Courtesy of The PGA of America
Gil Hanse and Jim Wagner’s work goes on display in the year’s second men’s major
Donald Ross designed close to 400 golf courses, but he only said this about one of them: “I intended to make this course my masterpiece, but not until today did I realize I built better than I knew.”
He came to this epiphany in 1948 when he visited Aronimink Golf Club in the west Philadelphia suburbs, a course he’d completed 20 years earlier. Architects often exaggerate the merits of their creations, but his assessment of Aronimink seems genuine considering the time he’d had to reflect on the property’s character, the elaborate bunkering and intricate green shapes. The club isn’t sure if he’d been back to see the course since construction, so the impression was evidently powerful.
The club moved to several locations before it found its permanent home in Newtown Square in 1926 on a rugged piece of former farmland that gave Ross room to build one of his most serious designs, measuring 6,619 yards, among his longest to that point. The muscular holes charge across depressions, bank off slopes and ride over upland plateaus. Nests of bunkers ensnare drives at every turn, and the canted greens are full of wonderful little shoulders and slopes that slide balls around the perimeter edges.
Like most courses of its vintage, heavy-handed tree planting resulted in fairways and greens that were shadowed in woods. More than 20 years of careful tree removal, however, have allowed the architectural details to shine, and a 2017 remodel by Gil Hanse and Jim Wagner further returned the course to its opening-day foundation. Today, at par 70 and more than 7,300 yards, it joins Merion and Oakmont in Pennsylvania’s storied triumvirate of championship layouts, hosting the 1977 U.S. Amateur, a women’s and senior PGA Championship, and the 1962 and 2026 PGA Championships. Here are five notable features to keep an eye on when the best of the best play this test.
HOLE 1: PAR 4, 434 YARDS
Donald Ross suggested that beginning holes should give the golfer a chance to warm up, to get the “swing of his stroke” under control. The drive at the par-4 first appears to fit the prescription with an ample, upward-rising fairway that catches but also deadens drives. The script flips on the approach that is steeply uphill to a semi-blind green with deep bunkers left and right. The putting surface is the only one at Aronimink with defined upper and lower tiers, a formulation Ross used more liberally elsewhere, adding to the challenge of getting the ball on the correct level. It’s far from a gentle handshake.
HOLE 5: PAR 3, 171 YARDS
BOX TOP: The pedestal par-3 fifth hole surrounded in sand is a Donald Ross specialty, seen at clubs like Seminole and Oakland Hills.
Scott Taetsch
The short, island-like par 3 surrounded in bunkers was a Ross specialty that he used at Seminole, Oak Hill, Oakland Hills, Scioto and dozens of other clubs. Aronimink’s fifth is one of his more attractive versions, playing slightly downhill to an ample, tabletop green with wavy contours around the back edge. Though it can stretch to more than 170 yards, Hanse thinks it’s most intriguing when played extremely forward—so it’s just a touch-shot for good players, especially coupled with a hole location in the front bowl that can yield birdies in bunches and even an ace or two.
BUNKERS
During the original construction of Aronimink, the large, singular bunkers that Ross illustrated on his blueprints were broken into smaller clusters, multiplying their number by a factor of three and giving the course a busy, shotgun-type look uncommon for Ross. It’s uncertain if Ross or his lead associate J.B. McGovern, who lived in Philadelphia and was there for the duration of the project, made the decision to alter the plans. What Ross drew is not what was built, even though his comments about Aronimink suggest he approved the changes. Renovations in future decades by other architects gradually reduced the number of bunkers, either removing them or recombining the clusters into whole shapes. During their 2017 remodel, Hanse, Wagner and the club chose to recreate the as-built course based on late 1920s aerial photography. This meant adding more than 100 bunkers across the property and reestablishing the course’s unique appearance.
HOLE 7: PAR 4, 419 YARDS
TILT-A-WHIRL: The seventh hole’s tilted fairway is the most challenging to hit.
Scott Taetsch
Ross used bunkers rather than doglegs at Aronimink to create movement, and the seventh is the last hole that truly bends. It’s also the most difficult fairway to hit. It’s a blind tee shot over directional bunkers that needs to be shaped into the reverse camber fairway with a landing area that slopes away from the line of play. Drives that miss on the inside line get snared in a field of shaggy moguls, and those straying too far left kick down into the low rough. Even perfect drives leave a spicy wedge up to a green that looks like it’s about to slip off the side of the hill that it sits on.
HOLE 11: PAR 4, 425 YARDS
The most intensively bunkered hole at Aronimink is the par-4 11th. Twenty of them garnish the path, bracketing the fairway and circling the green. But more threatening than sand to a bad score, or a bad loss of the hole, is the green, the most severely sloped on a course full of severely sloped greens. The putting surface is so pitched toward the front that it can be a challenge to find usable hole locations. Leaving approaches above the flag on the right side of the green will almost certainly lead to three-putts, if not worse.
HOLE 18: PAR 4, 490 YARDS
LAST DANCE: The newly extended 18th hole marches back toward the clubhouse ridge.
Scott Taetsch
It’s not easy finding extra yardage at older, landlocked courses, but in 2025 a new tee location was added on 18 on the opposite side of a maintenance road that brings the length of this par 4 to 490 yards. The nearly 30 extra yards makes a difficult finishing hole a bruising one, putting it in the same weight class as the more famous closers at Merion and Oakmont. Second shots are struck uphill toward a mostly obscured green, and it’s another wild one with a strange array of brows and pockets that make long putting a treacherous and inevitable endeavor.
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