Augusta National has a SubAir system under every green. Quail Hollow has it. Pebble Beach has it. The 108th PGA Championship’s host has none of them. Aronimink — the Donald Ross course in Newtown Square, Pennsylvania — will play this major on eighteen push-up greens built in 1928. No subterranean vacuum. No engineered moisture control. Gravity, sand, and twenty years of John Gosselin on the property.
Gil Hanse’s 2016-2018 restoration rebuilt one hundred seventy-four bunkers with new sub-grade drainage — the only modern engineering layered onto Ross’s original ridge-and-valley routing. Hanse used 1929 aerial photographs from the Dallin Collection at Hagley Museum, found by Gosselin in 2007, as the as-built blueprint. The 2018 BMW Championship absorbed three inches of rain in five days. The grounds held. Keegan Bradley shot a sixty-four on Monday.
Most golf courses do not have SubAir. The question, the next time you watch a major after a storm, is what your home course has instead. Drainage routing. Engineered help. Or a superintendent who knows where the water goes.
Sources
- Aronimink Golf Club — aronimink.org
- USGA Green Section Record — gsr.lib.msu.edu
- PGA Championship — pga.com
- Hagley Museum (Dallin aerial collection) — hagley.org