Aronimink’s prestigious history gets the national spotlight at the PGA Championship
The Newtown Square course has hosted big events going back to the early 1900s. But none boasted the fanfare and fan count that next week’s major tournament is expected to have.
Inside Aronimink Golf Club’s nearly 100-year-old Tudor-style clubhouse, up two flights of stairs, past the shelves that hold the backup glassware, behind a locked door, is a de facto museum of the club’s 130-year history.
David Penske, 84-years-old and a 59-year member of the club, is its one-man curator.
Looking for member rolls from 1976? Penske has them neatly compiled in a binder. Want to see the scorecard golfers used in the 1962 PGA Championship? There are plenty of them. Original Donald Ross course designs, a letter dated Jan. 23, 1906 announcing new ownership at the club’s original home at 54th Street and Whitby Avenue, the deed to the course’s current Newtown Square property, original blueprints, the hat John Fought wore when he won the 1977 U.S. Amateur at Aronimink, and so much more fill the rooms tucked away in the upper corner of the clubhouse.
“He’s one of our handful of members that remembers the 1962 PGA,” said Jeff Kiddie, Aronimink’s head pro. “He’s definitely a treasure for the club.”
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Sixty-four years later, a major championship returns to Aronimink, and its history and place in the golf world will be on full display.
Penske, a native of Ohio whose brother, Roger — yes, that Roger Penske — originally wanted him to join Philadelphia Cricket Club before he decided on Aronimink, can chronicle it all with ease. John McDermott, who in 1911 became the first American to win the U.S. Open, was an Aronimink caddie. When President Eisenhower wanted to install the first putting green outside the White House in the 50s, the grass, Penske said, came from a turf farm just off the 18th green at Aronimink.
“I’ve enjoyed the part of the history of the club, but more the tradition of the club,” Penske said.
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Aronimink has hosted its share of important golf events: the ‘62 PGA; the ‘77 U.S. Amateur; the ‘97 Junior Amateur; the 2003 Senior PGA; Tiger Woods’ AT&T National in 2010 and 2011; the BMW Championship, a FedEx Cup playoff event in 2018; and the KPMG Women’s PGA Championship in 2020, when Aronimink became the first course host all three of the PGA of America’s major tournaments. It also famously lost its ability to host the 1993 PGA Championship because it hadn’t admitted a Black member and didn’t have one until Ken Hill became a full-fledged member in 1998.
Penske has documents and information from all of those events. He even has a binder labeled: “1993 PGA Championship (Never Held).”
None of the events had the fanfare and fan count that next week’s PGA Championship will. More than 200,000 spectators are expected to walk through the gates over the course of the week. ESPN’s Scott Van Pelt has a studio lining the 18th fairway. Jim Nantz’s CBS booth is nearby. The golf-viewing world got a look at a northeast course with classic championship architecture when the Truist Championship came to A.W. Tillinghast’s Philadelphia Cricket Club last year.
Ross once said this about Aronimink, a quote that the club put on a plaque on a stone: “I intended to make this course my masterpiece, but not until today did I realize that I built better than I knew.”
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Penske is excited for the course he loves to get its biggest spot in the national spotlight.
“I hope they take away that Aronimink is a really special place, No. 1,” he said. “No. 2, everyone talks about Merion and Pine Valley and so forth, and not in the second breath but a little further down, Aronimink will get mentioned. I hope they walk away and understand how good a golf course this really is.”
Penske, who made his career in the automobile business, has been gathering everything he can about the club for years. A past president of the club, he took it upon himself to start the collections. First, all of it was assembled in a small room in the clubhouse, but he eventually found its permanent home on the third floor.
“Forget about even the history,” Kiddie said. “He does care about the history, but more than anything he cares about the club. He’s 84 years old and he’s still a bondholding member. He’s not a senior member. He still goes to every annual meeting. He just served on the board again probably three years ago. How much he values the history and how much he’s found and stored for us will pay dividends for years to come.
“What he’s doing up there is making it easier to pass it on. It’s not just in his head.”
Penske has shot his age more than 200 times, he said, and as recently as last year. He still skis. His Aronimink historical collection is all compiled in a manual, but soon it will be time to “anoint a few people to take over,” he said.
“My runway is getting short. Or shorter.”
