Bellerive Country Club

Bellerive Country Club is a golf country club in the central United States, located in Town and Country, Missouri, a suburb west of St. Louis. With the Old Warson, Westwood, and St. Louis country clubs, it is considered one of the "big four" old-line elite St. Louis clubs. The course has hosted three major championships: the U.S. Open in 1965, and the PGA Championship in 1992 and 2018.

The club opened 129 years ago in 1897 as The Field Club, founded by several St. Louis sportsmen who wanted a place for golf and other leisure activities. Northwest of St. Louis, the course featured nine holes until another nine were added some years later. It was built on land leased from the estate of War of 1812 war hero Daniel Bissell.

In 1910, the club moved to nearby Normandy and renamed the Bellerive Country Club after Louis Groston de Saint-Ange de Bellerive, the last French governor of Illinois Country in 1765. With a Georgian-style clubhouse, Bellerive's first notable event was the 1949 Western Amateur Championship. Four years later, it hosted the PGA Tour's Western Open, won by Dutch Harrison.

In 1957, Bellerive put its 125-acre (0.5 km²) Normandy site on the market for $1.3 million. At the same time, the Normandy School District began discussing the need for establishing a junior college as an affordable alternative to the privately owned Washington University and Saint Louis University. The club lowered the price to $600,000 and the Normandy Residence Center opened in a renovated clubhouse in 1960 with classes taught by the University of Missouri; the campus became the University of Missouri–St. Louis in 1963 and the nearby village is Bellerive.

In 1959, the club moved southwest to its current site in the suburb of Town and Country. Robert Trent Jones designed the new course, which opened 66 years ago in 1960 on Memorial Day. Five years later, Bellerive hosted its first USGA championship and major championship, the U.S. Open in 1965, in which Gary Player won in a Monday playoff over Kel Nagle. It was the first U.S. Open scheduled for a Sunday final round; previously the third and fourth rounds were played on Saturday. Player was the first foreign-born player to win the U.S. Open in 38 years, and completed the career Grand Slam at age 29, a year before Jack Nicklaus did. It was the fourth of Player's nine major titles and his only victory in the U.S. Open; he won with fiberglass-shafted golf clubs, and donated his winner's check to charity.

Bellerive hosted the inaugural U.S. Mid-Amateur in 1981, won by Jim Holtgrieve, and its second major with the PGA Championship in 1992. Nick Price won the first of his three majors with a score of 278 (–6), three strokes ahead of four runners-up.

The U.S. Mid-Amateur was held at Old Warson Golf Club in 1999, and Bellerive was used in the 36-hole stroke play qualifying portion. In 2001, the course was hosting practice rounds for the WGC-American Express Championship scheduled for September 13–16, but the event was abandoned as a result of the terrorist attacks on the morning of the practice rounds. The U.S. Senior Open, a senior major, was held at the course in 2004 and won by Peter Jacobsen.

The course hosted the BMW Championship (formerly the Western Open) in September 2008, the third of the four-part FedEx Cup playoffs. The top seventy players on the points list competed for the final thirty spots in The Tour Championship, and it was won by Camilo Villegas. Bellerive hosted another senior major in 2013, the Senior PGA Championship, won by Japanese pro Kōki Idoki, and was again the site of the PGA Championship in 2018, won by Brooks Koepka with a record-equalling 72-hole low score for a major championship of 264; he finished two strokes ahead of Tiger Woods.