3-way tie for lead in Bahamas with Woods at the bottom

If at the conclusion of the first round of THE PLAYERS Championship on March 12, you had closed your eyes and covered your ears until right now, and then took stock of your surroundings, you’d wonder what the fuss is all about. Yet, this week’s Travelers Championship is the first PGA TOUR event since that hasn’t been rescheduled or canceled. The 3M Open in four weeks is the only other tournament remaining this season that hasn’t budged. For the locals, for the golfers and for golf fans everywhere, each presents a taste of life as it was once familiar. It was at last year’s Travelers in which Matthew Wolff and Viktor Hovland made their professional debuts. It also marked the first time that the duo competed in the same event as Collin Morikawa. A year later, each is a PGA TOUR winner and in the field of 156 at TPC River Highlands in Cromwell, Connecticut. Scroll past the projected contenders for additional details on the makeup of the field, the inviting host course and more. RELATED: Featured Groups, tee times POWER RANKINGS: TRAVELERS CHAMPIONSHIP Defending champion Chez Reavie will be reviewed in Tuesday’s Fantasy Insider with 2017 winner Jordan Spieth, Dustin Johnson, Patrick Reed, Jason Day and other notables. OK, so not everything with respect to the competition of the Travelers Championship is exactly the same. For one, the field reserved room for only two open qualifiers instead of the usual four. This is one of the modifications made for all six of the remaining opens due to the reduction of playing time for the Korn Ferry Tour graduates in 2019-20. Another staple of the construction of the field also has been affected by a ripple of the impact of the pandemic. Whereas TPC River Highlands has served as a timely backdrop for recently turned professionals right out of college, the option for college seniors to stay another year has sharpened the focus on just the two who will be making their PGA TOUR debuts as pros this week. Sahith Theegala and Peter Kuest launch a promised fortnight of action as each is committed to next week’s Rocket Mortgage Classic as well. Theegala was the National Player of the Year. The Pepperdine product rose to as high as No. 3 in the World Amateur Golf Ranking. He made his TOUR debut as the winner of the Collegiate Showcase ahead of the 2017 Genesis Invitational. Kuest, a 10-time winner at BYU, was the West Coast Conference Player of the Year and First-Team All-American. He’s never appeared in sanctioned competition. TPC River Highlands is as welcoming site and predictable test as it gets. While there are no fans this year – another deviation from the norm – the stock par 70 tipping at just 6,841 yards encourages the kind of aggressive thinking that they’d love. Last year’s scoring average of 69.724 aligned with all editions in recent memory. Chez Reavie’s 17-under 263 en route to victory matched Bubba Watson’s aggregate the previous year. Despite the absence of overall length and existence of four-inch primary rough, accuracy off the tee isn’t a prerequisite to contend. The objective is the classic combination of hitting greens and sinking putts on the Poa annua surfaces. Scrambling is the separator on targets averaging just 5,000 square feet. Reavie ranked T7 in GIR (at 75 percent), but he led his field in Strokes Gained: Approach-the-Green and Strokes Gained: Tee-to-Green. He’s always among the leaders in fairways hit, but he still needs his putter to pay off the precision. Case in point, he slotted 10th in Strokes Gained: Putting and second in scrambling. As is the case with many winners on most courses, he also led the field in par-4 scoring. The likelihood of rain early in the week could restrict the greens from reaching 12 feet on the Stimpmeter as prepared, but the course will dry out over the first three days of competition. The threat of another system doesn’t return until the weekend. Daytime temperatures will climb into the upper 80s. Winds will remain light until the energy intensifies. ROB BOLTON’S SCHEDULE PGATOUR.COM’s Fantasy Insider Rob Bolton recaps and previews every tournament from numerous angles. Look for his following contributions as scheduled. MONDAY: Rookie Ranking, Qualifiers, Reshuffle, Medical Extensions, Power Rankings TUESDAY*: Sleepers, Fantasy Insider * – Rob is a member of the panel for PGATOUR.COM’s Expert Picks for PGA TOUR Fantasy Golf, which also publishes on Tuesday.

