Missouri's two golf cities could be in different states. St. Louis brings championship muscle: Bellerive Country Club has hosted a U.S. Open, PGA Championships, and the BMW Championship, a Robert Trent Jones parkland test that still holds modern Tour golf. Norwood Hills and a thick private-club culture fill the rest of the week. Kansas City's side of the state leans toward quality clubs and a growing destination story in the Ozarks. Big Cedar Lodge near Ridgedale assembled Payne's Valley (Tiger Woods's first U.S. public design), Ozarks National, Buffalo Ridge, and Mountain Top into a hill-country resort that draws golf travelers who used to fly over Missouri on the way to somewhere else.
The PGA Tour's relationship with the state now includes playoff golf at Bellerive and a public that treats those weeks as civic events. Everyday golf is tree-lined, humid, and thunderstorm-prone. Charity calendars in both metros are dense; the Ozarks add destination member-guests and resort scrambles with a different dress code.
Seasonally, May and September are the prizes. Missouri's signature is that dual identity: a major-ready club in the St. Louis suburbs and a Branson-adjacent resort that made the Ozarks a golf map pin. Locals still play the muni twilight in between. For a state often typed as a flyover, the architecture and the event résumé are no longer easy to skip.