'Cheers to 50 Years' — or is it 49 — for RBC Heritage on Hilton Head?

Before we cheer to 50 years of the RBC Heritage Presented by Boeing, let's all double check our scorecards.

How can it be 50 years when the first Heritage was played in 1969 over a brand new Harbour Town Golf Links on Hilton Head Island?

But on April 9-15 of this year — 2018 — the 50th edition of the PGA Tour event will be celebrated in grand style at Sea Pines with the snappy slogan, "Cheers to 50 Years!"

Set aside for a moment the fact that Heritage fans would cheer 50 minutes, or 50 weeks — whatever it takes to raise a glass.

Nevertheless, concerned citizens have been calling the newspaper to tell us we must have been absent the day they taught addition in school. Some of them self-identify as Marines, and they seem ready to storm the shores over this. They say 1969 plus 50 equals 2019.

So before we start throwing champagne glasses, let's do the math and show our work.

Start with 1969. On that Thanksgiving weekend, Hilton Head became forever thankful to Arnold Palmer for winning the first Heritage and making us all look like we knew what we were doing. So that's one. Mark that down. One tournament in the books.

Now rattle off every year since then, and mark it down in pencil on your scorecard of life.

When you get to 2018 — that would be this year, not next year — add up all the pencil marks you have for each time the tournament has been played.

The grand total will be 50.

That's the answer.

When I asked Angela McSwain, marketing and communications director for the Heritage Classic Foundation, she responded:

"We count the first year as one. It is the 50th tournament. The 50th year a tournament has been played. Does that help? We wanted to celebrate 50 tournaments."

I found a funny blog post online about many sports teams waffling all over the calendar on their anniversaries. The Yankees and 49ers and even the people frozen to their seats at Lambeau Field have stumbled through this little-known warp in time, according to a close examination of anniversary uniform patches by Paul Lukas of UniWatch, "the obsessive study of athletics aesthetics."

Since no one is more obsessive than the keepers of golf rules, and since no one has yet called a two-year penalty on the Heritage, or tried to DQ our fuzzy brains, let us then gather around the royal and ancient skybox and raise a toast:

Cheers to 50 years!

This story was originally published March 26, 2018 at 1:12 PM with the headline "'Cheers to 50 Years' — or is it 49 — for RBC Heritage on Hilton Head?."