The best golf courses in Missouri

The Gary Kern-designed Fox Run Golf Club, set among the dense deciduous forests outside of St. Louis, features tight driving areas protected by penal bunkering, rows of trees and challenging greens. The club was purchased in 2023 and is in the process of an enormous renovation project headed by Art Schaupeter, with a focus on expanding driving areas and green complexes, and the goal of making the course more playable from diverse tee positions. Once the renovation is complete, the course will feature stunning bentgrass putting surfaces with new bunkering and fescue-lined fairways.

Todd Clark and consultant Ron Whitten reinvented this 112-year-old course when they added several new holes and sacrificed others. Entire sections of the property have been rerouted, and while some holes maintain their basic shape, this is essentially a brand new course with reconstructed greens, fairways and bunkers all brought up to 21st-century standards.

In 2009, Branson Hills Country Club unveiled a Chuck Smith- and Bobby Clampett-designed golf course located in the breathtaking Ozark Mountains. The course pays homage to Missouri golfing history with a museum complete with photos and memorabilia from Tom Watson, John Daly and Payne Stewart. The course features a secluded design that roams through dense woodlands and over steep elevation changes dotted with natural creeks, rock outcroppings and abundant wildlife. The opening tee shot at Branson Hills is one of many memorable shots, as the tee shot descends over 130 feet to the tree-lined fairway below.

The Country Club of St. Albans opened the first of its two courses in 1992, commissioning Tom Weiskopf and Jay Morris to design a 7,400-yard links-style golf course in the dense forests bordering the Missouri River. Named after the famous American explorers, the Lewis and Clark course traverses dramatic elevation changes highlighted by rock-lined creeks and streams guarding the fairways. Known to be the more challenging of the two courses, Lewis and Clark has hosted many prestigious Missouri amateur championships. All 36 holes at Country Club of St. Albans underwent a $3.5 million upgrade in 2016 that saw improvements to drainage, course infrastructure and new practice facilities.

Tucked along the snaking shorelines of the Lake of the Ozarks in central Missouri is an Italian Riviera-style resort, yacht club and golf course called The Club at Porto Cima. The club opened its signature course in 2000, commissioning Jack Nicklaus to transform the undulating lakeside terrain into a championship-style golf course. Porto Cima is highlighted by seven spectacular holes that are adjacent to the lake, as well as oak tree-lined driving areas and intense elevation changes, making approach shots difficult and visually intimidating. A round at Porto Cima culminates with a four-hole finishing stretch along the banks of the lake, beginning with the 15th, a difficult par-5 played to a green that juts out into the water behind.

Five years after the premiere of the Lewis and Clark course, the Country Club of St. Albans brought in the design team of Dr. Michael Hurdzan and Dana Fry to unveil a spectacular and more member-friendly Tavern Creek course. Similar to the Lewis and Clark course, Tavern Creek is also rich with American history, as multiple Civil War-era gravesites can be found along the route. Tavern Creek is known for its cohesion with the surrounding environment as the course appears to naturally tumble over diverse terrain with running creeks that snake through dense woodlands. The course is defended by its namesake, as the Tavern Creek is in play on 12 holes. Though the tight driving windows and challenging hazards can be stressful, vistas of the Missouri River in the backdrop provide welcome sights.

This Tom Fazio design was the first course built at what is now Big Cedar Lodge, the ever-expanding recreational resort in southern Missouri from Bass Pro Shop founder Johnny Morris. Typical of Team Fazio, the design is strong on visual flair, with long views of the surrounding Ozarks as backdrops for holes cut through the site's exposed limestone outcroppings. The first nine is more up and down, situated on a higher section of land, and the second nine loops around the perimeter of a bluff that shows off the surrounding ridges and ravines. Networks of burbling artificial streams and rocky waterscapes accompany golfers around the course, leading to a big five-hole finish that starts at the par-5 14th playing through a valley toward a green set on a bluff above a section of creek.

From architecture editor Derek Duncan:


It was a long time coming. That’s not a reference to the three-and-a-half-years of construction and grow-in for Payne’s Valley, the newest resort course at Big Cedar Lodge near Branson, Mo. Rather, it had been 14 years since public golfers began waiting to play a course designed by Tiger Woods.
 

Woods founded his design company, TGR Design, in 2006. But because of his schedule, the desire to be selective of the few projects he signs onto and a devastating financial crisis, only two TGR courses were been completed—the El Cardonal course at Diamante Cabo San Lucas in Mexico, and Bluejack National, a private course in Texas. Payne’s Valley, which opened in 2020, presents to the largest audience to date the architectural principles he most values.


“My goal when starting TGR Design was to create courses that are fun and playable for golfers of all abilities,” Woods told Golf Digest. “This was particularly important at Payne’s Valley, my first public golf course.”


