Aronimink Golf Club Shoot – Newton Square, PA
About three weeks ago I arrived in Philadelphia to photograph the famous Aronimink Golf Club, site of this year’s AT&T National Tournament hosted by Tiger Woods. Tiger had been there only a week before to check out final arrangements, so I was able to experience the course at close to its playing level for the pros. Let me tell you, this is one heck of a Donald Ross design.
No history of golf in the Philadelphia area can be told without mentioning Aronimink. It was incorporated as a club in 1900, although its true genesis stretched back several years to the Belmont Golf Association (reorganized as Aronimink) and its role in founding the Golf Association of Philadelphia in 1897.
Golf was catching on in the U.S. around the turn of the century, and the citizens of Philadelphia were determined not to miss out on the game’s rising tide of popularity. The demand for professionally-designed, 18-hole tracks was growing. So much, in fact, that Aronimink actually outgrew and moved its facilities four times before finally acquiring its present site in 1926.
The club had the foresight to hire Donald Ross to design the layout, which today retains much of the character for which his courses are so well-known. At first glance, the casual observer might think the mature trees are Aronimink’s only real scoring obstacles, but Ross never designed a course with only one defense. Aronimink’s arsenal of hills, bunkers, valleys, and doglegs present what Ross called “a supreme test” to many of the world’s best players at this year’s AT&T.
Having seen it, walked it and photographed it, all I can say to the players who are about to take on Aronimink is… Good luck fellas, you’ll need it.