Bellerive Country Club has not hosted a professional event since the 2018 PGA Championship, and it had not hosted a FedExCup Playoffs event at all until this week. The Robert Trent Jones design in St Louis gets its turn from Thursday, and the timing could hardly be sharper: this is the week the field for the Tour Championship gets cut in half, and the man defending the title is coming off the most one-sided win of his career.
Scottie Scheffler arrives at the BMW Championship having won the FedEx St. Jude Championship by eight shots, a margin that turned what should have been a tense playoff opener into a procession. He is both the FedExCup points leader and the reigning BMW champion, and there is little in the recent form line to suggest anyone is close to catching him. That is not usually how these weeks go. The Playoffs are meant to compress the field, to make every shot carry a little more weight than it did in May. Scheffler’s task this week is less about surviving that pressure than about proving last week was not an aberration.
The field of fifty, and the cut that actually matters
Sixty-nine players teed it up at TPC Southwind. Fifty survive to Bellerive. Of those fifty, only thirty will make the trip to East Lake for the Tour Championship in eleven days’ time, and it is that second cut, not the leaderboard on Sunday, that will decide most players’ weeks.
Matt McCarty claimed the last spot in the field, sneaking in at 50th in the FedExCup standings. Keith Mitchell and Jordan Spieth, at 51st and 54th, did not have the finish they needed and will watch the Playoffs end from home. Max Homa and Shane Lowry missed as well. Spieth’s absence in particular will be felt; he had shared the first-round lead at TPC Southwind the week before last, and a top-50 finish in a fifty-man cut is the sort of margin that makes a season retrospectively feel like it turned on a single three-putt.
Sungjae Im’s route into the field tells the more encouraging story. He was outside the top fifty heading into last week and moved himself in with nothing but his own golf, a tie for fifth at the St. Jude that lifted him from 53rd to 40th. There is something clarifying about a top-fifty cut with no protections and no committee decisions. You are in because of what you shot, or you are not.
At the other end of the bracket, the fight for the final Tour Championship spots is even tighter. Rickie Fowler sits 30th, the last automatic qualifier for East Lake, with Gary Woodland breathing on his neck in 31st. Two FedExCup points separate them going into the week, which in practical terms means the gap could be settled by half a shot on Sunday afternoon.
Why Bellerive suits this particular tension
Robert Trent Jones built Bellerive wide and long, with greens that reward a controlled ball flight rather than a spinny one, and it has always played as a course where a bad decision compounds rather than gets absorbed. Bubba Watson and Rory McIlroy both found that out at the 2008 US Amateur and 2018 PGA Championship respectively, and this week’s field, several of whom are playing for their season rather than a trophy, will find the same. A course that punishes indecision is an appropriate stage for a cut this brutal.
Whether Scheffler extends the FedEx St. Jude form or Bellerive finally produces a contest closer to the one the bubble players are fighting for, the week gives a genuine verdict rather than a formality. Thirty players leave for East Lake. Twenty do not. Bellerive, generally speaking, does not care how the fixture was marketed.
The BMW Championship runs Thursday to Sunday at Bellerive Country Club, with the Tour Championship to follow at East Lake from August 27.