PGA News

Updated throughout each tournament week, ‘The Starter’ will provide key news, notes, and other nuggets prior to the first tee time on Thursday morning. Think of it as an all-in-one resource to help guide you in the days leading up to the start of the tournament, as you prepare your fantasy golf lineups and entries. As soon as we receive valuable news updates on things such as tee times, featured groups, withdrawals and other course reports we’ll be sure to post them all here.

RBC Heritage (April 13th-16th, 2023)

• Harbour Town Golf Links – Hilton Head Island, South Carolina

• Event #26 of the 2022-23 FedExCup Regular Season

• Designated Event #8

Overview

RBC Heritage is a long-running, classic event on the PGA Tour schedule. Since 1969, this event has been played at Harbour Town in the South Carolina Lowcountry.

This season, RBC Heritage was given elevated status, so nearly all of the biggest names and top-ranked PGA players are in the field. Those who failed to win the green jacket last week will have the opportunity to win a tartan jacket at Hilton Head Island this week (or Jon Rahm will just win back-to-back, very possible).

Notable omissions include Hideki Matsuyama, who decided to take this week off after playing three events in a row. Jason Day and Alex Noren were in the originally announced field last Friday but pulled out of this tournament over the weekend.

Rory McIlroy withdrew on Monday, making this the second elevated event that he’s missing this season (the other being the Sentry Tournament of Champions). Those receiving bonus money through the end-of-year Player Impact Program (PIP) are allowed to skip one event, so it’s possible that McIlroy receives some sort of penalty. No word on that yet.

At any rate, this year’s RBC Heritage still welcomes a much stronger field than normal. 20 of the top 25 in the Official World Golf Rankings are competing at Harbour Town this week.

The 2020 RBC Heritage is the only recent year that had a comparably strong strength of field. It was the second tournament coming out of the pandemic break and everyone on TOUR was itching to play.

The words “Masters hangover” will be said an extraordinary amount of times this week. The Masters is an incredibly difficult event to follow on the schedule, and players put so much preparation and energy into Masters week that it’s understandable to think that some will struggle to keep the energy and focus levels up at Harbour Town.

Cameron Smith is a decent example of the…