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MELBOURNE, Australia – Marc Leishman has won four times on the PGA TOUR, but has yet to hoist a trophy of significance in his home country. He intends to rectify this hole in his resume this week. But the affable Australian and his partner Cameron Smith will have their work cut out for them at the ISPS Handa Melbourne World Cup of Golf, as 27 other teams are eyeing the same prize. With the fall portion of the FedExCup in the rearview, attention turns to the Southern Hemisphere for this week’s team competition. The Metropolitan Golf Club sits in the famed Sandbelt golf region of Melbourne and should present a great challenge. “I’ve won all around the world now and won some smaller events here in Australia, but winning a big event at home, apart from a major, that’s the next thing on the list,â€� Leishman said. “I’m really determined to obviously play really well here this week and try and win the World Cup with Cam. That would be huge.â€� Teams of two alternate between Foursomes and Fourball play, in much the same vein as the Zurich Classic of New Orleans. Smith is a former winner in New Orleans (with Swede Jonas Blixt), so he has experienced success in the format. Coming after the local favorites are several teams of note. Fresh off his win at the Mayakoba Golf Classic in Mexico, Matt Kuchar joins forces with Kyle Stanley as the United States tries to continue its dominance in the event. The U.S. has 24 World Cup wins, well ahead of Australia and South Africa with five each. “Certainly riding a high. Winning a tournament on the PGA TOUR is hard to do. When you do it, you’ve got a great buzz going, a great sense of confidence and hoping to keep it going,â€� Kuchar said. The Americans have a combined 10 PGA TOUR wins between them, and Kuchar is a former World Cup champion, joining Gary Woodland to win in 2011. Team England is certainly a passionate one with firebrands Tyrrell Hatton and Ian Poulter. Poulter has had success on the Melbourne Sandbelt before, winning the now-defunct Australian Masters in 2011. The chest-thumping Englishman lobbied Hatton to choose him as a partner given his love for Sandbelt golf. The iconic region is littered with courses with thoughtful designs that call for more than just bomb-and-gouge. The greens are built expertly into the topography and the bunkers have crisp vertical edges that also fit snugly into the fairways and putting surfaces. “Team events are pretty special. And when you look at the type of course that we’re playing this week, it’s easy to get very fired up to come and play golf,â€� Poulter said. “I get asked all the time when I play pro-ams all over the world, what are some of the favorite courses you’ve played on. I pretty much tell everybody, unless you’ve traveled down to the Sandbelt, you really haven’t experienced golf.â€� England is looking for its first win since Paul Casey and Luke Donald combined for the 2004 title. Defending champion Denmark returns the same duo as 2016, in-form Thorbjorn Olesen and veteran Soren Kjeldsen. With Kjeldsen’s accuracy and Olesen’s power, the Danes are confident they have the magic formula to go back-to-back on the Sandbelt, having won at Kingston Heath in 2016. “We’re quite opposite; most of the time I put it in the fairway,” Kjeldsen said. “I’ve got a solid game, whereas Thorbjorn has a flashy game; he has amazing stuff now and again.” Olesen bypassed picking up-and-coming star Lucas Bjerregaard, who won last month’s Alfred Dunhill Links Championship on the European Tour, in favor of the winning combination. “We’re one of the better teams because we have a lot of confidence and we’ve proven we can do it,” Olesen said. Team China is looking to create history, as Haotong Li and Wu Ashun strive to better their runner-up finish in 2016. Not only do they want the World Cup trophy, but they want to state their case as a potential duo for the International team in next year’s Presidents Cup, which will also be held in Melbourne. “It would be very exciting to play a Presidents Cup together and would also be very good news in China, too, because a Chinese player has never played a Presidents Cup,â€� Ashun said. “So it’s a very good chance for me and Haotong to try to impress.â€� They’re not the only ones hoping to give International team captain Ernie Els something to ponder. Abraham Ancer leads the Mexican team fresh off a win at the Australian Open. Kiradech Aphibarnrat will look to overpower the course for team Thailand. Anirban Lahiri will lead team India, and his fellow 2017 Presidents Cup teammate Jhonattan Vegas will spearhead Venezuela. Then Byeong Hun An and former PLAYERS Champion Si Woo Kim make a formidable South Korean team. The battle for world supremacy is on.

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Below are the biggest movers up the FedExCup ranks following the Travelers Championship. MORE: Latest FedExCup standings

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