There is a particular kind of golf course that never quite becomes a household name but keeps getting handed the biggest weeks in the sport anyway, and Bellerive Country Club in suburban St Louis is as good an example as exists in American golf. This week it hosts the BMW Championship, the second leg of the FedExCup Playoffs, its fourth significant professional championship since the current course opened in 1960. Nobody talks about Bellerive the way they talk about Oakmont or Winged Foot, and yet the game keeps returning to it, which tells you something the reputation has not quite caught up with.
A course built to be tested immediately
Bellerive’s story begins not with the club itself, which traces back to 1897 as The Field Club, but with the decision in the late 1950s to move to a new site west of the city and commission Robert Trent Jones to design a course from scratch. What Jones produced was long and demanding even by the standards of the era, and the United States Golf Association wasted no time putting it to work. By 1965, barely five years after opening, Bellerive was hosting the U.S. Open, making it one of the youngest courses ever entrusted with the championship. Gary Player beat Kel Nagle in an 18-hole playoff that week, and famously gave his winnings away to cancer research and junior golf, a gesture that has become as much a part of Bellerive’s history as anything that happened on the course itself.
That U.S. Open set a pattern that has held for six decades. The course tested the best players in the world early in its life and was judged worthy of doing so again and again, hosting the PGA Championship in 1992, when Nick Price broke through for his first major, and again in 2018, when Brooks Koepka backed up his U.S. Open win from a few weeks earlier by closing out Tiger Woods in the final pairing. Few American courses outside the true blue-chip venues can claim three professional majors across three different decades, and Bellerive’s willingness to keep saying yes to the biggest events in the game is as much a part of its identity as any individual hole.
The Rees Jones years
The course that today’s field will play is not quite the one Robert Trent Jones handed over in 1960. His son Rees led a substantial renovation that reopened in 2006, expanding the greens, repositioning fairway bunkers, and adding a lake to the second hole that turned it, along with changes at the eleventh, into one of two genuinely drivable par fours on the course. It is a smart piece of variety on a layout that otherwise leans long and strategic, the kind of hole that tempts a big hitter into a mistake rather than simply punishing length with more length.
The rest of the course still carries its father’s fingerprints. The eighth is a straightened, demanding par five stretching past 600 yards, the twelfth is a picturesque par four that regularly ranks among the most photographed holes in Missouri golf, and the closing stretch offers little in the way of respite, finishing with a 464-yard par four that has decided more than one of the championships played here. At 7,177 yards and a par of 71 from the back tees, Bellerive is not the longest course on the Tour rotation, but its width, its green complexes, and its refusal to offer an easy finishing hole have made it a reliable examiner of form under pressure.
Why the Tour keeps coming back
Part of the appeal for the FedExCup Playoffs is straightforwardly logistical. St Louis is an easy market to activate, Bellerive has hosted enough big weeks to know how to run one, and the infrastructure from 2018 is still largely in place. But there is also something to be said for a course that has never needed radical alteration to stay relevant. Where some venues have had to be lengthened dramatically or reworked hole by hole to keep pace with modern distance, Bellerive’s original bones, wide corridors, demanding green complexes, a closing stretch with real teeth, have aged well enough that Rees Jones’s changes amounted to sharpening rather than rebuilding.
For a course with no British Open pedigree, no ocean views, and a name that plenty of casual golf fans still cannot place on a map, that is no small achievement. Bellerive has never had to argue for its place in the rotation. It has simply kept being handed the assignment, kept producing finishes worth remembering, and kept quietly building the kind of resume that other, louder courses would trade for in an instant.