TPC River Highlands has played host to a PGA Tour event in Cromwell, Conn., since 1984, when the tournament was called the Greater Hartford Open. It later became the Buick Open and, since 2007, has been the Travelers Championship.
The Travelers has become a staple of the PGA Tour: a popular stop for many of the game’s top players that today is a Signature Event.
“My favorite place to play basically in the world, and I look forward to it every year,” Keegan Bradley, who won the 2023 Travelers, said Wednesday.
Jordan Spieth also spoke warmly of the property.
“First and foremost, every time I come here, I think about maybe the coolest moment I’ve had, like moment in golf, which is in 2017 in that playoff,” Spieth said. “So it’s always fun to kind of relive that when I come here and get out on the course. I have great memories here.”
But TPC River Highlands, while beloved by players, faces an evolutionary question as the world’s best continue to hit the ball farther with the help of always-advancing modern equipment: Can courses properly challenge PGA Tour stars who routinely hit 300-plus-yard tee shots?
In 2023, Rory McIlroy, a proponent of rolling back the ball, bemoaned that modern technology had passed by TPC River Highlands. The PGA Tour and TPC River Highlands are constantly attempting to tweak the course to increase the challenge. This year, the tournament added a new tee box on the par-4 3rd hole, which had 3.5 times more birdies than bogeys in 2024.
Scottie Scheffler’s pre-tournament press conference at Travelers Championship
“We always ask players for their feedback and have used that to make sure that TPC River Highlands continues to challenge the best players in the world,” said Gary Young, the PGA Tour’s senior vice president for rules and competitions. “Changes to the course that have been made through the years have been well received, and we’re looking forward to another great tournament this year.
Young said the new tee at 3 adds 15 yards.
“The angle change requires a right-to-left ball flight and brings the fairway bunkers into play for the player who fails to turn the tee shot right to left,” he said.
While TPC River Highlands yields bushels of birdies, world No. 1 Scottie Scheffler doesn’t view that as a negative. To Scheffler, the focus shouldn’t be on the number under par but on what the course asks — and if it asks those questions in a fair manner.
“I think a proper test is good shots being rewarded and bad shots being punished,” Scheffler, the 2024 Travelers champion, said Wednesday when asked whether he felt River Highlands is too easy for the world’s best players. “I think this is one of the best golf courses for that. There’s opportunity out there, and there’s also punishment. You look at the closing stretch: 15, if you hit a good shot, you’ve got a birdie opportunity. If you try to bail out right, you’re going to be in a bunker short right of the green and have a 40-yard bunker shot, a hard shot. 16, if you hit a good shot, you’re going to have a good look at birdie. If you bail out and go long, it’s a tough chip down the hill. 17, you hit the fairway, you have a chance to hit in there close to the pin. If you hit it in the left rough, you probably can’t get to the green. That’s what we look for in golf courses, in terms of you want good shots to be rewarded and bad shots to be punished. It’s as simple as that.
“The winning score, I think people get way too caught up in. I’m not saying necessarily that even par is a bad winning score. Some weeks, like the U.S. Open, you hit two great shots and you’re going to get rewarded with a par. That’s fine. That’s good too. Across the board, the way we get tested in professional golf is very good. We play different types of golf courses, different types of grass, we play different types of winning scores. We just see different tests, and I think not one is better than the other.”
What Scheffler doesn’t want to see is the Tour tricking up courses to combat red numbers. To him, that doesn’t equate to a “proper” test.
“The most frustrating thing for me when I play a golf tournament is when you see good shots not getting rewarded and bad shots not being punished properly. That’s all we look for. Do we care that 22-under wins this week? No. I played good last year, and if they somehow change it to 12-under by making the pins in silly spots and doing things to trick up the golf course, what we want is a fair test. I think having birdies at the end sometimes is a pretty exciting finish. That’s really all there is to it.”
To Scheffler and many other Tour stars, TPC River Highlands checks that box and they welcome the changes because they know the golf course’s DNA won’t change with them.
