Round 3 of 4 · Round three
Friday
April 16, 2027
- Tee window
- 9:00–10:30 AM
- Green fee
- $300 + tax
Buffalo Ridge is the veteran of the week. Tom Fazio built it as Branson Creek Golf Club, and it opened in 2000, nearly two decades before either of the other courses on the card. Johnny Morris bought the property in 2013 and brought Fazio back; a year of new water, native planting and wider wildlife corridors later, it reopened in 2014 under a name meant literally.
The bison are real. They are free-ranging North American bison from nearby Dogwood Canyon Nature Park, and they graze in pastures beside the fairways; the local rules on the scorecard keep golfers out of their ground. The tee markers are bison skulls, which Golf Digest ranked eighth among its favourite tee markers in golf, and the back set is simply the Buffalo tees: 7,036 yards, par 71.
The earliest start of the week, and the only gallery that grazes.
Fazio's routing is two returning nines in a figure of eight, opening and closing on par 5s. The front nine rises and falls over the higher ground; the back nine circles the rim of a bluff with the ridges and ravines of the Ozarks laid out beyond it. None of the water is subtle: a flooded quarry off the fifth, a cascade down the eighth, a creek the length of the fourteenth and, at the seventeenth, an open cave behind the green that sends its water across the front.
It has a tournament record. PGA TOUR Champions played Legends of Golf rounds here in 2014, 2015, 2016 and 2018, and in August 2020 the course held an event of its own, the Charles Schwab Series at Bass Pro Shops Big Cedar Lodge. That week was settled at both ends of the card: Kenny Perry bogeyed the eighteenth to give back a one-shot lead, and Shane Bertsch won the four-man playoff with an eagle at the first.
The course the field will see is younger than its history. All eighteen greens were resodded in 2025 and every greenside bunker was redesigned. The zoysia fairways sleep from late October through March and usually green up around the start of April, so a mid-April round should find them waking, weather permitting. The weight of the day sits late, in a five-hole finish that opens with the 615-yard fourteenth and ends on a par 5 that has already cost a tour professional a one-shot lead.
