RBC Canadian Open 2014: Tee times, pairings, and TV schedule for Thursday’s first round

The PGA Tour returns this week but makes one of the rare annual stops outside the United States, swinging through Royal Montreal for the RBC Canadian Open. In recent years, the Tour has held a tournament opposite the Open Championship. It’s a lesser event made up of guys who couldn’t qualify for the British, but still offered a nice purse and some FedExCup points. With the new wraparound schedule, that opposite-week event was scrapped and now we’re back on Tour in Canada.

The Canadian Open doesn’t have an ideal spot on the PGA Tour schedule -- at all. It’s one week after most of the best players are traveling back from Britain and trying to re-adjust to the time difference, and one week before the WGC-Bridgestone Invitational, which almost always draws the top 50 players in the world. After that stop in Akron, it’s the PGA Championship. So this week, and the Wyndham in Greensboro are really the only opportunities for a break for so many of the top players who will play through the WGC, PGA, FedExCup, and maybe even Ryder Cup. It’s on the short end sandwiched around plenty of bigger and more attractive events in a busy late-summer schedule.

But even with that schedule disadvantage, the Canadian Open still draws a pretty solid field. A large reason for this is that its title sponsor, RBC, also sponsors a ton of world-class players. That deepens the field at both Harbour Town and up north. This week, we’ll get Matt Kuchar, Hunter Mahan, Luke Donald, Jim Furyk, Graeme McDowell, Ernie Els, and Brandt Snedeker. There’s no Tiger or Phil, but that’s a really loaded group and they’re all backed by RBC, so it makes sense that they play their marquee event up in Canada.

Snedeker is the defending champ here, the beneficiary of Hunter Mahan having to withdraw while holding the lead on the weekend so he could race home with his wife in labor. With Mahan gone, Snedeker rolled on Sunday afternoon. Dustin Johnson pushed him a bit, and he’ll be back again this year bombing drives all over Montreal.

Aside from that RBC crop, this event is also obviously important to all the Canadian-born Tour regulars. Mike Weir, David Hearn, Stephen Ames, Graham DeLaet, and Brad Fritsch are just some of bigger names among the 19 Canadians in the field this week. Despite that long list of natives always playing this event, a Canadian has not won his country’s open in 60 years, when Pat Fletcher took the title in 1954. There’s obviously the talent to end that drought, and DeLaet and Hearn would probably be the two best bets this week.

Unlike last week in Liverpool, where there’s hours and hours of daylight, the PGA Tour needs to send the field of 156 off split tees in groups of three. That will start at 7 a.m. ET. Here’s Thursday’s first round tee sheet at Royal Montreal (all times ET):

And here’s the media schedule for the opening round. Golf Channel will have their usual three-hour block of coverage on Thursday at Royal Montreal, but they’ll start an hour later than normal.

4 to 7 p.m. ET -- Golf Channel

1 to 7 p.m. -- PGA Tour Radio on Sirius-XM (Ch. 93/208)