Nine things to know: Bellerive Country Club, host of 2026 BMW Championship

The BMW Championship heads back to its Midwestern roots, playing host to the second leg of the FedExCup Playoffs at Bellerive Country Club in St. Louis, Missouri.

This will mark its second time hosting the BMW Championship. Camilo Villegas won the last time the PGA TOUR came in 2008.

Here’s what to know about the host site and information on what players will face this week at the penultimate event of the 2026 Playoffs.

'Green Monster of Ladue'

It won’t take a keen eye to recognize the roots of Bellerive.

The course is a quintessential Robert Trent Jones design, the famed golf architect known as “The Open Doctor.”

Long and brutish, Bellerive is equipped with large, deep bunkers, penal water hazards and thick rough. It was designed to embody one of Jones’ guiding philosophies: golf course design should yield a “hard par, but an easy bogey.” That doesn’t mean it's tricked up – quite the opposite. The course is right out in front of the player. There’s little deception with a Jones design. Just a string of difficult holes stacked on top of each other.

Thus spurred Bellerive’s nickname, affectionately tabbed the “Green Monster of Ladue.”

The course was designed with championships in mind, starting with the hiring of Jones, and it wouldn’t be long before the club hosted the U.S. Open in 1965. That year, the course was the longest in tournament history, measuring 7,191 yards.

Bellerive is one of 20 Jones designs to host America’s Open.

The Field Club

The Bellerive we see today is far from the version first laid out when the club was incorporated in 1897.

To start, the club was on an entirely different property, a nine-hole course northwest of the city, with an entirely different name, St. Louis Field Club.

Three years later, the membership established the name Bellerive Country Club, named after Louis St. Ange de Bellerive, the last French commander in North America. Still, it took another 60 years (and two different moves) before the club acquired and developed the land that encompasses the modern-day layout.

In 1910, the club moved to Normandy, Missouri, and developed an 18-hole golf course that hosted the 1949 Western Amateur and the 1953 Western Open (now known as the BMW Championship). That site was later sold and is now part of the University of Missouri-St. Louis campus. The clubhouse was retrofitted into a residence hall.

In 1959, the club made its final move to a plot of land southwest of St. Louis and tabbed Jones to design it. The rest is history.

Gary’s Grand Slam

Bellerive is part of an exclusive club, one of only five courses to crown a career Grand Slam champion. The club was the youngest to host a U.S. Open, only five years old when it staged America’s national open in 1965. Its champion was a gift for its growing acclaim.

Gary Player relinquished a three-stroke lead with three holes to play on Sunday, leading to an 18-hole Monday playoff against Australia’s Ken Nagle. Player led by as many as five shots during the closing 18 and comfortably finished the last leg of the career Grand Slam. Player joined Gene Sarazen and Ben Hogan as the only men to complete the feat at the time. Jack Nicklaus became the fourth the next year. Player’s victory snapped a 38-year run of Americans winning the U.S. Open.

The other courses with the distinction of crowning a Grand Slam champion are a who’s who of incredible venues: Augusta National (Gene Sarazen, 1935; Rory McIlroy, 2025), St. Andrews (Tiger Woods, 2000), Muirfield Golf Links (Jack Nicklaus, 1966) and Carnoustie Golf Links (Ben Hogan, 1953).

Brooks vs. Tiger

Bellerive was granted the PGA Championship’s centennial in 2018 and again played host to a tournament befitting that milestone.

Brooks Koepka emerged the victor, but the week might be most remembered for the man who tried to chase him down.

Tiger Woods shot a final-round 64, his best final round in a major, to push the championship into historic territory. No man had ever shot a lower total than 265 in a PGA Championship.

Woods’ round was good enough to sit in the clubhouse at 14-under 266, but Koepka made history with a 66 on Sunday to finish two better at 16-under 264. It was Woods’ closest call at a major championship in a decade and inspired new hope of chasing a 15th major title. He didn’t know it at that time, but Woods used his finish at Bellerive as momentum to win the TOUR Championship a few weeks later. Then, in his next major start, he broke through and won his fifth Masters.

