Page 12 - 2018 Golf Guide

Aronimink didn’t need a restoration project to attract the world’s best golfers—but it’s surely helped. “The course will be much different from what the players saw in 2010 and 2011—more as it was when it first opened in 1928,
as Ross intended it,” says Jeff Kiddie, Aronimink’s head golf professional. “For the spectators, the field will be stronger than what played in the 2010 and 2011 AT&T National. We had good fields and great champions for those events, but this field is one of the strongest of the year.”
The challenge of Aronimink’s renovation fell on the competent shoulders of Malvern-based golf course architect Gil Hanse, who’s become the new Rees Jones, the go-to guy for course restoration in advance of a major event. Hanse’s projects around the world—from the Olympic course in Rio to Los Angeles Country Club to Trump National Doral in Florida—make him one of the hardest- working men on turf.
Fortunately for Hanse and his crew, two things were in their favor for this project: The course had never been dramatically altered, making restoration possible, and some good aerial photos were taken around 1929. “We really studied the aerial photographs that the club had in their records,” Hanse says. “There’s an amazing resource called the Dallin collection, and there are aerial photographs of nearly every golf course in the Philadelphia region from the late 1920s and 1930s.”
Hanse zoomed in on these photos to try and determine scale, depth, location, etc. “With the help of our
Aronimink's 7th (top) and 11th holes.
talented associate, Jaeger Kovich, and superintendent John Gosselin, we were able to get them as close as possible
to our understanding of the original as-built design,” he says.
All said and done, Hanse and his
team were able to roll back years of modifications and natural decline, with the time machine landing in late 1928. The beauty is that the restoration elements look less like changes and more like
design aspects that have always been there, waiting to be reborn. “What players and spectators will notice the most will be in the bunkering,” says Hanse. “But there are many new tees—both back and front— and the tees have also been reshaped to be
more in keeping with the original free-form shapes of the tees. The greens have also been enlarged to reclaim lost area and lost hole locations.”
Hanse notes that the changes will
be the most noticeable from a play standpoint. “However, the aesthetic changes to the course in the presentation of the bunkers, the scale of the features and the sweep of the landscape are also very tangible benefits of the restoration,” he says.
Behind the first tee at Aronimink, there’s a plaque that quotes Ross, often referred to as the Michelangelo of golf course design. About Aronimink, it reads: “I intended to make this my masterpiece,
GG10 Golf Guide 2018 | www.todaymediainc.com