Tommy Fleetwood, Collin Morikawa, Justin Rose, and Sahith Theegala are all in the field, each with something different at stake as the FedExCup Playoffs continue.
BMW Championship
Bellerive Country Club
St. Louis, Missouri
$20,000,000 Purse
Only the top-50 arrive at Bellerive Country Club this week. And only 30 will advance to the TOUR Championship at East Lake Golf Club. The rest go home, and with them goes their share of the $40 million purse and the FedExCup title.
All four LAGC members — Tommy Fleetwood, Collin Morikawa, Justin Rose, Sahith Theegala — make their way to St. Louis, each with a lot on the line.
Bellerive Country Club
Bellerive Country Club began as a nine-hole course in north St. Louis in 1897, before the membership eventually moved west and handed the reins to architect Robert Trent Jones Sr. to design a new property. The current course opened on Memorial Day in 1960. Was it a success?
They hosted the U.S. Open within 5 years of opening. I’d say success. Jones designed the course around one guiding philosophy: a hard par but an easy bogey.
Large, deep bunkers, penal water hazards, thick rough, and large bentgrass greens divided by significant ridges and tiers — it’s got it all. Bellerive has hosted the PGA Championship twice (1992 and 2018), and is already scheduled for the 2030 Presidents Cup. The BMW Championship is its fifth premier event. Sure, there are some obvious standouts, but very few clubs in America have a resume like Bellerive.
The tournament's roots trace to 1899 as the Western Open, making it the third-oldest event on the PGA TOUR schedule, behind only The Open Championship and the U.S. Open. The Western Golf Association still runs the event, with BMW serving as the title sponsor since 2007. The BMW Championship is the only FedExCup Playoffs event that has a rotating venue — and bringing it to Bellerive for the first time since 2008 gives St. Louis a week it's been anticipating for the entire year.
Bonus Money at Stake
Your standing through this event determines your FedExCup bonus, and it could be something to behold. The bonus pool is substantial — the $100 million pool is distributed after the BMW Championship concludes, separate from the $40 million TOUR Championship purse.
For guys like Tommy and Collin (around the top-10), each position they can climb could result in additional hundreds of thousands, if not millions of dollars.
So yes, the TOUR Championship at East Lake is the end-all, be-all tournament, but the year-long race for the FedExCup bonuses ends this Sunday. The bonuses (including deferred + cash bonus) as things stand now:
8th — Tommy Fleetwood: $2,400,000
9th — Collin Morikawa: $1,650,000
24th — Justin Rose: $545,000
46th — Sahith Theegala: $279,000
Again, once you get into the top-10, those jumps are substantial. These guys will want to climb as high as they can.
All four LAGC players are in the field, all in different positions.
LAGC Storylines
Tommy Fleetwood enters ranked 8th in the FedExCup standings. He is defending FedExCup Champion, attempting to become the first player in history to successfully defend the title. At 8th, he’s safely into the TOUR Championship field in Atlanta. Tommy is just here to win.
Collin Morikawa comes in at 9th. He's secure for East Lake but arrives at Bellerive needing to find his closing gear. Like Tommy, he’s not having to think about the playoff bubble. He’s also just here to win and to get in form for Atlanta.
Justin Rose is 24th. He's safely inside the top-30 on paper, and though there’s not a ton of margin between 31st and 24th, Rose should be secure if he posts even a decent finish. So yes, Rosey should feel comfortable, but that’s not to say the pressure isn’t on.
Sahith Theegala enters at 46th — people may not consider him on the bubble, but he is alive, and he needs at minimum a three-way tie for second to crack the top-30. He also needs to hope that anyone in that three-way tie or ahead of him was already in the top-30. It’s a tall ask for him, but we would never count him out. Given his starting position, it would be one of the gutsiest climbs to the top-30 we’ve seen in a while.
What to watch
When Bellerive hosted the PGA Championship in 2018, the winning score was 16-under. It will be a grind to get to double digits, and a grind to keep going once you get there. It’s unlikely we see a runaway leader after 36 or 54 holes, so the goal is to stay in the fight.
The field is the best it will be until East Lake. By Sunday evening, 20 seasons will be over.