One of the nation’s top professional golf tournaments is coming back to Colorado. PGA Tour officials said Wednesday that they will host the BMW Championship at the Castle Pines Golf Club in Castle Rock in August 2024.
The course, which was designed by golf legend Jack Nicklaus, last hosted a major PGA Tour event regularly in 2006. The International was first played there in 1986 and ran for 21 years. When tour officials ended the event in 2007, they said that they couldn’t find a major sponsor to keep funding its event at Castle Pines.
The International used a modified scoring system called the Modified Stableford system instead of traditional stroke play. The BMW Championship will use the traditional scoring method.
The tournament is the second-to-last tournament of the FedEx Cup playoffs for the PGA Tour, making it a very important opportunity for players. This year, it will be held in Wilmington, Delaware. In 2014, the tournament was held at Cherry Hills Country Club in Cherry Hills Village.
Joining a Wednesday press conference virtually at Castle Pines, Nicklaus said he’s anxious to see how professionals approach the course.
“I think it’s a really good golf course,” he said. “I think it’s a fun golf course to play and it certainly doesn’t lack for beauty, that’s for sure.”
Nicklaus said he worked with club officials there to redo some of the holes on the course to make them more challenging for professionals. He also said that the altitude of the course will be a big hurdle for them to overcome. Castle Pines sits at an elevation of nearly 6,700 feet.
“If I were them I would get there as fast as I could from the previous tournament,” he said. “Altitude [adjustment] is something that doesn’t just happen overnight. It takes two or three days to get used to it.”
Tour officials said they don't yet have exact dates for the event, but that it will likely take place in mid-August, two weeks before Labor Day weekend.
PGA Tour officials also said they'd like to work out a way to bring more tournaments to Colorado, but stopped short of saying they were considering hosting a permanent PGA Tour tournament in Colorado in the future.
