Aronimink Golf Club

Aronimink Golf Club opened in 1928 to a Donald Ross routing on rolling Newtown Square farmland twenty miles west of Philadelphia, and it hosted the 1962 PGA Championship in its early years before falling into the background of competitive American golf for several decades. Gary Player won the 1962 — at twenty-six, his first PGA — over a course that had been altered significantly from the Ross original. Ron Prichard restored the Ross intent in the early 2000s, and Gil Hanse went deeper in 2018, lifting the lost bunkering Ross had specified, expanding the original green complexes, and removing the mid-century trees that had narrowed the corridors. The result is what the club currently plays — a course that reads now as one of Ross's most complete surviving designs.

The Gold markers measure 7,267 yards over par 70, with a slope of 138 and a course rating of 75.5. The par-70 is the marker that championship setup is intended — only two par-5s on the card, both over 550 yards, and a lineup of long par-4s that does the slope-rating work. The four par-3s sit between 159 and 242 yards. The 242-yard fifth is the longest one-shotter on the routing and plays as the third-hardest hole on the card; the green sits behind a pair of cross-bunkers Ross drew in the original blueprints and Hanse restored to their exact original dimensions in 2018.

The number-one handicap is the 457-yard fourth hole, a par-4 with an approach to a pulpit green that runs hard back to front. The second-hardest, a 515-yard par-5 that most members cannot reach in two, plays as a long three-shot hole for everyone but the longest hitters. The course hosted the BMW Championship in 2018 (Keegan Bradley won) and the 2020 KPMG Women's PGA Championship.

Aronimink's restoration trajectory is the model many Ross-design clubs aspire to — strip out the mid-century narrowing, restore the architect's original lines, accept that the course will play firmer and faster than the previous membership had grown comfortable with. The mid-Atlantic climate band compresses the prime window into April through October, with September delivering the firmest fairways. Suburban Philadelphia humidity peaks in July, and the rough at championship setup is grown out to four inches when an event arrives.