Cherry Hills Country Club has hosted U.S. Opens, PGA Championships, a U.S. Women’s Open, a U.S. Amateur and several other national and international tournaments. And now, the historic venue just south of Denver will add still more variety to its resume as it will be the site of a PGA Tour playoff event in 2014.
The BMW Championship, which was known as the Western Open for most of its history, will be contested at Cherry Hills Sept. 4-7, 2014, likely marking the first time the tournament has been held in the western U.S. since San Francisco hosted it in 1956.
John Elway, president of the Cherry Hills Country Club board of directors and executive vice president of football operations for the Denver Broncos, made the announcement Tuesday morning at the club. Former British Open champion David Duval, a Colorado resident and a member at Cherry Hills, also was in attendance (pictured above).
“We feel there’s a pent-up demand for PGA Tour golf in this area,” Elway said.
The 2014 BMW Championship will mark the first PGA Tour event played in Colorado since 2006, the final year of The International at Castle Pines Golf Club in Castle Rock. In the interim, Cherry Hills will host the U.S. Amateur for the second time next year, Aug. 13-19.
Ironically, the PGA Tour once offered to make The International part of the FedEx Cup playoffs, but tournament founder Jack Vickers opted against the idea.
“I get asked no less than 12 to 15 times a year by various players, “˜When are we coming back to Denver? When is another event going to be there?'” said Duval, a 13-time winner on Tour. “Everyone wants to come back to Colorado because they’ve always loved the experience of being here. It’s an amazing town for golf.”
The BMW/Western, which benefits the Evans Caddie Scholarship, has been held in Illinois every year but one since 1962, and at Cog Hill Golf Club all but one year since 1991. In 2012, however, with the Ryder Cup coming to Medinah in the Chicago area, the BMW is set for Crooked Stick in Indiana. The site of the 2013 BMW remains unsettled.
Cherry Hills’ current contract to host the BMW is for just one year.
Illinois is where the Evans Scholars Foundation/Western Golf Association is based, but one of the Evans Scholar houses is located at the University of Colorado, and Cherry Hills has one of the top caddie programs in the state, with more than 150 caddies working there any given year.
George Solich, a CU Evans Scholar alum, WGA director and a Cherry Hills member, was instrumental in bringing the BMW Championship to the club. (Solich is pictured at left sharing a laugh with Elway on Tuesday.)
“I’d like to thank George Solich, who really kind of led this charge for Cherry Hills Country Club the last 12-18 months and has done a tremendous job of making this happen for this great club,” Elway said. “Without George this would not have happened.”
The Evans Scholarship is one of the nation’s largest privately funded college scholarships, providing full tuition and housing grants to qualified caddies. More than 40 Scholars live in the CU chapter house and there are 860 current Evans Scholars nationwide. Six current Scholars caddied at Cherry Hills, and 32 others who worked at the club are ES alums.
The BMW coming to Cherry Hills “was really driven by the club being committed to one of the great traditions of the game — caddying,” Solich said. “We have a robust caddie program; that was the great connection.”
The BMW/Western, first played in 1899, is the oldest tournament on the PGA Tour aside from the British Open and the U.S. Open. Tiger Woods has won the event five times.
It is now one of the four tournaments that comprise the Tour’s Playoffs for the FedEx Cup, which culminates with the Tour Championship. The purse for the 2011 BMW Championship will be $8 million.
It was in 2007 that the Tour first instituted its playoffs, which offer bonus money for the 125 players who qualify by virtue of their season-long performance. The BMW is the third event of the playoffs, which means that just the top 70 players are eligible.
Solich said the original idea of the BMW Championship being held at Cherry Hills was planted in February 2010 when WGA President and CEO John Kaczkowski asked during a visit if the club might ever be interested in hosting the event.
That question got the powers that be at Cherry Hills thinking. And with the caddie connection, the late-summer timing and the limited field for a playoff event, the leadership at the club decided it would be a great fit. From there, Solich, Elway, the board of directors and the tournament committee took the ball and ran with it.
“Every project needs a champion, and I probably served that role to champion the idea, but there was great leadership at the club, particularly John Elway, and without John’s willingness to see the vision for what it could be, we would have never gotten off first base,” Solich said. “I did some heavy lifting, but it was definitely a team effort.”
