LEFTY MAKES IT RIGHT
How Phil Mickelson and organizers kept Greater Hartford Open afloat after it nearly went broke in 2002
The afternoon of June 23, 2002, was a complicated one for organizers of the Canon Greater Hartford Open. Phil Mickelson had just won the annual tournament at TPC River Highlands in Cromwell, holding off Davis Love III and Jonathan Kaye by a single stroke to capture his second consecutive tournament title. The golf had been good, the crowds had been strong, and the world’s No. 2 player had supplied fans the show they had hoped for.
But as Mickelson left with a trophy and $720,000 in prize money, organizers walked off with serious concerns about the future of the tournament. Canon had announced it would pull its title sponsorship, and amid a poor economy, no replacement had stepped forward. Now, with less than a year to
prepare for the 2003 event, the threat was existential.
“We’re clearly in a position where the tournament is at risk,” Roger Gelfenbien, chairman of the GHO title sponsor advisory group, said that October. “I hate to say that, but it’s the reality of the situation. We’re racing the clock, and if we’re not in a significantly better place in three weeks, I think we’re going to have to tell people we’re off the tour in 2003.”
Today, that crisis seems like ancient history. As Mickelson returns to Cromwell for the first time since 2003, the 67-year-old tournament, now called the Travelers Championship, appears healthy as ever, with robust attendance each year and a dependable roster of top-ranked players.
So how did Connecticut’s tournament survive the verge of collapse to become, once again, a prime destination event for the world’s best golfers? It began with kind words from Mickelson, a slew of frantic phone calls and just enough money at just the right time.
The void left by Canon
The tournament’s existential crisis began in August 2001, when Canon announced it would pull its title sponsorship after nearly two decades, citing a poor economy and a “change in strategy.”
At first, tournament officials expressed confidence that a new title sponsor would emerge, but by the following year, when Mickelson returned to town and defended his championship, the situation had become desperate. The PGA Tour was thriving at a time when Tiger Woods was must-see television each weekend, but as prize money had increased, sponsors had begun to balk.
“I think I was expecting the PGA Tour to help us find somebody very quickly, but that didn’t turn out to be the case,” Gelfenbien recalled recently. “We were on our own. And we all worked real hard to try to find somebody.”
Samsung was rumored as a potential replacement for Canon that September, but a deal never materialized. With the U.S. economy hovering just above 0 percent GDP growth and the stock market mid-downturn, raising money continued to prove difficult.
In October 2002, GHO officials announced that they had about five weeks to find either a title sponsor or $4 million in funding for a “bridge plan,” or the tournament would be canceled.
“There was a lot of debate about whether or not we should tell people what was going on,” Gelfenbien said. “Because we didn’t want to scare people, but at the same time, if we didn’t tell people and then we had to close down the tournament, people would have said, ‘Why didn’t you tell me you were in that kind of trouble?’”
On Oct. 10, 2002, Gelfenbien delivered the bad news.
“I was afraid from the start that we’d reach the 11th hour if a title sponsor didn’t step up, and we have,” Gelfenbien said at the time. “We would disappoint a great number of people if we’re not able to continue, but I’m hopeful we can avoid that situation.”
Taking a ‘bridge year’
With a title sponsor unlikely to come forward in time for the 2003 GHO, officials focused on their “bridge plan.” If organizers raised enough money by Nov. 18, they could ensure another year of golf in Cromwell while continuing the search for a longterm title sponsor.
Then-tournament director Dan Baker remembers telling corporate executives about the programs the Greater Hartford Jaycees would continue to fund with money raised by the GHO, while pitching them on the exposure the tournament brought to the Hartford area. He spoke of meeting business leaders from as far away as South Africa and Sweden who had watched the tournament on TV and marveled at the crowds.
“When we told that story to a lot of the companies, I think that resonated,” he said. “This was a chance to keep an international sporting event in the state.”
It helped to have support from Mickelson, then ranked No. 2 in the world. Baker recalls the two-time defending GHO champ issuing a spirited quote about his desire to see the tournament continue.
“Having a quote from Phil to be able to put out there was really big,” Baker said. “We couldn’t have had a better defending champion for that period of time.”
Just as the situation seemed impossibly desperate, local businesses began to open their wallets. On Oct. 10, 2002, the tournament was short $2.7 million. By Oct. 22, it needed $2 million. On Oct. 31, it was still down $1.5 million. But by Nov. 11, Gov. John Rowland (who had offered to use state money to save the GHO) said organizers were “close enough” to their goal to secure a date for the next year’s event. And on Nov. 13, Jaycees president Larry Wilder announced that the tournament had been saved thanks to $3.75 million in contributions from 32 sponsors.
“We used every chit we had. There’s nothing left in our wallets,” Gelfenbien said then.
“That was a lot of sleepless nights,” Ted May, a former GHO commissioner who served on the tournament’s title sponsor advisory committee, remembered recently. “We’d just had our 50th anniversary. The tournament is such a part of sports history in Connecticut, and there were a group of us who weren’t going to let it fail. But we needed the businesses to support it.”
The GHO proceeded as planned in 2003, with Peter Jacobsen winning the event for the second time. That July, officials announced a new deal with Buick that would turn the Canon Greater Hartford Open into the Buick Championship.
The tournament had its title sponsor. The “bridge year,” as Baker called it, was officially over.
Upward trajectory
The tournament would face another crisis in 2005, when Buick announced that it would not maintain its title sponsorship beyond its initial three-year commitment and the PGA Tour pulled Cromwell’s summer date for 2007.
Connecticut had largely resigned itself to hosting an event in the less prestigious Champions Tour when, in the spring of 2006, a spot opened on the PGA Tour’s summer calendar and Travelers leaped aboard as title sponsor.
“It was a whirlwind,” said Nathan Grube, who has served as tournament director since 2005. “Within a matter of weeks, we were going from, ‘Are we a Champions Tour event? How are we going to get a title sponsor for a Champions Tour event?’ to all of a sudden putting together a press conference and announcing that we had a local title sponsor on the regular tour and that we had a date back.”
Since then, the tournament has followed a steady upward trajectory. Attendance has risen during the Travelers era, reaching 290,000 fans in 2017. The tournament’s field has improved as well, with topranked players flocking to Cromwell each summer, no matter where on the calendar Travelers falls relative to larger events. This year, 14 of golf ’s top 25 players have committed to the event, including Mickelson, world No. 1 Brooks Koepka and three-time tournament champion Bubba Watson. Twice in a row, Travelers has won the Players Choice Award, which recognizes services, hospitality, attendance and quality of the course.
Sometimes, Grube looks back on that wobbly period in Travelers history and thinks about how things could have gone differently, either in 2002 when the event barely pulled off its bridge plan, or in 2006, when it faced demotion.
“I almost feel like I’m in an Avengers movie, with all the different timelines we could have been on,” Grube said. “I think about stuff like that all the time, and I wonder where we would have been.”