Aronimink Golf Club’s first club champion, in 1897, was
18-year-old Princeton freshman Hugh Wilson, who, 15 years later, would design
the fabled East course at Merion. Aronimink’s first professional was John
Shippen, a 19-year-old African-American who was arguably the first American-born
golf professional and inarguably the first minority to compete in a USGA
championship, the 1896 U.S. Open at Shinnecock Hills.
Aronimink is wonderfully representative of the outstanding
parkland courses laid out in the 1920s by Donald Ross and his peers, among them
A.W. Tillinghast, Alister MacKenzie and William Flynn. Like the best work of
these gifted designers, Aronimink is characterized by naturalness, aesthetic
beauty, superlative shot values and formidable challenge. There is a
spaciousness, indeed, a nobility, to Ross’ routing, which took full advantage of
the land’s natural features and is still nicely intact today.
The ups and downs are never abrupt, except for the plunge from the
1st tee to the valley floor. It is not studded with “death or glory” shots.
There is only one water hole and little or nothing in the way of forced carries.
Doglegs are graceful, unforced. The overall design is one of restraint and
honesty—no tricks, no excesses. Yet even the world-class player can find himself
losing a war of attrition to a frustrating procession of bogeys.
On a golf course with many excellent holes, it is not easy to
select the best. One thinks of the 8th, a splendid 237-yarder that plays from
exhilaratingly high down to a broad green guarded by bunkers right and left, but
with a generous opening across the front. A pretty little pond, some 75 yards
short of the putting surface, is merely decorative. The full-blooded shot
required here manages to be both exacting and inviting, an uncommon pairing.
