The PGA Tour is in Wilmington, Delaware this weekend with the playing of the BMW Championship. The BMW is the second of three Fed Ex Cup playoff tournaments that conclude the tour’s 2021-2022 wraparound season. Patrick Cantlay is the defending champion, having shown putting brilliance one year ago in his victorious shoot-out over Bryson DeChambeau. Last year Cantlay pocketed $1.71 million for his victory. This time around the eventual champion will received an eye-popping check for $2.7 million from a total purse of $15 million.
This is the 16th time that the BMW has been a part of the Fed Ex Cup series. That first BMW in 2007 was won by Tiger Woods and was contested at Cog Hill in Chicago’s southwest suburbs. Four of the first five BMWs were played at Cog Hill although the PGA Tour’s professionals turned on the well-known Dick Wilson design after the course went through a course redesign by Rees Jones. Having played Cog Hill hundreds of times during my teen-aged years and most recently in 2018, Jones made the course more difficult and more punitive, yet it didn’t seem to be unfair. So much for PGA Tour pros and their desire to turn every course into a birdie-fest.
The top 70 golfers from the Fed Ex Cup points list are at Wilmington this week in what is a tournament within a tournament. Those top 70 will be trying to win the BMW as well as find a way to get ranked among the Fed Ex Cup’s top 30 and advance to the Tour Championship at East Lake in Atlanta. Aside from next week’s winner’s share of a gaudy $18 million, everyone in the top 30 is a winner of sorts. The top 30 automatically get into the four majors in 2023 as well as a handful of invitational tournaments such as the Arnold Palmer and the Memorial.
Nowadays the BMW moves about the country. Since leaving Cog Hill in 2011, the BMW has visited such major championship sites as Bellerive (St. Louis), Crooked Stick (Indianapolis) and Cherry Hills (Denver) as well as Chicago area sites such as Olympia Fields and Medinah.
For those younger fans of the game, the big question about the BMW Championship will come during the awards ceremony on Sunday evening. Although this is the 16th running of the BMW, the winner will receive a large perpetual trophy that dates all the way back to 1899, some 123 years ago. So what exactly is the story behind the trophy that not only acknowledges the BMW champions, but also includes the results of the game’s third-oldest tournament of note? Only the British Open and the United States Open have a longer history.
When the Fed Ex Cup playoffs were initially formulated, events were needed to fill in the playoff schedule. The PGA Tour enlisted the Western Golf Association and its long-running Western Open to fill the slot during the week prior to the Tour Championship. While the event would no longer be called the Western Open, the BMW would remain a playoff staple of the playoffs. From the perspective of the WGA, it was crucial that its tournament, regardless of the name, stay under its umbrella. The charitable proceeds from the Western Open/ BMW have always gone to the Chick Evans Scholars Foundation and its caddie scholarship program.
At the turn of the 20th century, the four biggest professional tourneys were the U.S. Open, the British Open, the Canadian Open and the Western Open. Like the other three long ago “majors,” the Western rotated from site to site annually. From 1899 until 1961 the Western visited such historic courses of note as Portland CC, Colonial, Canterbury, Oakland Hills, Olympia Fields, Interlachen, Milwaukee CC, Blue Mound and Beverly. In 1956 the Western visited San Francisco and teed it up at the Presidio Golf Club with Mike Fetchick winning an 18-hole playoff over Doug Ford, Jay Herbert and Don January.
Beginning in 1962, the Western Open became an exclusively Chicago-area tournament. The Western rotated between Medinah, Midlothian, Olympia Fields and Beverly. As a brief aside, I was a 10-year-old in the gallery at Beverly in 1963 for the Monday 18-hole playoff when Arnold Palmer outlasted Julius Boros and Jack Nicklaus. I was a sign boy for the 1967 Western and caddied for top-20 golfer Bob Lunn in the 1970 version of the Western Open. Beginning in 1974, the Western found a permanent home at Butler National Golf Club, a tough meat-and-potatoes design of George and Tom Fazio. Butler remained the home of the Western until 1990. A very restrictive private club, Butler lost the Western following the Shoal Creek controversy. Butler was a male-only golf club and declined to change its policies.
Cog Hill was a natural choice for a Chicago area Western Open. It is a 72-hole complex and has lots of room for tournament infrastructure and parking. It has a USGA history, having hosted two U.S. Public Links Championships as well as the 1997 U.S. Amateur won by Georgia Tech collegiate golfer Matt Kuchar. It would host the Western Open from 1991 through 2006 and then four BMWs between 2007 and 2011. Cog Hill was an especially popular site for Tiger Woods, who would win at that locale on five different occasions.
I was one of those avid golf fans who were disappointed at the demise of the Western Open as it morphed into the BMW Championship. Its history is iconic. Tiger’s name is on the trophy five times. So too is Walter Hagen’s, who first won the Western Open in 1916 and took home his fifth one in 1932. Billy Casper won four Westerns and Tom Watson won three times. Two-time victors include Ben Hogan, Sam Snead, Arnold Palmer, Jack Nicklaus and Nick Price.
Yet regardless of my disappointment, I am heartened by the fact that the WGA still runs a tour event and that its charitable proceeds go to the Evans Scholars. Chick Evans, a lifelong amateur, won the 1910 Western at Beverly, became the first of two golfers to win the U.S. Amateur and the U.S. Open in the same year (1916) alongside Bobby Jones. While I wasn’t an Evans Scholar, a number of my caddie friends at Beverly did receive the full-tuition and room-and-board scholarships. They are among the 11,300 Evans’ alumni. Currently there are 1,070 Evans Scholars at 21 major universities, including Northwestern, Purdue, Illinois, Michigan, Colorado, Washington, Oregon, Penn State and Marquette.
Sunday will be a big day on the PGA Tour as someone will win the BMW Championship and advance to the Tour Championship. It also will be a great day for all those kid loopers with dreams of getting a college scholarship.
