The BMW Championship has its origins in the Western Open, which ran from 1899 to 2006, before the great god of golfing commercialism dictated that a brand new tournament was the best way to keep pace with the modern world and all its pecuniary benefits. And so, a hundred years of American golfing tradition was cast aside in favor of a shiny new professional event sponsored by the German multinational company Bayerische Motoren Werke AG.

Organized by the Western Golf Association, this 72-hole stroke play competition is played as an end of season FedEx Cup playoff event on the PGA Tour schedule and it’s open to the top 70 professionals with the most qualifying points following the Northern Trust tournament. The leading 30 players with FedEx points after the BMW progress to the final playoff event, the Tour Championship, where the FedEx Cup champion is decided.

The first edition of the tournament in 2007 was held at Cog Hill Golf & Country Club in Illinois, with Tiger Woods picking up the winner’s check for $1,260,000 from a total prize fund of seven million dollars. A year later, the competition moved southwest to Missouri, where Colombian Camilo Villegas celebrated a 2-shot win over his nearest rival Dudley Hart.

Most of the BMW Championships have been staged in the Prairie State and when it returned to Cog Hill for a three-year stint on the club’s No. 4 course in 2009, Tiger Woods claimed his second title with a winning margin of eight strokes over runners-up Marc Leishman and Jim Furyk.

The next port of call for the competition in 2012 was Crooked Stick Golf Club in Indiana, with Rory McIlroy from Northern Ireland taking the plaudits after accumulating an aggregate score of 280 – this total was enough to remain two shots ahead of Lee Westwood and Phil Mickelson – and add $1,440,000 to his bank account.

It was back to Illinois 12 months later, to Conway Farms Golf Club in Lake Forest, for the first of three editions of the BMW Championship at that location in the next five years. Zach Johnston won the 2013 event but many will remember the tournament more for Jim Furyk’s score of 59 in the second round, which went a long way to securing him third place in the final standings.

In 2014, the event moved a thousand miles west from Chicago to Cherry Hills Country Club in Colorado, where Floridian Billy Horchel shot 68-66-63-69 to beat Bubba Watson by two strokes and earn his second victory on the PGA Tour – and he followed that significant win seven days later by shooting another four rounds in the 60s to take the Tour Championship by three strokes at East Lake.

Aronimink Golf Club became the first venue in Pennsylvania to host the BMW Championship in 2018 and Justin Rose will remember it for all the wrong reasons. Having finished second the previous year to Australian Marc Leishman, he again ended up in the runner-up position after losing the first playoff in the tournament’s short history to Keegan Bradley.

Medinah Country Club in Illinois staged the next contest, with Justin Thomas holding off Patrick Cantley (who’d won earlier in the season at the Memorial Tournament) to capture his first PGA Tour since winning the WGC-Bridgestone Invitational twelve months earlier.

Olympia Fields Country Club in Illinois was the 8th club to host the competition in 2020, with John Rahm pocketing a first prize worth $1,710,000 from the total purse of nine and a half million dollars. After tying with Justin Johnston in regulation play over 72 holes, the Spaniard won with a birdie at the first playoff hole to claim the lion’s share of the cash.

Despite the demise of the Western Open, the winners of the BMW Championship are still presented with the J.K. Wadley Trophy as well as a new BMW trophy. J.K. Wadley donated the sterling silver cup when serving as a director of the Western Golf Association in the early 1920s and it has been presented to the winners ever since.