Round 1 of 4 · The opener
Wednesday
April 14, 2027
- Tee window
- 1:00–2:30 PM
- Green fee
- $300 + tax
Before it was Ozarks National it was a dairy farm, and part of it was somebody else’s course: Murder Rock, a John Daly design that came with Johnny Morris’s 2013 purchase of Branson Creek. Morris did not patch it. He split the land: the valley floor went to Tiger Woods for Payne’s Valley, and the upper ridges went to Bill Coore and Ben Crenshaw, who walked them with him in early 2015. Clearing, routing, shaping and sodding took the next four years, and the course opened in April 2019 — by Big Cedar’s account the first Coore & Crenshaw design in Missouri.
The ground did not make it easy. The holes sit on scattered limestone ridges with ravines falling away on either side, and Coore’s answer, as Planet Golf tells it, was to find ridges broad enough to carry one hole out and another back, then cross the gaps with par 3s rather than blast away the hillsides. The one-shotters at 2, 8 and 12 do that connecting work. Several greens sit at the very end of a ridge with nothing behind them, which concentrates the mind on the approach.
Played twice: once to learn it, once to answer for it.
It is set up firm and fast, on purpose. Zoysia fairways, bentgrass greens, punchbowls that gather the ball off the slopes around them and a few approaches blind over a brow: the ball can be run in, and the course expects you to think about when. Coore’s line was that it rewards ‘the ability to improvise and maybe think a little differently.’ The front nine is three par 3s, three 4s and three 5s. The back holds one par 5, at 11, then four straight par 4s from 13 through 16 that include the two longest on the card and three of the five hardest by handicap. The 13th starts with a carry over a ravine and a walk across a 400-foot wooden bridge; the 16th is the No. 1 handicap. Then 17, the shortest hole on the course, and a long climb at 18 to a green set sharply above the fairway.
The old farm is still in the routing. Its Stone House, built in the early 1900s, has never been moved and sits behind the greens at 5 and 16. The clubhouse is older than the house: an 1800s log cabin brought from Minnesota and assembled on the site in January 2019. And the course has a professional line. In August 2020 Phil Mickelson made his PGA Tour Champions debut here, opened with 61, drove the fifth green for an eagle on the final day and won wire to wire at 22 under. Big Cedar credits him with the course record. Golf Digest named it the Best New Public Course of 2019; Golfweek has it the No. 1 public-access course in Missouri for 2026.
The Invitational plays it first and last. The first time is for learning which slopes feed the hole and which ones send the ball away; the second, for proving it. The trip lands early in the Ozarks season — Big Cedar says its zoysia sits dormant through March and greens up toward the start of April — so the fairways may still be waking up.
