competing against the best and get to measure their respective games.
“The fields are really good,’’ Johnson said this past week from the RBC Heritage. “They’re just as strong as any event we’ll play all year really — especially these first three weeks. It’s good too to kind of know where your game’s at. It’s great really for the tournaments.’’
McIlroy said, “It feels great to look down the range and see most of the top players in the world’’ playing these events.
“That’s what we all want,’’ McIlroy said. “We all want to play against the best fields week in, week out. I guess it’s silver lining to this [pandemic] — that it seems like all the top guys are going to play a little more often going forward, and that’s a good thing for the tour and for us and for the people at home that are watching.’’