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COURSE OF THE WEEK · ARONIMINK, PA
Donald Ross designed more than 400 golf courses across his career. He shaped the American landscape of golf from the 1890s through the 1940s, working with a vision for strategic play and architectural subtlety that placed him, alongside Alister MacKenzie and A.W. Tillinghast, as one of the defining figures in the game’s physical history. Of those 400-plus designs, Ross said one was his finest. He called Aronimink his masterpiece. The word is not used lightly when it comes from the man who also built Pinehurst No. 2.
Origins: 1896 to 1928
The club’s origins trace to 1896, when the Belmont Golf Association — a spin-off from the Belmont Cricket Club — established itself on a modest parcel of Philadelphia-area land. The club moved locations twice over the following three decades, growing in ambition with each migration. In 1926, Aronimink acquired 300 acres in Newtown Square, a leafy suburb of the kind that existed only in a certain Philadelphia imagination — quiet, old money, discreetly beautiful. They commissioned Ross to build something worthy of the land.
Ross delivered. The course opened on Memorial Day, 1928, and the membership knew immediately that something extraordinary had been built on their land. The greens, fairways, and hazard placements that Ross established in 1928 are, remarkably, largely intact today. Unlike many courses of that era — which were rerouted, flattened, softened, or otherwise altered to accommodate modern equipment and expectations — Aronimink has been maintained with a fidelity to Ross’s original vision that borders on reverence. When you play the 18th hole today, you are playing essentially the same hole that Gary Player played to clinch the 1962 PGA Championship. The game has changed. The course has not needed to.
“This is the most characterful Donald Ross course I’ve ever walked. The greens are so complex that you need to plan your approach from the fairway — not to get close to the hole, but to get on the right tier.” — A tour player’s assessment during practice rounds
What Makes the Course Special
The defining feature of Aronimink is its green complexes. Ross was famous for crowned and contoured putting surfaces — greens that shed approaches to the rough if they’re not struck with sufficient precision, and that present multiple distinct sections with dramatic slope differentials between them. At Aronimink, these tendencies are expressed with particular force. The greens here are not simply difficult to hold; they’re architecturally sophisticated tests of course management. A pin on the back-left shelf might require an approach from the right side of the fairway. Miss to the left and you’re chipping from a position where stopping the ball within ten feet of the hole requires both skill and fortune.
The course plays to approximately 7,200 yards at championship setup, which is not extreme by modern standards. But distance, as Ross understood better than almost anyone, is a red herring. What matters at Aronimink is direction, trajectory, and the ability to hit irons to specific sections of greens rather than simply at them. Players who try to overpower the course — who fly approach shots at pins and trust their wedges to generate enough spin to stop on a crowned surface — will find themselves spending a lot of time on the wrong tier, making bogeys from twelve feet.
The 1962 PGA Championship
Gary Player won the 1962 PGA Championship at Aronimink with a score of 278, two under par. It was the first of his two PGA titles, and it announced to an American audience that this slight South African, who carried himself with such seriousness of purpose on the course, was here to stay. Player would go on to win nine major championships, becoming one of the game’s true global icons. His win at Aronimink was, at the time, considered a significant upset — the course was expected to reward American power players, and Player was neither American nor particularly powerful. He won it with his irons, his course management, and a mental toughness that even the most demanding Donald Ross greens couldn’t erode.
After Player’s victory, Aronimink faded from the major championship circuit. The club hosted various PGA Tour events over the following decades — the Ed McMahon Los Angeles Open made a brief, unlikely appearance there — but for most of its post-1962 history, Aronimink existed in the rarefied world of great private clubs: beloved by those who knew it, essentially invisible to those who didn’t. Its reputation among golf architects and serious course collectors grew steadily; it consistently features in best-course rankings. But the major championship spotlight never returned. Until now.
Holes to Watch
The par-4 13th is widely considered the course’s signature hole — a dogleg right with a fairway bunker positioned at exactly the distance where players are tempted to carry it and a green that punishes the approach from the wrong angle with savage effectiveness. The par-3 8th asks players to fly an iron to a well-protected green on a slope that seems to offer no safe half-measure: you’re either on the correct section or you’re making five. The closing stretch from 15 through 18 is among the finest finishing sequences on any course that will host a major this decade.
Watch where the tour’s best players miss their approaches this week. A shot six feet left of the flag at Aronimink, on the wrong slope, might be harder to get up-and-down from than a shot twenty yards short in a greenside bunker. That’s not bad design — it’s exactly the kind of premium on precision that Ross spent his life building. The course will not be overpowered. It will be solved, by the player who reads it best, one section at a time.