In 1948 Donald Ross stood on the property in Newtown Square, Pennsylvania, twenty years after he’d finished it, and said, “I intended to make this my masterpiece, but not until today did I realize that I built better than I knew.” It’s the only time he ever said anything like that about any of his roughly 400 courses. There’s a plaque with the quote on it.
But the course Ross saw in 1948 wasn’t the one he drew on paper in his Pinehurst office. During construction his lead associate J.B. McGovern — who lived in Philadelphia and was a member of the club — broke Ross’s large singular bunkers into clusters of three and four, more than doubling the count. Ross approved it. The course opened on Memorial Day 1928. Then four other architects spent forty years undoing it. Ron Prichard restored Ross’s drawings. And in 2017 Gil Hanse and Jim Wagner restored the as-built course from a stack of 1929 aerial photographs nobody had counted bunkers in.
This is what every golf course superintendent at a classic American course is dealing with — a stratigraphy under their feet, layer by layer, decade by decade, that nobody at the club really remembers anymore. Aronimink is just the loudest example.
Chapters
- 0:00 — Donald Ross’s Only Masterpiece
- 1:18 — The Third Physical Version
- 3:45 — The 1926 Build with Ross On-Site
- 5:10 — Forty Years of Other Architects
- 6:42 — The 1929 Photographs Nobody Counted
- 7:53 — Aronimink Compared to Augusta National
- 9:11 — Three Majors, Three Different Courses
- 10:05 — What the Broadcast Won’t Tell You
Sources
- PGA of America — A Closer Look at Aronimink
- Golf Digest — Restored Reverie at Aronimink
- Quadrilateral (Geoff Shackelford) — Course Preview: Aronimink
- Golfpass — What you need to know about Aronimink