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The PGA Tour will stage its final signature event of the regular season at the Travelers Championship, beginning Thursday at TPC River Highlands in Cromwell, Conn.

It’s one last opportunity for the best players on tour to compete for a $20 million prize pool without a 36-hole cut, but the biggest story after last weekend might be who isn’t there, rather than who is.

Rory McIlroy is taking three weeks off from golf after blowing a late lead at the U.S. Open. The Northern Irishman bogeyed three of his final four holes, handing the major championship to Bryson DeChambeau; he left the course minutes after DeChambeau clinched it with a par save at the final hole.

“As a competitor all of us have had our highs and lows to a certain degree,” Xander Schauffele said of McIlroy this week. “It’s a tough spot. It for sure is a tough spot. I’m sure him and his team are discussing what happened and sometimes you just need to step away from it all and really try and be as objective as possible … he’s just, you know, he needs some time away to figure out what’s going on.”

Other than McIlroy, seven of the top eight players in the Official World Golf Ranking headline the field, including World No. 1 Scottie Scheffler and No. 3 Schauffele, winners of the first two majors of the season.

Scheffler’s triumph two weeks ago at the Memorial made him the first player since Justin Thomas in 2016-17 to win five tournaments in a PGA Tour season. Scheffler’s victories have come on the biggest stages: The Players Championship, the Masters and three signature events.

But Scheffler is coming off a humdrum T41 finish at the U.S. Open.

“Just a long week,” Scheffler said. “I would say it’s a tough week. I didn’t have my best stuff and that’s a pretty difficult golf course to try and make a lot of birdies and play some good golf around when you don’t have your best stuff.”

The defending champion is Keegan Bradley, a native of Vermont who was overjoyed last year to win New England’s only PGA Tour event.

“It’s fun to come back as a winner of the tournament, but I can think of when I was a 12-, 13-year-old kid coming here to watch David Duval play,” Bradley said Wednesday. “And then now getting to come as defending champion is pretty cool.”

Other recent winners at the short par-70, 6,835-yard track include Schauffele (2022), Harris English (2021) and Jordan Spieth (2017). Bradley shot a tournament record 23-under 257 to win last year. The winning score to par is generally in the teens.

The Travelers will mark the professional debut of 22-year-old Massachusetts native Michael Thorbjornsen, who earned his tour card via the PGA Tour University pathway this year and is in the field on a sponsor exemption. He finished fourth at the Travelers as an amateur in 2022.

–Field Level Media