Mollie Cahillane | mollie@bigswingmedia.news

This week, Bellerive Country Club in St. Louis is transformed for the BMW Championship: grandstands rising over fairways, hospitality structures where members usually park, and a private golf course converted into a small city for a few days of made-for-TV golf. By Sunday night, the tents will be down, the corporate suites dismantled and thousands of attendees on flights back home. Left behind? Turf that won’t fully recover for months, and dozens of smaller repair jobs and renovations.

It’s a scene playing out at private clubs across the country every year, and it raises a question without an obvious answer. Why would elite, high-profile clubs that don’t need additional cash agree to any of this?

‍The cost before the check

Let’s start with what hosting a PGA Tour event, or a more elusive major, actually costs a private club before dollars begin changing hands. Private clubs typically spend somewhere between $500,000 and $1.5 million per year on course maintenance, with the average closer to $1.1 million — labor alone eats up 55% to 70% of that budget, according to industry benchmarking data from the Golf Course Superintendents Association of America.

A club with tournament-caliber conditioning standards likely sits at or above the top of that range even in a normal year. Toss in a Tour event or a major championship, and that number climbs further — tournament organizers bring in their own agronomy teams to take over a course’s conditioning in the weeks before and after, layering additional cost and disruption onto a club’s existing operation.

Then there’s the buildout and cleanup itself, which stretches far longer than the tournament week suggests. At one recent U.S. Open host club, the last turf repair vehicle didn’t leave the property until October 1, more than three months after the tournament wrapped in June, according to a longtime head professional who lived through the process. This year's U.S. Open host is on a similar timeline: As of mid-August, more than two months after the tournament ended, the temporary structures had come down, but turf repair work on the course itself had not yet begun. Guest play is curtailed weeks in advance, and golf carts are banned entirely for long stretches, cutting off access for older members and others who can’t easily walk 18 holes.

At one longtime Tour stop, the host club lost its tennis courts and parking lot to corporate hospitality for roughly a month before the event and another month after. At the U.S. Open host club, an entire nine-hole par-3 course — a fixture for the club’s junior program — was out of commission for the better part of a year.

Not every hosting commitment carries the same weight, though. Sources were clear that a regular PGA Tour stop and a major championship are not comparable asks. The USGA and the R&A hold host courses to a materially higher standard than a typical Tour event does, and a major draws somewhere in the range of 25,000 to 30,000 spectators a day — well above most Tour stops — which means a larger buildout, more infrastructure and more of a club's grounds handed over to hospitality and corporate space for longer. That scale cuts both ways on the revenue side, too: Majors and marquee international events like the Ryder Cup also pull in considerably more corporate spending, since companies are willing to pay a premium simply to be associated with golf's biggest stages.

What’s actually on the ledger?

Given the massive disruption, the direct financial payout can look thin. Private clubs hosting a major or PGA Tour event typically negotiate a flat rights fee — let’s call it rent, for simplicity — sometimes paired with a share of corporate hospitality sales. That split varies by contract, and some clubs opt to skip the revenue-sharing complexity entirely in favor of a lump sum.

What clubs don’t get: merchandise sales, food and beverage, and media rights, which by most accounts represents the single largest revenue line in the entire event and remains with the governing body or tour. Resort properties like Pinehurst or Pebble Beach operate under a different model altogether, since they aren’t member-owned clubs to begin with.

For a private club, there is real money involved — U.S. Open hosts usually rake in somewhere between $5 million and $10 million for hosting, per several sources with direct knowledge of arrangements. But set against the cost of agronomy takeover, construction, lost amenities and a disrupted membership experience for the better part of a year, several people who’ve been on the inside of these deals describe the math as close to a wash, if not a net loss, once every cost is tallied.

‍What’s the real return?

So, why do it? The answer depends on who you ask.

“There’s an absurd amount of hubris in the golf membership space,” said a private investor with experience in sports and hospitality businesses.

Clubs in the U.S. Open or Open Championship rotation (places with the kind of institutional wealth that makes a rights fee close to irrelevant) often say yes because maintaining that status, generation after generation, is core to how the membership sees itself. Most clubs pursuing a major or Tour event, the same source added, “quite frankly, don’t need the money.”

The longtime head pro sees it in far less cynical terms.

“I don’t view it as a burden at all,” the pro said. “I view it as an honor to be working at a club, or being a member of a club that's hosted a major.” That framing extends to the membership too — for every member who questions the cost of disruption, there are two who are thrilled to say they belong to a club that’s hosted one of golf’s most prestigious events.

The clearest financial version of that return shows up in pricing power. A club that has hosted a U.S. Open can charge a real premium for corporate outings afterward. "If you want to have an outing at a U.S. Open course, it's going to cost you more than if it's a non-U.S. Open course," the same head professional said, describing it as a genuine trickle-down benefit.

Beyond that effect, though, the return is less concrete than club leadership might hope or the public expects. At one recent U.S. Open venue, hosting didn't meaningfully move membership demand or the waitlist — the club was already exclusive enough that a major championship didn't change who wanted in. What the tournament proceeds funded instead was renovation work the club likely would have done anyway, just with the USGA effectively subsidizing a chunk of the bill.

‍A shrinking pool

Whatever the mix of motives, fewer private clubs are choosing to be part of it. A handful still host a Tour event nearly every year — Riviera and Colonial among them — but that list is short and getting shorter. Most of the country’s storied private clubs have settled into something closer to a once-a-decade rotation for majors, taking their turn in the spotlight and then stepping back for years at a time.

It’s an unusual arrangement compared to the rest of pro sports. Franchises in other leagues own their stadiums and venues outright. In golf, tours and governing bodies mostly don't own their venues. The PGA Tour's own TPC network is a partial exception: the Tour holds direct ownership stakes in some TPC courses (81% of TPC Deere Run, 62.5% of TPC Boston, among others) while licensing the TPC name to other, independently owned courses — but that network still represents a small fraction of where Tour events are actually played.

The majority of tournament golf, and virtually all major championship golf, happens on courses the Tour and USGA don't own at all, which means the sport's biggest media events depend entirely on private clubs voluntarily absorbing months of disruption for a payday that, by several accounts, barely covers the cost of hosting.

As the Tour's 2028 restructuring narrows the competitive calendar and interest in golf keeps climbing, that dynamic is unlikely to get simpler: fewer clubs willing to host, more demand for the ones that still are, and a private-club economy that will keep saying yes for reasons that have very little to do with the number on the check.