The PGA Championship tees it up Thursday at Bellerive Country Club outside St. Louis. This will be the 100th playing of the PGA, the final major championship of 2018. Bellerive is a Robert Trent Jones design, plays to a par of 70, and can be stretched out to 7,431 yards. The course’s two par-5s play to 613 and 603 yards, its par-3 16th hole is a mighty 239 yards long, and the par-4 fourth hole is an eye-blinking 530 yards.
We’re merely three weeks removed from a most colorful British Open at Carnoustie. Because of the drought in Great Britain, Carnoustie played firm and fast. More accurately, it played really firm and really fast. The greats of the game were hitting tee shots that carried 300 yards and then the ball would often roll out another 100 yards. On Saturday of British Open week, Jordan Spieth teed off on the 396-yard first hole and ended up on the green with his tee shot. This time around, there won’t be any 400-yard bombs off the tee. It rains fairly regularly in the Midwest and the fairways at Bellerive will be lush. Tee shots won’t be bounding wildly down the fairways. At the same time, the 156 golf professionals in the field will need to prepare for the August humidity that is an everyday summer occurrence in St. Louis.
Bellerive Country Club was first established in 1897. The club was located on two previous sites until the members decided to relocate for a third time west of St. Louis in the appropriately named suburb of Town and Country, Missouri. The leading golf course architect of that time, Robert Trent Jones (Spyglass, Firestone, Hazeltine and 500 others) designed the current Bellerive in 1960. Water comes into play on 11 of the 18 holes. In 2006 the course underwent a $9.5 million renovation that was orchestrated by Rees Jones, the younger son of Robert Trent Jones.
Bellerive was initially on golf’s center stage five years after its opening with the playing of the 1965 United States Open. Gary Player won that National Open in an 18-hole Monday playoff over Australian Kel Nagle, the former 1960 British Open champ. When Player won that ’65 Open, he attained the career grand slam, having previously won the British Open, the Masters and the PGA. As a unique aside, Player won that Open playing Shakespeare golf clubs that had fiberglass shafts. Yes, that was a long time ago.
In 1992 Bellerive hosted the PGA Championship won by Nick Price. Price won the PGA by three strokes over the quartet of John Cook, Nick Faldo, Jim Gallagher Jr. and Gene Sauers. It was the first of Price’s three major championships. The World Golf Championship was scheduled to be contested at Bellerive in late September of 2001, but that event was canceled after the Sept. 11 attack on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. Peter Jacobsen won the 2004 U.S. Senior Open at Bellerive and Camilo Villegas captured the BMW Championship there in 2008. In 2013 Kohki Idoki won the Senior PGA at Bellerive. The course has an interesting history of varied tournaments and the overriding theme for victory at Bellerive is all about ball striking. You don’t have to be a power player to achieve at Bellerive, but you do need to hit fairways and greens. Course management will be the overall theme.
We mentioned that humidity will be a factor at Bellerive and yet this just might be the last time that statement is made regarding the PGA Championship in August. Beginning next year, the PGA Championship will move to May on the calendar. The reasons for doing so are two-fold. The PGA Tour wants to conclude its end-of-the-year Fed Ex Cup playoffs in early September in an effort to avoid competing for television dollars at the start of the college football and NFL seasons. Secondly, a May date for the PGA will avoid the every-fourth-year chaos brought about by Olympic Golf. Starting next year, the five-tournament run of big events will include the Players in March, the Masters in April, the PGA in May, the U.S. Open in June, and the British Open in July. The playoffs will run from mid-August to early September and the wrap-around season will kick off a new year in October. It’s all about the dollars.
Another side story at next week’s PGA Championship will revolve around Jordan Spieth. Spieth is the owner of a Masters green jacket, the U.S. Open trophy, and the British Open’s Claret Jug. A win at the PGA would put Jordan in the rarified air of Gene Sarazen, Ben Hogan, Gary Player, Jack Nicklaus and Tiger Woods as only the sixth golfer in history to collect all four major championships. A Jordan Spieth career grand slam would be the golf story of the year. However, the Jordan Spieth who won last year’s British Open is far removed from the one who is currently plying his craft on the PGA Tour. Spieth has yet to win this year and he has done some uncharacteristic things such as his poor final-round showing at Carnoustie last month. The issue is all about the putter. In 2016, Jordan gained one stroke per round over the rest of the field on the greens. This year he is at minus-1.5 in the strokes-gained putting category. A loss of 1.5 shots per round on the greens equates to a six-shot total over the course of 72 holes. No one can afford to give up six shots to the field in a tournament, and Spieth has his golfing resume because of the putter. Until he turns it around on the greens, there won’t yet be a career grand slam in Jordan’s future.
The PGA Championship is the year’s final major and the three earlier majors have been a mixed bag featuring a Patrick Reed win at the Masters, a Brooks Koepka repeat at the National Open, and a surprising British Open triumph for European Tour regular Francesco Molinari. The members of the 20-something brigade that includes Spieth, Rory McIlory, Justin Thomas and the rest will find that 2018 was an incomplete year in their careers if they don’t add a major to their golfing resumes. Yet none of the aforementioned trio has given us a reason to think that a victory at the 2018 PGA is on the horizon. I do believe that the PGA Championship is a wide-open affair although that overall comment doesn’t include the 40-somethings like Tiger and Phil
The golf season’s final major, the PGA Championship, tees it up Thursday in St. Louis at Bellerive Country Club. A classic design course, Bellerive will demand that fairways are found and greens are hit in regulation. Stray drives will find the myriad of water hazards and trees. Poor iron play will lead to difficult birdie putts on the Robert Trent Jones’ greens. There appears to be no obvious favorite going into next week’s PGA Championship and yet the ultimate champion will have a career-defining moment by winning the season’s final major.