Koepka, meanwhile, notched his third major with the victory, becoming only the fifth American to win three majors before the age of 29. The only others were Jack Nicklaus, Jordan Spieth, Tom Watson and Woods.

The treacherous sixth

The signature hole on the front nine is also the hardest on the property.

The picturesque par-3 sixth, measuring 215 yards, played as the most difficult hole during the 2018 PGA Championship, more than one-third of a shot over par for the tournament. That’s not even approaching how difficult it played during the 1965 U.S. Open, when it yielded an incredible 4.03 stroke average.

The green has even shrunk a bit since then, making the front of the putting surface just as difficult to hit as the back right shelf. Hole locations cut in the middle swale always provide some excitement with tee shots feeding toward the cup. Aside from its merits as a tournament golf hole, it will be a popular viewing area as players hit from an elevated tee box down to the green, with water perilously in between.

Driveable drama

The 11th hole is the only driveable par 4 at Bellerive, and it delivered equal parts euphoria and devastation in 2018, yielding the same number of eagles as double bogeys.

Players choosing to lay up short of the pond guarding the front right of the green will only need a midiron to do so. This will leave the player with a wedge to a long, narrow green. The risk-taker will need a precise drive to hit the green.

However, the hole can also be played anywhere between 271 and 361 yards.

'The Ridge'

PGA National has “The Bear Trap.” Quail Hollow has the “Green Mile.” Bellerive has “The Ridge.”

Aptly named for its topographical location on the property, "The Ridge" is a brutish three-hole stretch beginning at the 14th which plays along the high point of the course and will play its part in deciding the eventual champion.

The 14th is likely the easiest of the bunch, a 417-yard par 4 with an infinity green.

The 15th is a 495-yard par 4 which played as one of the hardest holes during the 2018 PGA Championship. The hole typically plays into a prevailing southerly wind. A good tee shot gives a player a chance to hit a middle or long iron into this wide but shallow target. Miss short right or go over the green and a player will find a most difficult up-and-down from the bunkers. The steep right-to-left slope makes short pitches and chips very challenging.

The concluding hole on "The Ridge" is the lengthy 237-yard, par-3 16th that also traditionally plays into the wind. Players could be hitting lumber into this perched green depending on the severity of the conditions. A par is all players will be looking for.

Presidents Cup

Bellerive won’t go long without hosting another premier PGA TOUR event. The course has already been named as the host for the 2030 Presidents Cup.

The team event pitting the U.S. against the Internationals is playing stateside this fall at Medinah Country Club in Chicago. In 2028, the International Team will host the event at Kingston Heath Golf Club in Melbourne, Australia. Then it will be Bellerive’s turn.

Bellerive has hosted a slew of prestigious events, but this will be its first opportunity to host a team event.

What else it hosted (and one it didn’t)

Bellerive is one of three courses to have hosted all the traveling professional men’s major golf championships in the United States (U.S. Open, U.S. Senior Open, PGA Championship and Senior PGA Championship).

The club has held around one significant championship every decade since its inception. After Player’s historic U.S. Open win in 1965, Bellerive had the distinction of hosting the very first U.S. Mid-Amateur in 1981, won by St. Louis native Jim Holtgrieve. In 1992, the club hosted its first PGA Championship, won by Nick Price, the first of his three major championships.

In 2004, Peter Jacobsen improbably won the U.S. Senior Open, after having hip surgery just months earlier. Within three months before his victory, Jacobsen was still walking with crutches. Yet he endured a marathon 36-hole day on Sunday to emerge victorious. It’s not the only senior major the club contested either. Kohki Idoki won the 2013 Senior PGA Championship.

In 2008, the club hosted the BMW Championship, its first non-major event. That’s where Villegas claimed his first PGA TOUR victory, making a pair of birdies to finish his round and win by two strokes.

"Hopefully, it's the first of many,” said Villegas, the eventual five-time TOUR winner.

Koepka’s 2018 PGA Championship victory was the last professional tournament hosted at the venue.

There is notably one tournament Bellerive was supposed to host but never did. In 2001, Bellerive was set to host the WGC-American Express Champions. The event was canceled because of the Sept. 11 attacks in New York City, which happened two days before the tournament was set to start.

Bellerive Country Club