Cherry Hills has been the site of three U.S. Opens (1938, “˜60 and “˜78) and two PGA Championships (1941 and “˜85). Among the players who have won big tournaments at the course are Arnold Palmer (“˜60 U.S. Open), Phil Mickelson (“˜90 U.S. Amateur) and Jack Nicklaus (“˜93 U.S. Senior Open).
PGA Tour commissioner Tim Finchem said when the Tour playoffs were implemented that “our objective was to play great golf tournaments on great golf courses,” noted Andy Pazder, chief of operations for the Tour. “”¦ The PGA Tour views the marriage of the BMW Championship and Cherry Hills Country Club as a natural, a terrific fit, an iconic tournament played at an iconic club.”
The 2014 BMW will be the first professional tour event to come to Cherry Hills since 1985 and since the course underwent a $7.6 million restoration in late 2008 and early 2009. The project added a little more than 300 yards to the maximum length the course can play (now 7,462), and also restored some of the original design elements William Flynn implemented leading up to the club’s opening in 1922. Tom Doak and his team, which designed Pacific Dunes and Old Macdonald in Oregon and Ballyneal and CommonGround in Colorado, handled the restoration work.
As part of the project, every bunker and tee box was redone and the irrigation system was completely replaced. In addition, selected greens were rebuilt. About 200 trees were removed, with some of those being relocated.
Some of the most noticeable changes came on the par-5 17th, where cross bunkers were added in the fairway and trees were removed from the island green. The par-3 eighth hole was completely relocated, and the par-5 fifth also underwent significant alterations.
Duval, a member at Cherry Hills the last six or sevens years, and a resident of Cherry Hills Village, admits that with the mile-high altitude and the advances in equipment, the course will be considered short by Tour players. But with often-sloping fairways that will be narrowed for the tournament, higher rough, and some formidable green complexes, Cherry Hills won’t be any pushover for Tour players, in Duval”˜s opinion.
“I don’t think this golf course will be embarrassed by any stretch,” said Duval, who noted that his personal low score at Cherry Hills is about a 64.
John Ogden, the head professional at the club, believes next year’s U.S. Amateur in many ways will serve as a “dress rehearsal” for the BMW Championship as far as course setup goes, especially with the dates of the events being similar.
“I think the Tour is going to take a hard look at how the golf course plays for the U.S. Amateur,” said Ogden, who was discussing course setup for the Amateur just Tuesday morning with USGA executive director Mike Davis. “That will give us a good measuring point for 2014. But I”˜m not concerned about the golf course. The golf course has always held its own.”
Besides, a good sprinkling of birdies often adds to tournament excitement, as the recent Masters demonstrated.
Since its re-opening in 2009, Cherry Hills has hosted the 2009 Palmer Cup, a college version of the Ryder Cup. During that competition, some of the best college players in the world proved that great scoring can be done at the club. Among those golfers was American Mike Van Sickle, who won a singles match 8 and 7 after being 8 under par through 11 holes.
Whatever the case, Golf Digest certainly thinks highly of Cherry Hills. In the magazine’s recently released list of “America’s 100 Greatest Golf Courses” Cherry Hills was ranked No. 67.
And the club can certainly draw the fans for major events as it proved once again in 2005 when it set the attendance record that still stands for the U.S. Women’s Open (more than 131,000 for the week).
However, Solich said that Cherry Hills’ contract with the BMW Championship calls for attendance to be limited to 27,000 people per day.
“We’ve done that because BMW wants to ensure a quality experience for their patrons and we believe that’s the right thing for Cherry Hills and the community as well,” he said. “We don’t want to make it exclusive — we want to make it an opportunity for golf fans to experience this — but we also want to make it a quality event.”
Colorado has had a steady diet of big golf tournaments in recent years. There was the U.S. Amateur Public Links (2008), the U.S. Senior Open (2008), Palmer Cup (2009) and Senior PGA Championship (2010), and upcoming are the U.S. Women’s Open (2011), U.S. Amateur (2012), the Solheim Cup (2013) and now the BMW Championship (2014).
