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2024 BMW Championship Preview
The PGA TOUR’s Best Take on One of Colorado’s Best
Memories of the International | What to Expect on the Course | BMW Championship Viewers Guide | History of the FedEx Cup | Impact of Evans Scholars | Food Trucks at Castle Pines
By Jim Bebbington
In the final week of August, the 50 best PGA Tour players of the year will be in one place – Castle Pines Golf Club.
It’s been too long.
“Jack Vickers would be very proud knowing the Tour is returning,” said George Solich, who succeeded Vickers as chairman and president of Castle Pines Golf Club when club founder Vickers died at age 93 in 2018. From 1986 to 2006, Castle Pines Golf Club played host to the golf world each summer for The International. The Colorado golf fan became accustomed to being part of the Tour experience every year.
Vickers, the founder of both Castle Pines Golf Club and The International golf tournament, toiled for two decades to give Colorado golf fans the best.
The International was unique. It used the Modified Stableford scoring system – players accrued points for good holes and lost them for going over par. It was intended to add variety as well as incentivize risk-taking for pros playing at elevation where their normal excellence could lead to very low scores.
For 21 years the tournament featured shoot-outs, incredible shots and drama (See “The History of the International” on page 40).
But it struggled on the PGA Tour schedule. TV ratings were underwhelming. Tiger Woods in his prime came only twice. The patented late afternoon thunderstorms of the Colorado front-range summer caused numerous delays in play. In early 2007 it was cancelled and replaced instantly by the Tiger Woods Foundation’s new tournament, the AT&T National in Washington.
When The International went away, Colorado lost its regular connection to the best that the PGA Tour has to offer.
But beginning back in 2014, the Tour and the membership at Castle Pines Golf Club decided the Tour needed to return to Castle Rock.
“Not too long after the 2014 BMW at Cherry Hills (Country Club) was the idea not just to bring it back to Colorado, but to bring it back here to Castle Pines and my brother George was very instrumental in that,” said BMW Championship chairman Duffy Solich. “We have a great relationship with the Western Golf Association, which is the tournament host. They own the tournament and I think at that point it was about convincing the BMW folks and Tour that this is the right kind of course and venue to have the tournament.”
WHO IS COMING?
The BMW Championship is the conference finals of the PGA Tour – do well here, and you get a shot at the title the following week.
The Tour has held the FedEx Cup playoffs since 2007 – initially a four-tournament series but in 2019 it was chopped back to three. Players qualify for it by their play during the season and the overall winner this year gets a $25 million bonus.
The top 70 players on the FedEx Cup standings after the Wyndham Championship Aug. 7 to 11 are eligible for the first playoff tournament, the FedEx St. Jude Championship at TPC Southwind in Memphis. Points earned there accumulate, and the top 50 come to Colorado from Aug. 20 to 25 for week two, the BMW Championship. The top 30 players after the BMW move on to the Tour Championship at East Lake Golf Club in Atlanta.
The full field depends on a lot of things – July tournaments and how players do the week before at the St. Jude Championship. Late-season injuries often take a toll too.
But barring injury, some players are shoo-ins.
Scottie Scheffler: Scheffler has had an amazing season, winning six times by the end of June. He had enough FedEx Cup points by the Fourth of July that it is likely he could have gone on sabbatical and showed up in August in Memphis and he would have had a slot waiting for him. Given that he might have an Olympic gold medal by then too he will likely be the pre-tournament favorite.
Xander Schauffele: Schauffele is proving this season he has big-game hunting skills. He won the PGA Championship and finished top 8 in the Masters and U.S. Open. The stronger the spotlight, the brighter he shines.
Rory McIlroy: No player has benefited more from the existence of the FedEx Cup than Rory. He has won the title three times, more than any other. This season he’s been in contention nearly every time he’s played and will be a threat to win his fourth.
Collin Morikawa: Morikawa was winless in the early goings this season but had six top-10 finishes. He’s always in the hunt.
HOME FIELD ADVANTAGE
Denver-native Wyndham Clark came to Castle Pines in June to help with media day and talk about how important it is to him to do well in his first pro tournament where he grew up.
Clark learned the game at Cherry Hills Country Club but has played Castle Pines often. He said coming home means a little more pressure for him.
“I’m not gonna lie: I do feel that,” he said. “I haven’t played here in front of a home crowd and especially now being a top-five player in the world and having gained a lot of traction, I think there is a little bit of pressure. But I go to things that have helped me in that.”
Since his breakout wins in 2023 Clark has been one of the most vocal PGA stars in discussing his mental approach and the need to balance competitive fire with emotional health.
