The final round of the Travelers Championship 2024 could hardly have been more exciting: Tom Kim and Scottie Scheffler, both in the final flight, battled it out for the PGA Tour victory. Scottie Scheffler had a one-stroke lead on the 18th hole, so Tom Kim had to finish the hole with one stroke less than Scheffler to at least force a play-off. Kim managed the approach perfectly, increasing his chances of a birdie. A final on the 18th green could hardly have been more exciting. Just as Scottie Scheffler was about to putt, however, chaos broke out on the green: Climate protesters stormed the scene, causing stunned faces.
Protesters interrupt the PGA Tour final round
Surrounded by hundreds of spectators, Scottie Scheffler, Tom Kim and Akshay Bhatia, the third player in the flight, were in full focus on the 18th green of the TPC River Highlands. It was in Scottie Scheffler’s hands to finish the tournament as the winner when chaos broke out. A total of five protesters stormed the green from different directions to draw attention to climate change. The local police reacted with lightning speed and overpowered them. The three players and their caddies stood in the middle of it all.
Nobody can say exactly how much the situation influenced the players. Would Scottie Scheffler have holed out for birdie and won outright? Would Tom Kim have had a better focus in the subsequent play-off, which he forced thanks to a birdie, and not lost the first hole straight away?
Tom Kim: “It’s really hard to see”
After the round, Tom Kim reveals that the situation was definitely weighing on him. “The security guards were tackling people and people were getting arrested, like it’s just, it’s really hard to see nowadays,” Kim said. “… It kind of felt like it took my mind off of the moment and just kind of realized what was happening and obviously even though those people did something bad, you still don’t want them to get hurt … the police are trying to protect the players and stuff, I get it, but you still don’t want people to get hurt and I think it just kind of personally just took my mind away from golf a little bit and worried about something else.”
Behind the protest were demonstrators from the radical environmental movement “Extinction Rebellion”, who took a lightning strike on the Moving Day of the Travelers Championship as the reason for their action: “We are all watching the climate catastrophe unfold at warp speed. Our relatively mild disruption of the Travelers Championship calls attention to nature’s much more severe and long-lasting disruptions,” said Miles Grant, a spokesperson for Extinction Rebellion, in a statement.