TOUR Insider: BMW Championship

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The Rees Jones Tour continues on the PGA TOUR. In fact, the Playoffs for the FedExCup might well be decided by which player best navigates the layouts Jones has doctored, given that the final two events have his renovation signature.

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Once the "Bellerive Bell" rings, players are expected to get one heck of a test.

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Bellerive Country Club, a behemoth of a golf course that was called "The Green Monster of Ladue Road" when it opened in 1960, hosts this week's third Playoff event, the BMW Championship, which features the top 70 players in the FedExCup standings. Robert Trent Jones designed the course and his son, Rees, oversaw a significant renovation in 2006 that brings the St. Louis course to 7,375 yards.

The PGA TOUR returns to St. Louis for the first time since Bellervie hosted the 1992 PGA Championship. The course was scheduled to host the 2001 World-Golf Championship-American Express Championship (now the CA Championship), but the 9-11 terrorist attacks on the U.S. forced its cancellation. Bellerive becomes the first layout other than Cog Hill Golf & Country Club, near Chicago, to host the former Western Open since 1990 when it was played for the final time at Butler National Golf Club.

"Especially after missing the guys in 2001, it's exciting to bring this level of golf to the St. Louis region," said Jerry Ritter, tournament general chairman, who served a similar role in '01 and for the '04 U.S. Senior Open at Bellerive, which was founded in 1897 as the St. Louis Field Club.

The younger Jones has been a prominent figure on the PGA TOUR this year. Bellerive is the fifth course the TOUR has visited this year that Jones has worked on. A sixth comes in the final week of the Playoffs for the FedExCup Sept. 25-28 at THE TOUR Championship presented by Coca-Cola at East Lake Golf Club. Jones also redesigned two major courses, Torrey Pines South and Oakland Hills Country Club.

"It's been an interesting year, very rewarding, and I've seen a lot of great golf," said Jones, whose father also was the original designer of Oakland Hills, near Detroit.

At Bellerive, Jones merely extrapolated on the work his father did. "Anyone who played it before will recognize it, but they will still be introduced to a new challenge," he said. "It's going to be a heck of a test."

The most prominent change was made to the massive putting surfaces. They have been reduced from around 8,500 square feet to 7,000, still huge compared to most layouts. Like he has done at other sites, Jones recontoured the surfaces to build small targets into the larger ones. Fail to get the ball in the right area and two-putts will be long and difficult.

Other signature Jones adjustments on the par-70 layout include deepening of greenside bunkers and moving them closer to the putting surfaces and pushing fairway bunkers farther down the fairway into landing zones.

Holes changed the most: No. 2, where a pond was installed down the left side all the way to the green, No. 4, converted to a par-5 (but will be a 500-yard par-4 this week), and No. 10, which was changed from a par-5 to a par-4 and also will be more than 500 yards. Trees along the creek at the par-5 eighth holes have been removed.

Chuck Gast, the course superintendent, said the Winning Colors fescue grass rough was topped off at 3 1/2 inches. The Meyer zoysiagrass fairways are a half-inch and those large greens, covered in A-4 creeping bentgrass will run at about 11 on the stimpmeter. He likes how the course has firmed up, and how much it's shaped up with the renovation.

"It's a course totally brought up to the modern age," said Gast, who has been able to dial in an optimal setup because of a cooperative summer climate. "I think there's more strategy to it. You really have to think starting with the tee shot and then all the way through."

"Bellerive was designed with the future in mind," Jones said. "The future is now here. My dad saw what was happening in the game, even then, and was going to happen. The basics of his course are still there, and we have just added to it."

FEDEXCUP POINTERS

• Not that it matters greatly given the changes to the course, but five of the 70 qualifiers for the BMW Championship competed in the last event at Bellerive, the 1992 PGA Championship. Steve Elkington leads the list; the Aussie finished tied for 18th at 3-over-par 287, nine strokes behind winner Nick Price. The others: Vijay Singh, who tied for 48th at 292, and Billy Mayfair, Dudley Hart and Ernie Els, who missed the cut.

• A player with more recent experience at Bellerive is Jay Williamson, who lives in St. Louis and is a member of the club. He's been bombarded by questions from his peers, but he hasn't been able to help much. "A lot of people have been asking me what it's going to be like, and I really don't know because the golf course, we haven't really seen it in championship form yet," Williamson said at TPC Boston, where he tied for 73rd. "I'll be real anxious to see how it sets up next week."

• The BMW Championship is the successor to the Western Open and still run by the Western Golf Association. Bellerive has hosted the Western Open before, in 1953. Dutch Harrison defeated Ed Furgol, Fred Haas and Lloyd Mangrum by four shots on a par-71 course that was immensely long for its day, 7,305 yards. The course also hosted the 1965 U.S. Open won by Gary Player and the inaugural U.S. Mid-Amateur in 1981.

• Kevin Sutherland, vaulted all the way to third in the standings after his runner-up finish at The Barclays, was the most notable PING staff player to employ new equipment to begin the Playoffs for the FedExCup. Sutherland had a new PING Rapture V2 driver in the bag, and he average 287 yards off the tee, 18th best in the field and ranked 21st for the week in driving accuracy at 64.3 percent.

• Speaking of new clubs, Paul Casey, Trevor Immelman and Stephen Ames all have put new Nike Victory Red irons in play during the Playoffs. Casey now uses Nike throughout the bag, all 14 clubs. "I very rarely change equipment," said. Casey, selected by captain Nick Faldo for the European Ryder Cup team despite missing the cut at the Deutsche Bank Championship. "I've got the same driver I've been using for two years and the same wedges. I wouldn't put something in if I wasn't comfortable."

• This year's championship will mark only the seventh time that it has been held on a par-70 golf course, and the first time since 1934 at Country Club or Peoria, in Illinois. Only once has the winner at those layouts won by fewer that three shots, and that also was in Peoria when Harry Cooper downed Ky Lafoon in a playoff.

• After winning earlier this season at the Sony Open in Hawaii with an Odyssey putter, K.J. Choi has switched to Yes! Golf's Callie putter. Choi has consecutive top 25 finishes after missing the cut at the PGA Championship. Still, he hasn't had a top-10 finish since February.

• With defending champion Tiger Woods on the sidelines, the best record in the BMW Championship belongs to Jim Furyk, who won the 2005 edition and has only finished out of the top 10 once since 2000, and that was last year when he tied for 14th. Furyk twice has finished third.

• Course setup could become a bit of a non-factor depending on the path of Hurricane Gustav, which made landfall in Louisiana Monday morning. St. Louis could be in store for some heavy rains later in the week, depending on how the Category 2 storm progresses through the plains states.