Tiering BMW Championship Venues

BMW Championship week is upon us. It’s sort of an odd tournament on the PGA Tour schedule in that the second of three playoff events tends to be the least compelling. Fifty players is a small field, and while there are meaningful stakes for performing well and making it to East Lake for the Tour Championship, the tournament has lacked juice at times in recent years. The best way to inject life into this tournament is by staging it at a proper championship venue. Accordingly, today I’ve tiered the most recent five BMW Championship venues.

A few notes:

Medinah No. 3 and Olympia Fields (North) are both quintessential BMW Championship venues. Located in Chicago within the tradition of the Western Open, both clubs are in one of golf’s great, underserved markets. Plus, August is a prime time to visit Chicago. From a competitive standpoint, each course provides a stout test, especially when conditions are firm and windy. Each BMW Championship hosted at one of these two premier venues should be eagerly anticipated. 

I quite enjoyed Castle Pines last year. The golf course presented a unique challenge, especially with the added variable of adjusting distances for altitude, and it is appreciably better designed than most Jack Nicklaus courses. Located in the Denver metro area, another major city that doesn’t see much championship-level professional golf, Castle Pines is a worthy BMW host. 

I pride myself on having a very strong memory, at least when it comes to golf, but I struggle to remember much of the 2022 BMW Championship at Wilmington Country Club. In rewatching highlights to refresh my memory, I was reminded of why I can’t remember it. The golf course was fine. Nothing special. Nothing particularly memorable, either. 

Let’s be honest: the whole point of this exercise is to talk about Caves Valley Golf Club, host of this week’s tournament. Woof. In many ways, the Tom Fazio design and subsequent renovations represent some of the worst ideas that have taken hold in professional golf. A par 70 measuring 7,600 yards, Caves Valley’s primary defense is length, narrow fairways, and thick rough. Since last hosting the BMW Championship, the course has undergone a renovation that has only made it play longer and narrower, but I’m hard-pressed to find ways in which the course has improved, outside of installing a PrecisionAire system that will increase the firmness of the greens. 

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At last year’s PGA Championship, Andy Johnson described Valhalla perfectly: It asks a question professional golfers solved a decade ago. The question? Can you hit the same shot high, straight, and far over and over again? 

Caves Valley isn’t identically designed to Valhalla, but the same principle applies. There’s rough, narrow fairways, and either a bunker on one or both sides of the fairway. Over and over again. A few caddies have texted me similar sentiments this week, while also highlighting the lack of strategic intrigue on both the renovated short par 4s, holes 5 and 11. I would credit the caddies, but I suspect they’d prefer to stay anonymous. 

Venue selection is a difficult task, so I’m not going to crush the PGA Tour for winding up back at Caves Valley. However, I will suggest that the recent, expensive renovation missed the mark. When a golf course’s only defense is length, it results in a brutish, one-dimensional test. I’d like to have seen more of an effort to create strategic options on the ground instead of repeatedly providing narrow corridors and nondescript bunkers on just about every hole. 

I’m sure the membership is lovely, but Caves Valley shouldn’t be hosting top-tier professional golf tournaments. 

Ok, that’s all for this week. As always, you can shoot feedback and questions to me at joseph@thefriedegg.com!