“I feel like I’m learning how to handle that pressure and so I’m hoping by then I’ll be ready but if not, honestly, I’m going to look at as just enjoying the week,” he said. “I get to play in front of people that never get to see me play. And on a course that I love. So I’m really looking forward to that.”
But it is the players whose names don’t typically appear in the headlines for whom the FedEx Cup can be life-altering. Denver native Mark Hubbard is one of the folks fighting for his position. Hubbard qualified for the St. Jude Championship in 2023, but finished tied for 66th place in Memphis and did not advance. This year he has played steady golf, making the cut at all his tournaments through early July, and earning enough points to hover in the 60s on the FedEx Cup points list – a status that if it holds would qualify him again for Memphis.
MAKING SOMETHING GOOD, BETTER
Part of the process of bringing the PGA Tour back to Colorado included taking a hard look at the Castle Pines course and grounds and seeing what could be improved.
The Jack Nicklaus-designed course has received a full makeover.
“Of the course itself – lengthening, improving the holes and doing a renovation of the clubhouse – that made that possible,” Duffy Solich said. “It’s fair to say, but I don’t think there’s one hole that hasn’t been touched.”
Trees: The pine forest that gives the course its identity has been thinned of old growth, and replanted with hundreds of new trees. Part of that was due to a fire-prevention initiative; part was meant to give the course a few more clear sight lines.
“Just clean up a lot of the scrub oak and other brush that was kind of just encroaching on the course after 20-plus years of having it in place,” Duffy Solich said.
Tees: The course built several championship tees that push its length to more than 8,100 yards.
Bunkers and greens: Six green complexes have been moved or modified and more than 70 bunkers on the course have been reshaped or rebuilt.
“So that has all been a process in the last 10 years and Jack Nicklaus has probably made at least 10 trips to Castle Pines,” said Keith Schneider, the general manager of Castle Pines. “And with this being a Jack Nicklaus design and he was one of our original founders – in fact, the only founder still alive today – we wanted him to be very much a part of this modernization of the golf course. And it started 10 years ago, and he’s been very involved. Between he and George (Solich), they have made every decision on this golf course the last 10 years.”
What is underfoot: The grass and the drainage are easy for spectators to overlook, but with the passage of time grasses had blended a little. Not anymore. And the drainage system was rebuilt specifically to handle the late-afternoon rainfall if it comes.
“The greens have always been bent grass; the fairways are a combination of bent and ryegrass, and the tees are bent, and the rough is Kentucky bluegrass,” Schneider said. “In fact, if anything, there’s been a lot of effort made on the approach- es to go back to a very consistent experience.”
Golf architecture has been described as “disguised drainage,” but in the case of the work done at Castle Pines, it was also modified to account for the best of the best coming this summer.
“Knock on wood, it’s going to be perfect for when August rolls around,” Schneider said. “We’ve done a lot of drainage work because we wanted this golf course to get as firm and fast as we possibly can.”
WHAT TO EXPECT
As the old saying goes, expect the unexpected. “This golf course has never been tested on medal play,” Duffy Solich points out.
With the Modified Stableford scoring system used for 21 years at The International, there are no records for how pros will score relative to par over a four-day tournament at Castle Pines. The planners are as interested as anybody about what is about to happen.
“So you can go look at Cherry Hills or Muirfield or other great courses that have stood the test of time as to what the pros shoot there,” Solich said. “Nobody really knows (here). There’s always a lot of speculation as to what that will be and as good as these players are today, there’s a lot of good courses that 20-under seems to be kind of the mark anymore.”
“Weather will dictate that,” Schneider said. “If the golf course is soft, they’ll throw darts at it so that the score will be down. You know, if we were really concerned about score, we could have made a couple of the par fives, par fours. Well, that’s not the history of the golf course. The history of the golf course is that it’s a par 72 and we wanted to honor that and respect that.”
The Old Bear, Nicklaus has been busy deep into his 80s making changes like that to his PGA Tour courses. Just as with Castle Pines, his home course Muir- field Village received a similar makeover to keep it competitive against the distances PGA Tour pros hit at today.
“Our tagline is ‘The best day of golf in America’ and we want this tournament to be the best tournament in America,” Schneider said. “I think if the (Western Golf Association), the BMW and the PGA Tour organizations, they walk away that Monday morning and go ‘Well, we need to come back here.’ that would be success.”
Colorado AvidGolfer Magazine is the state’s leading resource for golf and the lifestyle that surrounds it, publishing eight issues annually and proudly delivering daily content via coloradoavidgolfer.com.
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