Bellerive Country Club

The ‘Green Monster’ Awaits

Bellerive Boasts A Distinguished Championship History

Courtesy of BY John Steinbreder
Global Golf Post

Golf was just taking hold in the United States in 1897 when a group of sportsmen in St. Louis founded The Field Club and constructed a nine-hole golf course on land northwest of what then was one of the most important metropolises in the country. Thirteen years later, they relocated to the nearby village of Normandy, renaming their association the Bellerive Country Club, after Louis Groston de Saint-Ange de Bellerive, the last French governor of what used to be called the Illinois Country – and what became part of America with the Louisiana Purchase in 1803.

Scotsman James Foulis designed and then built an 18-hole course in that spot, and it became so well regarded that it played host to two of the biggest tournaments of midcentury America – the Western Amateur and the Western Open. Then in 1960, Bellerive reimagined itself once again with a move to a new track by Robert Trent Jones Sr. on 235 acres of rolling farmland west of the city center. The layout opened for play on Memorial Day that spring and five years later, the club hosted its first major – the 1965 U.S. Open – which South African Gary Player won in an 18-hole playoff. Since then, Bellerive has come to be considered not only one of the Show Me State’s most exclusive retreats but also a superb site for championship golf, also hosting the first U.S. Mid- Amateur (in 1981) as well as the 1992 PGA Championship, the 2004 U.S. Senior Open and the 2013 Senior PGA Championship.

This month, the club is once again the stage for one of golf’s biggest tournaments, the 100th PGA Championship. What competitors will find at Bellerive is a layout that is quite different from Jones’ original – thanks to extensive revampings in the past dozen years by Rees Jones, the founding architect’s son – and every bit as testing. “It’s a big golf course, a good golf course,” says Jim Holtgrieve, a St. Louis native and Bellerive member who won the 1981 U.S. Mid-Amateur there and later captained two Walker Cup teams for the United States. “And it’s a great venue for a professional major.”

Holding tournaments of that stature was one of the goals of club leaders at Bellerive when they decided to move to their current locale some six decades ago. Among the biggest advocates of that transfer was Hord Hardin, who was a good enough player to have qualified for six U.S. Amateurs from 1953 to 1963 and also quite active in golf administration, eventually serving as USGA president (1968-69) and Augusta National Golf Club chairman (1980-1991). And more than anyone else, it was Hardin who convinced his colleagues at the USGA to select Bellerive as the site of the 1965 U.S. Open. It remains the youngest layout in the modern era to host that event.

By the time the first shot was hit in that championship, Bellerive had come to be called the “Green Monster,” and with good reason. Built around a meandering creek that came into play on nine of the holes, it measured just less than 7,200 yards from the tips, which was a staggering distance in those days and a record for a U.S. Open course, and featured runway tees that in some cases were nearly 100 yards long as well as cavernous bunkers and expansive greens. Perhaps the track’s most difficult stretch was the one known as the Ridge; comprising Nos. 14-17, it forced players to finish strong if they had any hope of winning.

Interestingly, it was a pair of relatively short hitters in Player and Australian Kel Nagle who stood atop the leaderboard at the end of 72 holes at 2-over par after they both struggled with different parts of the Ridge during the final round. So they returned to the course on Monday for the playoff, with the then 29-year-old Player shooting 71 to Nagle’s 74 to capture his only U.S. Open. That made the South African only the third golfer to win a career grand slam, with Gene Sarazen and Ben Hogan having achieved the feat before him. The winner’s share was $25,000, and Player donated his earnings to cancer research in honor of his mother, who had died of the disease when he was a boy, and to junior golf in the United States. “I’m a foreigner here,” he said at the time. “The American people have treated me so well that I wanted to give something back.”

No. 11 at Bellerive

Bellerive was still a behemoth when the PGA came to town in 1992. “It was one of the longer major championship courses at the time,” recalls Nick Price, a South African-born Zimbabwean who shot a final-round 70 to take that tournament by three strokes ahead of runners-up Nick Faldo, Gene Sauers, John Cook and Jim Gallagher Jr. “The rough was pretty severe, too, and the fairways narrow, which played right into my hands because I was an accurate driver of the golf ball. It was not by any means a low-scoring course, though, and 6 under turned out to be the winning number.”

Bellerive was all set to expand its tournament portfolio in 2001 as the venue for that year’s WGC-American Express Championship. But the PGA Tour cancelled the event after the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, which occurred while many competitors were playing their practice rounds that Tuesday. Three years later, however, the club played host to the U.S. Senior Open, which Peter Jacobsen won. In 2008, Bellerive was the site of the BMW Championship in which Colombian Camilo Villegas prevailed for his first career PGA Tour triumph. Then in the 2013 Senior PGA Championship that took place there, longtime Japan Golf Tour player Kōki Idoki bested Americans Jay Haas and Kenny Perry by two shots. A few years before Villegas won his tournament at Bellerive, the club asked Rees Jones to update the Green Monster. Then he returned to make additional modifications prior to the Senior PGA.

Rees Jones and Jack Nicklaus

“Essentially, we rebuilt the course using my father’s original concepts, and the objective in many ways was to get another major championship,” Jones recalls.

To help achieve that, he oversaw the removal of hundreds of trees, added length, reconstructed bunkers and moved a number of them farther down the fairway so they once again presented problems off the tees to the increasingly long tour professionals. The architect also redesigned the fourth and 10th holes so they could be set up as par- 4s that measure more than 500 yards and tweaked Nos. 2 and 11 so they could play on occasion as drivable par-4s. As for the greens, which Holtgrieve says average 12,000 square feet in size, Jones designed them in sections so there were even more options for pin placements, using a sort of “green within a green” philosophy that compels golfers to go for those sections in which the flags are located if they want to score. “And if they miss those spots, they will bring bogey and worse into play,” Jones explains.

The greens at Bellerive are made up of bentgrass, and the fairways are Zoysia, a grass that is especially tolerant of the sort of heat one can expect to find in St. Louis in the summer. The ball tends to sit up on that variety of turf and as a result players will be able to impart a fair amount of spin on their approaches. “Those who are able to hit their drives long and straight should then be able to attack the hole locations and take advantage of the course,” says Holtgrieve.

No. 12 at Bellerive