RELATED: Tiger Woods has been passionate about course design for longer than you might think

Woods has always been at his best on the biggest stages, and Payne’s Valley, named for the late Payne Stewart, who grew up in nearby Springfield, is unquestionably big.


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Situated just south of St. Louis and a few miles from the Illinois and Missouri border is Dalhousie Golf Club, a Gary Nicklaus-designed club that opened in 2002 and features elevation changes defended by a mix of Allister MacKenzie-style fairway bunkering and Jack Nicklaus-esque greenside traps. Tumbling zoysia fairways protected by fescue and bluegrass rough allow for a variety of creative shot selection into perfectly manicured bentgrass putting surfaces. Dalhousie truly shines during the challenging six-hole stretch from holes 11 to 16, featuring the reachable par-5 15th with expansive views of the property and old-growth forest in the backdrop.

From Golf Digest Architecture Editor emeritus Ron Whitten:
 

Since I've been critical of some P.B. Dye designs in my reviews, I figure it's only proper to mention one of P.B.'s designs that I really like. It's Boone Valley Golf Club west of St. Louis, a half mile from a state historical monument marking the spot where Daniel Boone resided during much of his adult life.
 

I like Boone Valley because it feels like it could have been designed by P.B.'s father, the great Pete Dye. Which makes me a hypocrite, I admit, because my criticism of P.B.'s work has always been that he seemed to be trying too hard to outdo his father's architecture, which usually resulted in outrageous or even unplayable holes. But there's none of that at Boone Valley. OK, the 18th green is an enormous 25,000 square foot thing fronted by a pond, but it works, maybe because it brings to my mind Pete's enormous 18th green at Whistling Straits. In fact, there are parts of Boone Valley that remind me of some of Pete's finest early work at The Golf Club in Ohio and Crooked Stick in Indiana.
 

At Boone Valley, P.B. Dye didn't exaggerate his father's architecture, he emulated it.


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Old Warson was a staple on the America's 100 Greatest Courses ranking from the late 1960s through much of the 1990s. The 1954 Robert Trent Jones design in St. Louis was among the first wave of significant post-World War II modern designs, an open countryside course with broad fairways that floated into elevated greens, many protected in the front by Jones' freeform bunkers. Today, as age and the suburbs have ingested it, it's evolved into a treelined parkland design, its fairways much skinnier, its once robust putting contours conceded to current green speeds. The routing remains a strong point with the first nine playing off a ridge that runs through the eastern side of the course and the second nine circling a chain of lakes highlighted by the 12th, one of RTJ's great par-5s with a creek that crosses the fairway then doubles back in front of the green.

The Ozarks of southern Missouri are not tall, but their ridge-and-valley topography provides a sense of heightened elevation. Ozarks National at Big Cedar Lodge takes advantage of the illusion with holes that run out along ridgetops and onto elongated fingers of land that fall off into wooded ravines. Formerly the site of a different, much narrower golf course, Coore & Crenshaw found ways to widen out many of the same spaces and added new holes on previously unused parts of the property. Though not as broad as is customary for the designers, the cant of the holes and the engaging fairway bunkering put a premium on shaping shots and hitting the correct line off the tee.

Once the darling of the USGA, which awarded this Robert Trent Jones design the 1965 U.S. Open, making it the second youngest course to host an Open in the 20th century (after Northwood in Dallas), Bellerive is now favored by the PGA of America, which successfully concluded the 2018 PGA Championship on it. The polished course that hosted the PGA is a far cry from the immature one of 1965. Hardwoods along holes now have 60 years' worth of growth, fairways are now Zoysia and architect Rees Jones has replaced his father’s bunkering with that of his own style, positioned farther off the tees to challenge big hitters. Rees also filled in a pond in front of the 17th green and added chipping areas next to several putting surfaces.

One gets the impression, playing St. Louis Country Club, that C.B. Macdonald was perplexed about how to route a course on such a tight piece of property. After all, his previous and concurrent design efforts at National Golf Links of America, Piping Rock and The Lido were comparatively spacious. But at St. Louis C.C., Macdonald must have felt squeezed, for he installed back-to-back par-3s at the second and third holes, placed his Redan par-3, the 16th, near the entrance road, then had players walk back to the 16th tee to play the 17th. Those quirks aside, St. Louis C.C. is a sublime, hilly museum of golf. It has so many enormous, unique landforms, it’s like playing golf through a dinosaur graveyard. The short par-4 18th is Macdonald’s version of the 17th at Prestwick, the Alps, and features a blind approach over a ridge into the green. If you miss a 30-incher on this punchbowl green, remember Sam Snead did, too, to lose the ’47 U.S. Open.