CROMWELL, Conn. — Golf is a relatively simple game at it’s core. Get the ball from the tee to the hole in as few strokes as possible, that’s about it.

The reactions, though, can be complicated. Hundreds of thousands of fans flock to the Travelers Championship each year, cluster around the green, and when you hear the crowd noise swell from a half a mile away you know a ball has dropped into a hole, or another type of great shot has been made. Isn’t that what they’ve come to see?

And yet, when the scores get low, the criticism elevates, with speculation the course is too easy for the professionals, especially of the highest caliber that come to Cromwell. It happened here in 2023, when Keegan Bradley won the Travelers with a record 23-under par, and Rory McIlroy called the TPC River Highlands “obsolete.” A few changes were made to adjust to the stronger field of a Signature Event before the 2024.

The other day, when the top golfer on earth, Scottie Scheffler, scorched the course with a 60, a fan with a little buzz going nudged me on my way out to the parking lot. “Ten-under par? Are you kidding me?”

Was he talking about Scheffler’s greatness? Or was he referring to the course? We know when Scheffler missed a birdie putt on 18, he didn’t seem too broken up about it. After all, a 59 wouldn’t even have been the course record. Jim Furyk’s Tour-record 58 happened on this very par-70 course in 2016. Patrick Cantlay, now a Tour veteran, shot 60 here as an amateur in 2011.

For me, the question is, why would anyone consider low scores such a bad thing? It’s made for some entertaining golf at the TPC River Highlands.

“You have to understand the context,” Travelers tournament director Nathan Grube said. “Golf is the only sport that is so affected by the weather and environment. When you look at a golf course, the weather has a massive impact in how the tournament goes. This golf course, when it’s dry and the greens are fast, it will compete with any course in the country. I think our average running score is about 14-under over the last 20 years. It’s not the lowest score, it’s rare that we have been in the high teens or low 20s (under par), ever.”

The low scores Thursday and Friday put Bradley’s tournament record in jeopardy, but in context and on cue, as Grube expected, the course began to play much differently Saturday. Greens were dry and fast for the morning groups, then when the leaders got started in the afternoon, light rain arrived. Scheffler made only one birdie on the front nine, Viktor Hovland made three on the first four holes to tie him at 17-under, then they started trading pars, and both bogeyed 10. Scheffler reached 20-under, but two-putted and bogeyed 18 as Hovland birdied to complete a third-round 64 to take a 1-stroke lead into Sunday’s finale.

Scheffler, who won the Travelers with 22-under par in 2024, began play Saturday at 16-under, the lowest score ever through 36 holes, but leading Hovland by only two with a dozen others in striking distance. Conditions Friday just were ideal, with rain softening the greens during the week and Thursday overnight. The field, which included 49 of the top 50 golfers on the PGA Tour — McIlroy opted out — made 339 birdies in the second round, 295 in the first round. During the final round in 2024, the average round was 67.099, and this year’s second round nearly matched it, 67.112.

“I really do enjoy kind of harder tests and sometimes the battle is fun as well,” Scheffler said this week. “This golf course I think is interesting in a sense of you hit some different clubs off the tee, there’s some strategy involved, but you got to show up and make birdies. When you look at the closing stretch on this golf course as well, especially if you’re in contention on Sunday, you’re not going to be able to just limp in, you got to go out there and you got to make birdies and hit some really, really great shots in order to win this tournament.

“So you always seem to have a really good finishes here and I think that’s the nature of the closing stretch and how difficult it is to close on this course.”

To Scheffler’s point, the battle is the thing here. The golfers are competing with each other, not against the course, so the opportunities to make birdies brings a different challenge, the pressure to make them.

“The guys in front of you typically are making birdies and so the leaderboard also will get really bunched just by the nature of how the golf course is,” Scheffler said. “So playing with the lead here I think is difficult. The guys in front of you can put a lot of pressure on you.”

The birdie bar has been so high here, it has made for thrilling finishes at the Travelers, which also keeps the fans flocking to the 18th green on Sundays, and keeps the TV viewers tuned in.

“It’s fun when the conditions are this soft and a guy can do it, it’s great, it’s super fun,” Grube said, “but there are a lot of reasons you could see lower scores. Listen, everybody is playing the same course.”

In some years, the TPC’s reputation has suffered because it follows on the heels of the U.S. Open, which rotates among the hardest courses and conditions in America, but Grube is quick to recall 2017, when Brooks Koepka won the the U.S. Open at Erin Hills in Wisconsin with 16-under par and, a week later, Jordan Spieth took The Travelers at 12-under, and needed his famous miracle shot to get there. Many of the metrics pro golfers use in a safer approach to a round or a tournament have to be thrown out when a course plays the way River Highlands played Thursday and Friday.

“It puts a weird kind of pressure on guys,” Grube said. “You know you have to play super aggressive or you’re going to get lapped. So the guys play differently. Where usually, it’s ‘I play super conservative, play statistically,’ you have to play a different game and that’s what the fans get to see. ‘This is the aggressive version of me, this is me chasing down a lead like Sunday, but I have to play that way the whole four days.’

“It puts these guys in a different kind of space and it’s fun to see, because these guys have different gears.”

The Travelers’ $20 million purse, with more than $3 million going to the winner, keeps the top golfers coming back so when it takes a shootout to win, so be it. But as Saturday’s play showed, things have a way of evening out, regressing to the mean. Reigning U.S. Open champ Wyndham Clark called the last four holes at River Highlands “one of the best finishes in golf.”

“You play the U.S. Open, and pars feel like birdies,” said Clark, 13-under through three rounds. “Then you come out here, and you know, pars feel like almost bogeys. You just have to kind of change it in your head, but it’s nice. I think a lot of us prefer to play where you are making birdies rather than struggling to make pars.”

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