When Merion Golf Club was founded in 1896, Philadelphians were more likely to play cricket than golf. They even sent touring cricket teams to England!
But it wasn’t long before the golf bug really hit home and wealthy Philadelphians decided that they needed a top-notch golf course, so they dispatched Hugh Wilson back to Scotland to check out a few decent course designs. After seven months in Britain he returned with some great ideas for the new Merion and he set about putting them into practice. In 1912, the East course at Merion was ready for play and, considering Wilson was a complete amateur architect, he managed to produce one of the greatest courses in the States.
“Merion is an inland course,” wrote Robert Trent Jones in The Complete Golfer, “but the framework of its greens with their combinations of multiform mounds, oriented with sand and sod, give it somewhat the appearance of a seaside links. It is these well-shaped, artistically appealing green areas that make Merion characteristically different from most American courses and, further, explain to a considerable extent why Merion remains a vital test of golf, whereas most other courses of its pre-World War I vintage have long since lost their snap and crackle.
Analyze Merion closely. It has something. It keeps the pressure on the tournament golfer all the way through to the home hole. It is harder on the average golfer than a course like Augusta National, but its variety of fairway contours, the angles of its green surfaces, its contiguous ‘white faces,’ and the intelligence of its routing have made for a course that age has not withered nor custom staled.”
We could write a small book about the East course at Merion. For example, this was where Bobby Jones won the US Amateur Championship to complete his 1930 Grand Slam. Jack Nicklaus scored 66, 67, 68 and 68 in his four rounds of the 1960 Eisenhower Trophy, causing an international stir.
In the Golden Bear’s book, , he commented, “Merion’s setting is nowhere near as picturesque as the , the most beautiful meadowland course I know, or as majestic as , with its awesome cliffs and ocean headlands. It is a park-type course, set in the suburbs. It occupies pleasant rolling terrain, but it is what its designer, Hugh Wilson, did with that terrain that makes Merion exceptional. Each of the eighteen holes has its own personality. Each is interesting to play. Each requires that you use your head to get your par.”