CROMWELL, Conn. — If being around smiling and contented people for extended periods of time sets you a bit on edge, then hopefully you avoided being anywhere near the TPC River Highlands golf course just south of Hartford and west of a lazy bend of the Connecticut River the past few days. If you’re OK with it, then welcome to Happyville.
From the moment a charter jet whisked the best players on the PGA Tour from the US Open last Sunday to the Travelers Championship, players and then fans entered what has turned into an annual feel-good zone where you really have to try to find anything to complain about. “They know that we’ll do anything for them,” said Andy Bessette, the Travelers executive vice president and chief administrative officer who serves as the unofficial goodwill ambassador of the tour stop that became a Signature Event for the first time this year. Advertisement Since the Hartford-based insurance company took over title sponsorship of the tournament in 2007, he has been on a mission “to prove that we can make this the best weekend in golf.
And we did it over many, many years. Now we’re hitting our stride.” It’s the only PGA Tour stop in New England, and the opportunity is not lost on fans.
From the moment they get out of their cars in the free parking lots and hear piped-in championship calls from CBS Sports’s Jim Nantz to the baskets of chapstick, sunscreen, and sunglasses just past security, there’s every conceivable shaded and unshaded o.