Missouri Bluffs - Missouri - USA

Recently, I was fortunate to experience my first round of golf in the “Show Me” state at the Tom Fazio designed Missouri Bluffs Golf Club. Situated on a rolling piece of forested terrain above the Missouri River, the course offered an exceptional example of the riveting golf topography in the greater St. Louis area.

The Missouri Bluffs routing is near perfectly balanced, and it is no wonder that guests return time and time again to play this public course. By my count, there is nearly an equal number of holes which are routed downhill, on flatter ground, and uphill, as well as a fairly even split among holes which work their way to the right, stay straight, or move left. Moreover, Fazio masterfully designed corridors which utilize almost every permutation of these undulations. On some holes, the fairways may act as a speed slot. On others, such as the dogleg right 9th, the slope actually kicks balls to the left. Only a player with a consummate game will feel comfortable over every tee shot and approach at Missouri Bluffs.

The course conditioning was also strong at Missouri Bluffs. Here in North Carolina, zoysia fairways are a rarity. The well-maintained playing surfaces set up well for a variety of shots into some shallow, wavy putting surfaces.

While I would return to Missouri Bluffs without hesitation, my one critique of the course would be about the setup the day I played. For instance, each par three played to a roughly similar length mid-iron. Since each plays at least slightly downhill, the staff could easily have set up five very unique distances on those holes. Moreover, on the back nine, one or two of the opening par fours could be set up as drivable, adding diversity to the overall set of challenges presented.

The highlight of my trip to Missouri was being able to meet and play with fellow Top100GolfCourses reviewer Jeff Kissel. Jeff could not have been a more knowledgeable and gracious host in the Gateway City. If you are not following Jeff’s “Munis_and_Monsters” Instagram account, you are missing out on some very thoughtful, interesting golf architecture commentary (https://www.instagram.com/munis_and_monsters/). Jeff has also has 80+ well-crafted reviews on Top100GolfCourses that you should check out as well (https://www.top100golfcourses.com/reviewer/10026). Thank you Jeff for such a fantastic day!

It was the early 1990s, at the height of the golf course construction boom, and a prominent developer sought to build a “country club for a day”-style high-end public layout near fast-growing suburbs west of St. Louis on heavily wooded public land owned by the University of Missouri. (More on that later.) Tom Fazio was the highest of course designer high fashion at the time, so he was brought in to design the course. The resulting layout at Missouri Bluffs was intended to sit at or near the top in the rankings of best public courses in the state; while it never quite got to that level, its eventual maturation resulted in a high-quality, playable golf course that flies a bit under the radar among the best courses in the St. Louis area.

Fazio took advantage of the hilly terrain by mostly routing holes up and down hills through U-shaped valleys, and along the tops of ridges, rather than up or down the steeper sides of those ridges. The holes up and down valleys offer forgiveness, with most of them being narrow enough around the edges of the fairway to deflect balls back into the middle, while the hole corridors along the ridges are wide enough to at least allow misses on one side or the other. The layout plays to a total par of 71, with an extra par three on the front nine; those par threes are generally used as transitional holes in the routing, taking players between ridges or valleys and other ridges or valleys. Consequently, there is not much variety at all on those short holes; from the back tees, the shortest and longest of the five par threes measure only provide 23 yards of difference, and all are downhill to varying degrees. But most of the rest of the golf course offers a fair bit of variety, with an excellent set of four par fives and several good par fours along the way.

My favorite holes include: #1, a short downhill par five playing through one of the aforementioned valleys and providing a nice birdie opportunity right off the bat; #3, a par four playing back up another valley towards the clubhouse; #5, a par five along the top of a ridge that plays slightly downhill to a spectacular green with multiple levels left and right; #9, a long dogleg right par four featuring a slight crown to its fairway and an incredibly deep green; #11, a drivable par four with all sorts of trouble lurking around its elevated green; #14, a par three over a ravine to a sliver of a green with a particularly difficult portion in its back right; and finally, #15, the most photographed hole on the course, a short par five that drops well over 100 feet from the tee boxes to the fairway and climbs more than halfway back up to the green. When I was a child, my father joined the then-semi-private club for the first couple of years it was open as a place for him (and me) to play regularly; as such, we previewed the Bluffs in the fall of 1994 ahead of the general public (during which my father holed out from 150+ yards for eagle on the par four #16) and after two or so years of it being nearly the only place we played, we’ve been relatively regular visitors ever since.

Fast forward to the present day, and Missouri Bluffs’ story takes a bit of a dark turn. A housing developer – not the one that originally built the course, mind you – worked out a deal with the University of Missouri to purchase several parcels interspersed throughout the course’s routing with the intent of developing a residential subdivision on that land. As this proposal worked its way through the development approval channels, lawsuits were filed by the local chapter of the Sierra Club, among others; hundreds of acres of pristine old-growth forest would be lost, they argued, with associated impacts on flora and fauna in the area. Others questioned a sweetheart deal that was given to a developer to build houses on what was once public land intended for "research" purposes by the university. (The Missouri Bluffs property abuts similarly wooded protected areas on multiple sides, so the development would most certainly be out of character.) While I am not as much an opponent of this development on environmental grounds, from a pure golfing enjoyment perspective, the plans for this subdivision seem outrageously intrusive and the construction process will likely be a nightmare. Most courses with a housing component are usually designed and built together with that housing component, providing at least (when done correctly) some semblance of harmony with the golf course; Missouri Bluffs will not be one of those courses. For now (as of fall 2021), the construction is in Phase 1, which has only impacted the area behind the seventeenth green and eighteenth tee; time will tell if the remaining disruption turns out to be significant or not.

Played over 45 times between October 30, 1994 and September 16, 2021