From Insurance City To Travelers: Connecticut’s PGA Tour Story Still Has Soul
Charlie Sifford smiles after winning the 1967 Greater Hartford Open, a landmark victory in the tournament now known as the Travelers Championship and an important chapter in both Connecticut golf and PGA Tour history.
The Travelers Championship has always been more than a week on the PGA Tour schedule.
It is a Connecticut golf story.
That is easy to forget in the modern Signature Event era, when the field list, purse and FedExCup points get most of the attention. This week’s Travelers Championship at TPC River Highlands has all of that. It is a $20 million event, the final Signature Event of the 2026 PGA Tour season and one of the strongest fields in the game.
But its history reaches much farther back than that.
The tournament began in 1952 as the Insurance City Open. Ted Kroll won the first edition. The event later became the Greater Hartford Open and eventually the Travelers Championship after Travelers became title sponsor in 2007.
That kind of longevity matters.
A tournament does not last 75 years by accident.
The Early Connecticut Identity
Before TPC River Highlands became the tournament’s home, the event spent decades building a local identity through Hartford-area golf.
Its winner list quickly gained weight. Sam Snead won in 1955. Arnold Palmer followed in 1956, earning his first PGA Tour victory in the United States. Billy Casper became one of the tournament’s great figures, eventually winning four times.
The names changed as the eras changed, but the event kept its Connecticut personality.
It was never the biggest tournament on the calendar.
It was something else.
It was dependable. It was rooted. It was part of the state’s summer sports rhythm.
Charlie Sifford And A Historic 1967 Win
Any serious history of this tournament has to include Charlie Sifford.
In 1967, Sifford won what was then the Greater Hartford Open, a victory that still belongs among the most meaningful moments in the event’s history. Sifford’s place in golf history is larger than one tournament, but Connecticut was one of the stages where that history became visible.
For collectors and historians, this is one of the reasons the Travelers lineage matters. Programs, tickets and newspaper coverage tied to that period are not just tournament artifacts. They are pieces of a broader American golf story.
TPC River Highlands Gives The Event Its Modern Stage
TPC River Highlands has hosted the tournament since 1991, and the move helped define its modern identity.
The course is short by current PGA Tour standards, but that has become part of its charm. It creates scoring runs. It creates late drama. It creates a finishing stretch that fans can understand instantly.
No. 15 is a drivable par 4 where a player can make eagle or stumble into big trouble. No. 16 brings water and a demanding par 3. No. 17 asks for courage and precision. No. 18 gives the gallery one final amphitheater moment.
That is why the Travelers produces memories.
Modern Moments That Stick
Jim Furyk’s 58 in 2016 remains one of the tournament’s defining modern moments and one of the great scoring achievements in PGA Tour history.
Jordan Spieth’s bunker hole-out to win the 2017 playoff is another. The image of Spieth jumping in celebration at TPC River Highlands became instantly tied to the tournament’s identity.
Suzy Whaley’s 2003 start added another important chapter, as she became the first woman in decades to qualify for a PGA Tour event.
More recently, Keegan Bradley has given New England fans a player who feels like their own. Bradley won in 2023 and again in 2025, and his connection to the region adds a local heartbeat to the tournament’s modern chapter.
Why The Travelers Still Works
Some tournaments survive because they are old.
The Travelers has survived because it kept becoming relevant again.
It has history. It has a recognizable venue. It has a community identity. It has produced records, breakthroughs, local heroes and moments people still talk about.
That is heritage.
Not just dates and names.
A living tournament with a memory.