There are weeks in golf where the leaderboard tells one story and everything swirling around it tells another. This was one of those weeks. Wyndham Clark stood atop Bellerive with a sixth career title in hand, Scottie Scheffler quietly revealed he’d been battling illness the whole time, LIV Golf closed its season in a fog of uncertainty, and somewhere in Indiana, Harold Varner III got asked to leave a golf course. August has a way of making things complicated.
PGA Tour: BMW Championship
Wyndham Clark has a habit of arriving at the right moment. At Bellerive Golf Course in St. Louis, with $20 million and 2,000 FedEx Cup points on the line, he did it again. Clark’s victory at the 2026 BMW Championship was his sixth career win on the PGA Tour and, perhaps more remarkably, his third using the same Ping Ally Blue Onset putter — a club that seems to locate something steady in him when the pressure builds.
Clark isn’t a player who blends into a field. He has a boldness to his game, an attacking quality that can feel almost reckless until it suddenly looks inevitable. At Bellerive, that willingness to commit — to trust the line, to trust the putter — was the difference. The BMW Championship tends to separate players who are still figuring out who they are from those who have already decided. Clark has clearly decided.
What lingered after the trophy presentation was what Scottie Scheffler quietly disclosed in its aftermath. The world’s best player had been dealing with an illness throughout the week and admitted it might have been a poor decision to play at all. There’s a particular kind of competitor who shows up sick and says nothing until it’s over — and even then says it almost apologetically, as if the struggle itself is something to be ashamed of. Scheffler isn’t one for drama. He simply shows up, competes, and reflects honestly after the fact.
LIV Golf: Season Finale
On the other side of the golf world, Michael La Sasso won LIV Golf’s season-ending event, a result that deserved more attention than it received. La Sasso played well enough to win and did exactly that — but his victory was quickly overshadowed by larger questions about what comes next for the league.
LIV heading into an uncertain offseason has become a familiar story, but this one feels heavier than previous versions. The questions about the league’s future, the ongoing negotiations, the unresolved structure of professional golf — none of it has gotten any cleaner. La Sasso won. The season ended. That’s not his burden to carry, but it does color the moment in ways that feel unfair to a player who simply went out and played his best golf when it counted.
LPGA Future?
Away from the marquee stages, Emma Bunch was doing something genuinely remarkable. Bunch closed with a final-round 68 at the Colorado Championship on the ANNIKA Women’s All Pro Tour, forcing a playoff with Tiffany Le before outlasting her over five holes to claim her third title of the season. Three wins in one season is a serious run by any measure.
Five holes is a long time to stay locked in during a playoff. The fact that she did — and closed it out — says a lot about where her game is right now. She’s worth tracking closely as the calendar moves into fall.
Golf News: The Stories Beneath the Scores
Beyond the ropes, a handful of stories this week cut through in ways worth noting.
In Michigan, Rustic Glen Golf Club’s new owners — data-center developer Related Digital — announced plans to build a $16 billion data center on the adjacent land. They’ve promised to keep the rural course open. That promise will be tested, but for now it’s an unusual pairing: a golf course sitting alongside one of the largest infrastructure investments of the modern era. The fairways and the fiber, the sand traps and the server farms. Whether the course survives intact long-term is a story worth following.
Then there was Harold Varner III. According to widely circulated reports this week, Varner and his group were removed from an Indiana golf course, with the club subsequently calling them out publicly. The details are still murky, but the incident landed hard given Varner’s profile and the conversations that tend to follow whenever a Black professional golfer and a private club find themselves at odds. Golf has made real progress on access and inclusion, but there’s still a gap between where the game is and where it ought to be. The golf community took notice, and rightly so.
On the equipment front, PUMA Golf and Realtree unveiled their “Precision in the Wild” capsule collection, a collaboration that pulls four decades of Realtree’s outdoor identity through performance fabrics built for the course. It’s a niche collaboration, but an interesting one. Golf apparel keeps moving toward golfers who don’t feel the need to leave the rest of their life at the bag drop.
And quietly, in Idaho, Kal Zaranec at Circling Raven Golf Club completed a certification program through the GCSAA. It won’t make headlines anywhere else. But as a former greenskeeper myself, I think the people who maintain these courses, who get up before the sun to make sure the game is playable, fair, and worth showing up for, deserve the acknowledgment.
Looking Ahead
The FedEx Cup Playoffs are tightening. Clark has positioned himself well. Scheffler, illness and all, will regroup — that much you can count on. LIV heads into the offseason with more questions than answers. And Emma Bunch is probably already thinking about number four.
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