When it comes to long-range weather forecasts, throwing forward nine years might seem a stretch, but America’s Ryder Cup captain Keegan Bradley had seen enough to be wary and was up for the challenge.
Bradley was certain of one thing, even if the prediction could not be proved correct for eight years. If the weather held along the US east coast preceding the 2026 PGA Championship, the Aronimink Golf Course would be bearing teeth.
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It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia? Definitely not. But should the title of the long-running comedy classic ring true over the next week, the world’s best will need to be on their game to challenge according to Bradley.
At least, that was his assessment after winning the last major PGA Tour event to be held on the course with a chequered history when successful in the BMW Championship in 2018.
“The venue is incredible. I think if this course plays firm and fast with high rough … it’s a really difficult golf course and it’ll be a great test for us,” Bradley said at the time.
A quick glance at Wikipedia supports the theory, with Aronimink cited at No.4 among the “toughest courses” on the PGA Tour, 78th in a “greatest courses” assessment and 55th in a “classic courses” category citing different golf journals and publications.
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Now for the caveat. When Bradley, the winner of the 2011 PGA Championship, won at Aronimink back in 2018, the course played anything but tough. The 39-year-old shot 20-under and still needed a playoff to edge Justin Rose.
It turned out that the New Englander had a harder time handling the taunts of Philly Eagles fans chanting 41-33 to him – the score line from the 2018 Super Bowl – than any threat posed by the dampened course.
Heavy rain had rendered Aronimink, which is designed by legendary architect Donald J. Ross and famed for rewarding precision over power, unfortunately toothless that year.
The course record is shared by five players at 62, which is 8-under the card, but four of those scores were shared when Aronimink’s acclaimed checks and balances were blunted back in 2018.
NEWTOWN SQUARE, PA – AUGUST 4: The 11th fairway at the Aronimink Golf Club (Photo by Dave Evenson/PGA of America via Getty Images)Source: Getty Images
Tiger Woods shot his best score for the year, Rory McIlroy regained some lost touch, Kevin Na said yes and Tommy Fleetwood managed what would normally be a mighty feat twice. And he was still among the also-rans.
It is well known that the characteristics of a course can change significantly based on weather and timing.
This major will be held far earlier than that event, which was played in September preceding that year’s Ryder Cup, though admittedly during a busy storm season. But it will pay to keep a close eye on the weather this week.
“This is one of our tougher tests but it just wasn’t playing that way this year,” Woods said.
“It was just soft and as it was hot early in the week, the ball was flying (and) guys were hitting driver, wedge every hole. It wasn’t much of a challenge.”
Jeff Kiddie, the head professional at the course for almost two decades, said the club had a clear wish for this year’s PGA Championship … but admitted they needed a little help from Mother Nature.
“We’d like it to play firm and fast, but that won’t be up to us,” Kiddie told pga.com.
Fox Sport’s expert analyst Paul Gow said the venue will look appealing to regular golfers tuning in from Australia but warned they should not be deceived by its beauty, saying it is more than capable of becoming a beast.
“Now we’ve got to keep in mind that this is a parklands golf course, so it’s going to be picturesque, it’s going to be green,” told foxsports.com.au.
“The golf course itself, It’s got elevated greens with what I would call complicated approaches to them. There is a of a false front type of thing. And there is a bit of elevation change here.
“And we have only seen a bunch of events there. Justin Rose won there. Keegan Bradley won there when it was a tour event. They have played a women’s event there. Gary Player won the PGA there back in 1962.
Aronimink GC, Pennsylvania: Gary Player after winning the PGA Championship in 1962.Source: Getty Images
“But it’ll be a test of golf and depending on the weather really, especially Philly at this time of the season, if it dries out … it could be really challenging.”
THE THINKING GOLFERS COURSE
Commissioned to build a course on farmland in Newtown Square, about 25km from the centre of Philadelphia, Ross strove to create a masterpiece at Aronimink, which is said to have been named after the chief of the Lenape tribe.
The great Scot wanted Aronimink to play like a chess board. This was to be a course for the thoughtful golfer, one capable of strategising and devising a way to handle its challenges.
As the tournament’s website notes, “with rolling fairways, strategic bunkering and classic green complexes that demand thoughtful shot-making, it’s a course that challenges every part of a player’s game”.
When he returned to assess his work two decades on from its 1928 opening, and 14 years before Gary Player clinched the PGA Championship there in 1962, Ross was tickled pink.
“I intended to make this my masterpiece, but not until today did I realise I built it better than I knew,” he said.
Some of the world’s best golfers including Bryson DeChambeau, Tommy Fleetwood, Cameron Young, Rory McIlroy and Jon Rahm and, on the second row, Chris Gotterup, Cameron Young, Xander Schauffele, Scottie Scheffler and Jordan Spieth are among those chasing PGA Championship glory this week. (AP Photo/File)Source: AP
Aussie Marc Leishman, who arrived at Aronimink in 2018 as the defending champion in the BMW Championship, noted the big wet had blunted its difficulty.
But he stressed its bunkers, in particular, were hard to attack from and that the greens had the potential to be devilishly hard if the ball finished in the wrong spot in regular conditions.
There is a truth every golfer who plays Aronimink, be it the members of the private course of the professionals on site this week, knows. Do not leave the ball above the green.
“There’s quite a bit of room off the tee but if you do hit it in the bunkers, they’re very penalising,” Leishman said.
“I think most people will be hitting a lot of fairways. But good iron play is probably the key, along with obviously holing the putts. But I think good iron play is a huge, huge advantage (in terms of) how the scoring will go. If you’re in the wrong parts of the green, you have no chance.”
