Blue Hills Country Club

Blue Hills Country Club has been a Kansas City tradition since 1912, designed by Robert Dunning at 777 W Burning Tree Drive. The 7,308-yard championship layout has hosted USGA events and U.S. Open local and sectional qualifiers.

Blue Hills Country Club in Kansas City, Missouri has occupied a central place in the city's golf history since its founding in 1912. The club was established by a group of Kansas City businessmen and civic leaders who wanted a golf facility commensurate with the city's aspirations as a major American metropolis during the era of its greatest early twentieth century growth. The club's early decades were marked by the kind of membership that reflected Kansas City society at its most engaged. Among the notable visitors to Blue Hills in its first half-century was President William Howard Taft, who played the course during his time in public life. Bobby Jones, the greatest amateur golfer of the twentieth century and winner of the 1930 Grand Slam, also played Blue Hills — a distinction that placed the club in a lineage of American courses that Jones visited during his competitive years. The club moved to its current location in 1963, at which point a new course was constructed by designer Robert Dunning.

The Dunning layout stretches to 7,300 yards, making it one of the longer private courses in the Kansas City metropolitan area. Dunning produced a course that tested the full range of shot-making required by the game, with a design philosophy that rewarded precision off the tee and demanded sharp iron play to the greens. Blue Hills became particularly associated with Tom Watson, the Kansas City native who became one of the greatest golfers of the second half of the twentieth century. Watson won eight major championships — five British Opens, two Masters, and a US Open — and remained a passionate ambassador for the game throughout and beyond his competitive career. His connection to Blue Hills ran deep: for a period of approximately 25 years, Watson hosted a celebrity charity golf outing at the club that brought together some of the sport's greatest figures. The outing featured Watson alongside Jack Nicklaus, Arnold Palmer, and Lee Trevino — an assembly of major champions that raised approximately $12 million for Children's Mercy Hospital in Kansas City. This philanthropic endeavor, run through the club that Watson called home, stands as one of the more remarkable charitable achievements in American golf history, blending competitive excellence with civic commitment in a way that embodied Watson's character. The course at Blue Hills sits in the rolling terrain of Clay County, north of the Missouri River, in a landscape that offers the kind of topographic variety that makes for interesting golf. Mature trees line the fairways, and the course's length demands that players manage their game from tee to green with a coherent strategy rather than simply hitting driver on every par-4 and par-5. The Dunning design takes advantage of the property's contours to create holes where the approach shot is complicated by slope, wind exposure, and the position of the landing area relative to the green's orientation. Kansas City's golf culture has always been shaped by its competitive players and by the clubs that nurtured them. Blue Hills represents the private club tradition at its most fully developed — a place where serious golfers have for generations come to test their games in a setting that demands both physical execution and mental management.

The club's history includes generations of members who competed in local, regional, and national amateur events, and who carried the Blue Hills tradition into whatever competition they entered. The club's location in the northern part of the Kansas City metropolitan area reflects the pattern of suburban development that has characterized the city's growth, with golf courses serving as anchors for residential development in areas that combine accessibility to the urban core with the space and topography that golf requires. Blue Hills has remained a consistent reference point in Kansas City golf for more than a century, with the Watson connection giving it a place in the broader history of American professional golf that few private clubs anywhere can match.