Round 2 of 4 · Round two
Thursday
April 15, 2027
- Tee window
- 11:00 AM–12:30 PM
- Green fee
- $450 + tax
The course carries the name of Payne Stewart, the Springfield man who won three major championships before he was killed in a plane accident in 1999. Tiger Woods and Johnny Morris announced it in 2017 with Stewart’s family as the third partner, and it became the first fully public-access course anywhere finished by Woods’s firm, TGR Design. The ground is Big Cedar hill country near Branson: exposed limestone, wooded ridges and running streams.
Woods built it to be played, not survived. There are more than 85 acres of zoysia fairway. The greens are open at the front so the ball can be run on, and the runoffs around them are mown tight enough that the putter works from most places off the edge. He says his crew took out only a handful of trees and added only a handful of creeks. The water that is there does the work: the lake at the 5th, crossed by a cart bridge to a peninsula green; the falls behind the heart-shaped 10th; the lake waiting left of the 16th.
Eighteen holes to decide the match. One more to settle the accounts.
The front nine hands out chances. It starts by dropping off the hill, and the 2nd, a par 3 of 267 yards from the back, plays well short of its number. The 3rd is drivable and the 4th can be reached in two from the right side. The back nine takes them back. The 13th through 15th climb, often into the wind, and the 13th, at 653 yards, is the longest hole on the property. Then the routing turns for home and the par-5 18th points straight at the Big Rock.
The 19th is Morris’s, not Woods’s: a short par 3 to an island green at the foot of that wall, with water running down the rock, built for one purpose, which is ending arguments. It has already ended one in public. At the first Payne’s Valley Cup, Woods and Justin Thomas reached it all square with Justin Rose and Rory McIlroy, and Thomas closed the match by putting his tee shot inside ten feet. The trip back to the clubhouse runs about a mile, through a spring-fed cave and over bridges strung across 250-foot cliffs.
It is our one look at the place, so there is no learning it for next time. The club asks for five hours or less for all nineteen holes. Budget for the nineteenth; it is the one that settles the day.