THE WEIRD AND AWKWARD TRAPS
Not surprisingly for a course just a couple of years short of celebrating its 100th birthday, Aronimink has undergone a nip, tuck and freshen up to keep pace with the modern game.
It is a decade since Gil Hanse took on the challenge of stiffening a course that, at 6700 metres in length and playing to a Par 70, is not overly long by current standards.
He has more than doubled the number of bunkers to 174 – that’s enough to make any golfer break out in sweats – in part by dicing and reshaping some of the larger traps situated around the greens.
Gow, who has returned to Australia after an extended stint covering the PGA Tour beginning at the Masters, said the bunkers have the ability to frustrate the world’s very best golfers.
“They’re really weird. They’re really small bunkers. They’re annoying bunkers,” he said.
“(They have) unusual lies in the bunkers, you know, far from the lips, the back lips, the side lips and into the front side. They’ve done a pretty good job taking it back to how Ross designed it.”
Greens have been expanded to provide more locations to place the pin and challenge the putting of the professionals, while several fairways have been widened and lengthened.
“I think it’s going to be somebody’s creativity around the greens, the ability to get up and down, that will be the critical part. You’re going to miss greens, and it’s the scrambling ability that will be important,” Hanse told the tour website.
“As with any Donald Ross course, being able to read those greens will be key because they have such significant contours, but also an amazing series of subtle breaks within them that will be crucial.”
Reading between the lines, the advice rings true. Don’t leave the ball above the hole.
A LONG TIME COMING
Given its lofty status in several ratings, it might surprise the only major the Philadelphia course has hosted was the 1962 PGA Championship clinched by Gary Player.
It was a vintage period, with Player sharing the spoils in majors that year with the other two members of the celebrated Big Three in Arnold Palmer and Jack Nicklaus.
It was later that a controversy arose, one that points to the complex nature of American history. Aronimink was supposed to host the 1993 PGA Championship but withdrew from doing so amid a civil rights storm.
In an essay titled “The Last Bastions of Bigotry”, Time Magazine considered the furore surrounding a change in law in 1990 that thankfully brought all-white clubs into the modern age.
NEWTOWN SQUARE, PA – AUGUST 3: The 11th hole at the Aronimink Golf Club (Photo by Dave Evenson/PGA of America via Getty Images)Source: Getty Images
It noted that 43 years after Jackie Robinson was allowed to play Major League Baseball, the PGA was lamentably late when introducing anti-bias rules that year.
At the time, 17 of the 39 courses that hosted PGA Tour events were hosted by private courses that did not allow black members.
The law scarcely led to an influx initially as clubs with reputations glittering for their designs loosened their rules at the pace of … well, we all know a slow golfer and how frustrating that can be.
Aronimink drafted junior members initially, but claimed that due to an extended waiting list, it would be some time until it was able to satisfy the demands introduced in 1990.
As a result, it forfeited the rights to host the major and it has taken another 33 years for that right to be bestowed upon the course once again.
They were not alone – fellow Pennsylvania course Merion Golf Club relinquished the rights to the US Open a year later after reaching the same conclusion. But it was a sobering period.
Revered golfer Tom Watson, an honorary starter for the Masters at the Augusta National Golf Club which also took its time to accept black members, blasted bigotry on the links.
He resigned from the Kansas City Country Club in 1990 after it blackballed accounting mogul Henry Block who, like his wife and children, was Jewish.
In a New York Times column he decried the “hypocrisy” of admitting a single black to “integrate” and urged, “Let’s discriminate right now, each one of us, privately, between what is right and what is wrong.”
THE CHAMPION MAKERS
Gow has identified the most challenging hole that will sort the championship contenders from the chaff and suspects it could well prove extremely difficult if the weather is dry.
A feature of Aronimink is its par threes and the 17th, a 210m par three that heads downhill and is designed for drama, is certain to provide some thrills and spills.
The tournament website provides this description; “Any ball heading to the left will likely find the pond that runs down the entire left side of the green. The safe shot is to the middle of the large putting surface, but that will almost certainly leave a difficult two-putt. The front right hole location just beyond the bunker will also create a lot of challenges.”
That, according to Gow, is an accurate assessment of its difficulty, saying it “will be a true test”, while he is also a big fan of the opening hole.
“The first is an interesting hole. It is straight up hill and is 400-odd metres, so there are a couple of really good holes,” he said.
“The 11th, which is another par 4, it’s another really solid uphill test. There are a lot of holes where you just can’t see the bottom of the pin, and that adds a challenge to the distance control there.”
Bradley, when discussing some of the changes to the course this week on The Smylie Show vodcast, acknowledged the course will be almost new for him if it is dry, despite his success back in 2018.
And he identified the 18th, which has been lengthened about 35 metres, as a particularly difficult finish.
“This hole is brutal,” he said.
I could not believe they have lengthened it, because I hit a 4-iron in on the Sunday at the BMW (when successful) and they have lengthened it 40 yards. It is a classic north-east (finale), coming into this huge clubhouse.”
Leishman, when assessing the par threes on the 5th, 8th, 14th and 17th prior to the 2018 BMW Championship, recommended a cautious approach to attacking the quartet, with three of the four longer than 200m.
“I think you have got to be pretty conservative on eight and 17. You have just got to hit good shot,” he said.
“The fifth is the short one? That’s a good hole, you know, (but on) any of them, you can’t really short-side yourself on. Anything in the middle of the green is a pretty good shot.
“If you hit good shots, you can make birdies but (it is) the same as the second shots into the greens on the par-4s. You have to be hitting your irons good and hitting your spots. If you don’t, it’s going to be tough. It’s going to be very tough.”