A well-traveled team has gone miles to build up the Travelers Championship
It’s hard for a PGA Tour event to distinguish itself.
There are the majors. There’s Major Lite: The Players. There are four World Golf Championships. There’s Memorial and Bay Hill. Then there are the four FedEx Cup playoff events. All offer big purses and prestige. Several offer a guaranteed paycheck just for showing up.
If your tournament isn’t one of those 15, then you have to really stand out among the other 30-plus PGA Tour events played each season to make it onto the schedules of the pro game’s top players.
It’s remarkable, then, that 39 players, fresh off the grind of the U.S. Open, traveled across the country from Washington to Connecticut to compete in this week’s Travelers Championship. That figure is yet another sign of the tournament’s resurrection since the Hartford-based insurance company took over as title sponsor in 2007.
The year after Travelers took over from Buick, which, at the time, had its name on four PGA Tour events, the old Greater Hartford Open offered 36 Official World Golf Ranking points to the winner. After a spike to 48 first-place points in 2009, the tournament has steadily climbed up from 38 in 2010 — to 44 in 2011, then 46 in 2012 and 48 each of the last two seasons. It’s not a major-caliber field, but, considering its perennial place after the U.S. Open, it’s a borderline miracle.
So what drives players to Hartford? It’s a confluence of factors.
TPC River Highlands, located outside of Hartford in nearby Cromwell, is a player-friendly course, inviting lower scores regardless of how far you can hit the ball off the tee. However, the property’s practice facility was one of the worst on the PGA Tour. So, Travelers and the PGA Tour, which owns the property, got together to transform it into one of the Tour’s best.
The tournament is also family friendly, with staffers planning activities for children during tournament week. Then there’s the U.S. Open charter that flies each year from the site of the national championship to Hartford. That plane has been a life-saver for some players, particularly those with a big family in tow the week of a major.
And, of course, money matters. The purse has gone up from $6 million in 2007 to $6.4 million this year.
It’s those kinds of amenities that get players talking, making evangelists of some and converts of others. New England native Keegan Bradley has been telling his buddy and fellow Jupiter, Fla., Bear’s Club member Luke Donald about the Travelers. Donald’s curiosity was piqued, so he put Hartford on his schedule.
“I play a lot with Keegan, and he’s always asking what tournaments I’m playing,” Donald said. “And he told me he thought I should go play Travelers because the course fits the way I play and that it was a good fit for my game.
“That time between the U.S. Open and the Open Championship has always been pretty hectic, so I hadn’t thought about playing Travelers too much in the past. But thanks to Keegan’s recommendation and that of some other players, I decided to play this year.”
Tournament director Nathan Grube and Travelers, led by its executive vice president Andy Bessette, however, don’t simply wait for the referrals to roll in. Each year, they get together to target a few top-name players with the goal of getting them to say yes to their tournament, even if for one year.
“We go out on Tour to four or fives times a year, and we plan,” Grube said. “We look at the guys who have sometimes played us, never played us and some who are on the fence, and we’ll strategically seek out that guy or his agent. We target about 30 guys per year. We try to find out what they like and don’t like, and if it’s something we can change. Is it the date, or the course, or something else?”
Here’s an example of something Grube and his team couldn’t fix. The team aimed for Rory McIlroy, but were stymied in 2014 by a European Tour schedule that put the Irish Open opposite the Travelers. No dice.
A few years ago, Stewart Cink, a tournament loyalist, couldn’t make the event. It was the week of his son’s high school graduation. Not much to be done.
The tournament has gone the extra mile to get players to give their event a try. It could range from serving as a pseudo-concierge service for players to pairing pros with their favorite celebrities in the Wednesday pro-am.
Dustin Johnson showed up last year to play despite it being the week of his 30th birthday. The tournament went out of its way to make that weekend special.
“There’s no real silver bullet,” Grube said, “but I can go up and down the top 50 right now and tell you why or why not they’re playing us.”
The tournament has also worked hard to earn the loyalty of up-and-coming players by extending exemptions to them when they’re highly touted amateurs or newly minted pros. Consider Hunter Mahan, who has become an advocate for the event among his peers. Or Patrick Cantlay, who shot a PGA Tour amateur-record 60 there in 2011.
That trend continues this week with Arizona State standout Jon Rahm getting in the field. Rahm already has a top-five finish on the PGA Tour this season, coming at the Waste Management Phoenix Open. It made sense to invite him to Hartford with the hope that he’ll become a solid pro and repay this exemption with future appearances.
It makes sense that a tournament sponsored by an insurance company would want to build a foundation for its future. The hands-on approach has clearly worked, particularly to the satisfaction of Travelers, which last year announced a 10-year extension to remain title sponsor through 2024.
“I have never worked with or heard of a title sponsor like Travelers,” Grube said. “I probably meet with Travelers twice a day throughout the year. We meet every Friday for an hour. I’ve never heard of another tournament having that close of a relationship.
“From where I sit, that’s why they signed the 10-year extension. They feel a part of what we’re doing and that this an extension of their brand.”
Ryan Ballengee is a Yahoo Sports contributor. Find him on Facebook and Twitter.
