Jan. 30. (Photo by Thomas Melville/Times of San Diego)
Say goodbye to the Farmers Insurance Open and hello to The Sentry.
The next time the PGA Tour event at Torrey Pines Golf Course takes place, it will have a new
name. Sentry Insurance has replaced Farmers Insurance as the event’s title sponsor, so after
being known as the Farmers Open for the past 17 years, the tournament will be rebranded.
The event, which was founded in 1952, has had a handful of name changes over the
decades, including when it was known as the Buick Invitational from 1992 to 2010.
The tournament was last held in January under its previous name, the Farmers Insurance
Open. The next tournament, scheduled to take place from Jan. 25-30, 2027, will be under its new branding.
The event will be broadcast on CBS and the Golf Channel, as well as streamed on Paramount+.
The tournament, which was first played in 1952 as the San Diego Open, has been held at
Torrey Pines, each year since 1968, is organized by the Century Club of San Diego, a 501 (c) (3) nonprofit whose Champions for Youth program serves at-risk and underserved communities by providing tools and resources needed to bolster community partners and their missions.
“For 75 years, our city has had the privilege to host a PGA Tour event and show off our
community and showcase the beauty that is San Diego,” Century Club of San Diego CEO Marty Gorsich said during a June 1 news conference announcing the name change. “And we’re very excited today to announce that Century Insurance will be the title sponsor of our event moving forward and, more importantly, a great community partner.”
Gorsich said that when looking for a new title sponsor, the Century Club had sought – and
found – one that would embrace the community.
“We didn’t want to just find a sponsor. We didn’t want somebody to just slap their name on
the tournament,” Gorsich explained. “We wanted to find another partner. We wanted to find
another cog in that wheel. We wanted somebody else who embraced what we do here, all
coming together to run a great event.”
Although Sentry is headquartered in Wisconsin, CEO Pete McPartland said during the news
conference that he is very familiar with America’s Finest City.
“I’ve been coming here for 17 or 18 years,” he said. “I lived in San Diego full-time in 2009 and
10, (then) moved to small-town Wisconsin to take over an insurance company in that small town called Century Insurance, and kept our house here in San Diego, in Coronado, and have been coming back ever since.”
“During the (Covid-19) pandemic, our son from New Jersey and his four kids moved into our
house; they stayed there for almost two years,” he added. “The boys, now 10 and 12, became
rabid Padre fans, and so we’re all in on San Diego. It is an absolutely fantastic place, no doubt
about that.”
