Dom Amore: As PGA Tour evolves, Travelers Championship expects to be, and should remain top-shelf

CROMWELL, Conn. — For 20 years, the Travelers Championship has brought world-class golf to our neck of the woods. The tournament’s hierarchy took a struggling PGA stop and ran with it, making it a must-play for most of the top players in the world, and a keeper for the pro golf establishment.

And while pro golf has undergone quite a lot of upheaval these last few years, the Travelers has been a cocoon as the storms passed, LIV Golf being the most dangerous. As the Tour started to separate haves and have nots, the Travelers has always been on the right side of the tracks.

So when the PGA’s Enterprises Board rolled into town on Tuesday to announce its vision for future of, it was encouraging for the locals to hear the words of Brian Rolapp, who came from the NFL to revamp things as CEO and, it was announced, will also succeed Jay Monahan as PGA commissioner next year.

“This has been an extremely successful tournament by every metric,” Rolapp said. “Our members love it, they’ve been an amazing partner, we’ve obviously got an affinity for this course. This is a market that doesn’t get many professional sports, so it’s an opportunity for us. They do a wonderful job, so I think they do a lot of things we’re looking for in a Championship Series event.”

Championship Series is the working title for what will become the tournaments, roughly 24 including the majors, that will draw the top players on the Tour, with an eye on attracting bigger TV money. The Challenger Series will be for the best of the rest, and safe to say it’s not where The Travelers wants to be, nor should be.

Before Monahan and Rolapp announced the changing of the guard and the changes to the Tour, Tiger Woods stood on the stage in a business suit, offering support in his first public appearance since his DUI arrest in March. In town for the Executive Board meetings, his inclusion lent gravitas to the moment.

“This is an exciting moment for the game of golf,” Woods said, reading from a prepared statement. “It has been a privilege to lead the Future Competition Committee and I am proud of the work we have done to build the best version of the PGA Tour for future generations of players and fans.”

The Championship Series, with roughly 130 players, and Challenger Series will be separated by promotion criteria, the kind of which pro golf has not had before, with pathways for players to move up or down. The Championship tier events will have purses of at least $20 million, much like the current Signature Events, which includes the Travelers. The schedule, yet to be determined, will be trimmed. Challenger Series players will get less money, of course, but more money than the current Korn Ferry Tour. Sponsor exemptions will be eliminated.

The changes, approved nearly unanimously, are indeed sweeping, but at the end of this day it is how all of this will impact the Travelers that matters around here.

“It was nice of (Rolapp) to say that what we do here at the Travelers is really good and would easily fit into the Championship model,” said Andy Bessette, the Travelers VP/chief administrative officer. “You only have to get out and talk to the players, every player, every player’s wife, every player’s caddie wants to be here. … We’re not going to change the way we do it. We’ve been at it for 20 years, and we’re going to just keep getting better and better and better.”

Tournament director Nathan Grube was also optimistic. The Travelers, which has 49 of the top 50 golfers on the PGA Tour in the field this year, is signed on as a title sponsor through 2032, and signed on with the PGA Tour to be a Signature Event through 2030. What that means when Signature Events become something else in 2028, or what the new schedule will look like, is to be determined. The Travelers is expected to be Championship Series event in 2028, according to ESPN.

“I think our best years are ahead of us,” Grube said. “Looking where the Tour is going, what the model is going to be, what people are going to be investing in The Tour, I think the best years are in the future for the Travelers Championship and I could not be more excited.”

Certainly, Rolapp, even as an all-business sports executive, would not have come to the TPC River Highlands to announce, or hint, that the future of this tournament is up in the air. His words were encouraging, but there was no commitment. There is a baby elephant in this room, not a threat right now, but in Connecticut we are all too familiar with how these large-trunked mammals can grow and stomp us off the map of big-time sports.

The eight current Signature Events are expected to remain as top-tier events at the outset: AT&T Pebble Beach Pro-Am, Genesis Invitational, Arnold Palmer Invitational, RBC Heritage, Cadillac Championship, Truist Championship, Memorial Tournament and the Travelers. All good so far. But under Rolapp, the PGA has been talking about getting into bigger markets to attract better TV deals. Currently, the Travelers is the only stop in this part of the country. The Tour is said to be targeting places like Boston, Denver, New York, Philadelphia, San Francisco, Seattle and Washington, D.C.

Big markets … TV money … Sound familiar?

Folks who lived through the Whalers departure, and the soon-to-be-ended Connecticut Sun saga, know how this movie has ended in the past, and with the conspiracy theorist’s space in the brain, can imagine a scenario where the new-look PGA Tour considers New York and Boston “big league” and squeezes Connecticut onto the kid’s table.

That kind of tournament worked for our grandparents’ Greater Hartford Open, but the way the Travelers, which raised more than $4 million for local charities in 2025, has been run, the way it has grown and the crowds it attracts, it demands and deserves a permanent place in the PGA’s major league, or whatever term they use going forward.

“The more the leadership has seen what this event does at this venue, I think they’ve just been impressed,” Grube said. “It’s a really unique piece of property. This golf course is fun, it’s special for the fans, for the players. When you see the theater it creates, I think they know they have something special here.”