Aronimink Golf Club exudes history

As one of the four founding members of the Golf Association of Philadelphia in 1897, Aronimink Golf Club, which started out as the Belmont Golf Association, has experienced its share of historic moments in three centuries.

The club's first professional, John Shippen, who was 19 when hired in 1898, was the first minority to play in a U.S. Open and likely the first golf pro born in the United States. He grew up on the Shinnecock Indian reservation on Long Island, where his father was a Presbyterian pastor.

The club also employed a caddie named Johnny McDermott, who would post back-to-back U.S. Open victories in 1911 and 1912. The 1911 title made him the first American-born player to win the national championship and, at 19, also the youngest player ever to take home the trophy.

Aronimink went on to become the site, starting in 1928, of one of the crown jewels on the resume of legendary golf course designer Donald Ross. It hosted the PGA Championship in 1962, the 1977 U.S. Amateur, the 1997 U.S. Junior Amateur, and the 2003 Senior PGA Championship.

This week, 115 years after its founding, the club will be the venue for the PGA Tour's AT&T National, featuring Tiger Woods, golf's No. 1 player and, with 14 career major titles, within sight of the long-standing record of 18 majors held by Jack Nicklaus.

Yes, Aronimink has come a long way from 52d and Chester.

That was the location of the first nine-hole course of what was then the Belmont Golf Association. The layout included two par-31/2 holes and one par-51/2, 600-yard hole. Its first club champion was 18-year-old Hugh Wilson, soon to become famous as the designer of the East course at Merion.

Belmont was founded within the Belmont Cricket Club in 1895, and joined Merion, Philadelphia Cricket Club, and Philadelphia Country Club as founding members of GAP.

Belmont incorporated as the Aronimink Country Club in 1900; it became "Golf Club" in 1920. Club officials adopted the name, which means "by the beaver dam," from the chief of the Lenape Indian tribe (spelled Arronomink) who once lived there. The club moved several blocks to 54th and Whitby in 1907, then to 100 acres in Drexel Hill in 1913.

Finally, in 1926, Aronimink sold the Drexel Hill land for $1.2 million and spent $300,000 to purchase 300 acres in the Radnor Hunt country in Newtown Square. To design the new course, club officials brought in Ross, who was familiar with the area as the designer of such courses as LuLu (1912), Gulph Mills (1919), and Torresdale-Frankford (1922).

Ross apparently had something to prove.

"It was rumored that, much irritated when another Philadelphia club rejected his design for a course, Ross vowed to give Aronimink one that couldn't be duplicated here," according to a history authored for the club by longtime Inquirer golf writer Fred Byrod.

The course was built in 1927, and opened the next year. In 1948, when Ross returned to the club shortly before his death, he surveyed the course and said, "I intended to make this my masterpiece, but not until today did I realize that I build better than I know." Those words are inscribed on a plaque near the first tee.

Unfortunately, the club allowed others to tinker with Ross' work. First came A.W. Tillinghast, then Dick Wilson, Bill Gordon and Robert Trent Jones.

It wasn't until members decided to restore Ross' original design that the club hired Ron Prichard, a locally based architect who was a Ross disciple. That work was completed in 2002, before the Senior PGA.

The club hosted its first major in 1962, when Gary Player won the PGA Championship by 1 stroke over Bob Goalby. The previous year, Aronimink had agreed to host the tournament after the PGA had elected to move it there from Riviera Country Club in Los Angeles rather than comply with a request from the California attorney general to allow Charlie Sifford to play.

The PGA, which denied that was the case, sported bylaws then that said tournaments were open only to white players. The association insisted that Sifford, an African American who used to work at Cobbs Creek Golf Course in West Philadelphia, was not qualified because of his playing record. The NAACP criticized Aronimink for making itself "a party to the continuing un-American practices" of the PGA.

The issue of race and golf surfaced again after Aronimink pulled out of hosting the 1993 PGA, saying it could not comply with minority-membership requirements in time for the event. While it said there was an African American on its waiting list, the club said, that out of fairness to others, it would not move him up the list to satisfy the PGA of America.

Coincidentally, by the time the 1993 PGA was played at the Inverness Club in Toledo, Ohio, the African American man was in place as a full member at Aronimink.