A golf ball once exploded at the U.S. Open at Philadelphia Cricket Club. The club’s history gets the national spotlight this week.

The year was 1907. The site was the St. Martin’s Course at the Philadelphia Cricket Club. It was the 13th U.S. Open, the first of two in four years hosted at Cricket, the oldest country club in the United States.

Alex Campbell, a Scottish golfer, was closing in on the lead. Campbell was an early adopter of the silk pneumatic golf ball, a new invention at the time. The ball was inflated with air pressure and wrapped in silk, which enabled it to be inflated to a pressure of more pounds per square inch than the previous cotton wrapping, and had outperformed the more standard rubber-cored Haskell balls used by the masses.

That is until Campbell stepped to the fourth tee in third round. Bang. A sound that mimicked the recoil of a rifle shot. The ball had exploded and lost its pressure, and the rules of golf at the time stated that Campbell had to finish the hole with the largest portion of the ball. The detonation cost him about three strokes, and he eventually lost the tournament by that same margin.

The silk pneumatic golf ball died at the Cricket Club, a little-known historical anecdote for a club founded in 1854 that first hosted golfers in 1895. The golf course had a big part in golf’s origin story in the U.S., and in a bit of comical turn, it was advances in golf clubs and golf balls that rendered it relatively obsolete and forced the club to acquire 375 acres of land in Flourtown in 1920.

That’s when the legendary architect A.W. Tillinghast, a member at Cricket, got to work in an effort to build a course that challenged the game’s best players and could stand the test of time. Two years later, the Wissahickon Course opened. This week, more than 100 years later, and after a sweeping renovation, Cricket’s long history and its place in the sport will get its long-awaited national spotlight at the biggest event it has hosted in modern history. The Truist Championship, a signature PGA Tour event, will bring Masters champion Rory McIlroy and many of the best golfers in the world to live out Tillinghast’s vision.

“When you do an event like this, it gives you a pulpit to share the Cricket Club with the world,” said Jim Smith Jr., Cricket’s director of golf. “Part of the strategy is, what are you trying to share? In our case, the quality of the golf course is important to share, but we also want to share our history, the uniqueness of the club and how historic it is.”

» READ MORE: The raucous life and times of A.W. Tillinghast, the father of Philadelphia Cricket Club’s masterpiece

When the famous courses of the Northeast and mid-Atlantic are discussed, how often is Cricket mentioned? There are Pine Valley and Merion and Aronimink. Pine Valley has been consistently ranked as one of the best courses in the world. Merion has and will continue to host U.S. Opens. Aronimink has next year’s PGA Championship and has previously hosted PGA Tour events.

Cricket? The Wissahickon Course has hosted its share of top events post-renovation. The PGA Professional National Championship was there in 2015. The Constellation Senior Players Championship came to town the following year, when Bernhard Langer walked away with a trophy. Then came the Big Ten tournament in 2019 and the U.S. Amateur Fourball Championship last year.

None of those will bring the bodies through the gates and the viewers on television the way this week’s Truist and its $20 million purse will. And so the television broadcast and national golf media will give Cricket’s long history its largest audience yet.

This is where the club’s heritage committee shines. In 2004, Cricket produced a hardback book for the club’s sesquicentennial. Powell Arms joined the club a year later and got his hands on the book. A lifelong Philadelphian, Arms was intrigued by the place’s history and its part in laying the groundwork for the sport’s growth in Philadelphia. Arms, Chris Kallmeyer, and Rob Nydick make up part of the club’s heritage committee, formed in the last decade with a mission of telling the story of Cricket’s history, internally and externally, and preserving it for future generations.

Smith, who has been at Cricket for more than 20 years, said the committee was long overdue. The club knew it had great history but needed to tell it better.

“I think the club is a special place, has got incredible history, and I want it to live on for generations,” Kallmeyer said.

Kallmeyer said he had a “eureka moment” early in his time digging into the club’s history. He was at the home of longtime Philly-area golf historian Pete Trenham when Trenham showed him a book that featured some of the golf courses in the Philadelphia area in the late 1800s. In it was a pencil sketch of the original 1895 layout. Kallmeyer digitally reproduced the sketch and laid it on top of a Google map of the area to figure out where the original holes were routed.

They ran across properties that are now homes behind the club in Chestnut Hill.

“You feel like you’ve discovered something that’s been lost to history,” said Kallmeyer, who is the chief executive of Golf Genius, a golf software company.

Like the story of Campbell and the pressurized golf ball. With the help of golf historian David Mackesey, Kallmeyer brought golf ball history back to life.

» READ MORE: Xander Schauffele and most players will be flying blind at Philadelphia Cricket Club, an A.W. Tillinghast masterpiece

Golf and its famed courses are unique in the way words and pictures and television broadcasts bring to life the places where the average person will never place a tee in the ground.

The golf-watching world will learn a lot about Cricket this week, but the place has 1,500 members and a long waiting list.

So what’s the benefit of nailing this pulpit?

“It’s our chance to be a great host and have people just get a glimpse of one of the great golf courses that we get to enjoy,” Arms said. “You want to give back to the sport.”

There’s internal benefit, too.

“The number-one way to perpetuate the quality of this club is to do a phenomenal job for the existing membership,” Smith said. “If you do that, and they perceive value in being a member, you never have to worry about it.”

The club’s heritage committee is trying to add value, too, creating a connection to Tillinghast and the club’s past and preserving its legacy long after the committee’s members are gone. The Truist will be another chapter. “You sort of forget history happens every day,” Arms said.

“Tillinghast was a member here. George Thomas was a member. George Crump. The Philadelphia school of golf architecture … you can make the argument that the Philadelphia school, one of its central places was the Philadelphia Cricket Club.

“Now we’re playing a signature event on a golf course designed by a member who happens to be a prolific designer of championship golf courses. That’s awesome. It’s awesome for the club. It’s awesome for the city. We’re thrilled to be able to showcase that little part of the lineage of our golf course.”

“It’s about building on our existing legacy and continue to build on that heritage,” Kallmeyer said. “Wow, that golf course, opened in 1922, was capable of hosting the best players in the world. ... Who knows what happens after this?”

Perhaps the Truist restores Cricket to its place as one of the top courses in the sport capable of hosting major events with the best players in the world.

One thing’s for sure: The pressurized golf ball won’t be resurrected at its place of death.