The unlikely story of Philadelphia’s Golden Age golf architects as the PGA Tour visits Philadelphia Cricket Club

“Let me quote a very prominent Philadelphia golfer, ‘We are past our babyhood in golf. Let us build permanent courses that are up to the standard of the best.’”

— The American Golfer, May 1909

An interesting thing about the Golden Age of American golf course architecture is that it has its roots in Philadelphia’s inferiority complex. Visit any of a number of this country’s greatest courses and you may sense it. It is there at Riviera, drifting like the Pangean bunkers around the No. 10 green. It is there at Shinnecock Hills, winding through the rolling brush like the No. 14 fairway. It will most certainly be there among the panoramic vistas at Philadelphia Cricket Club this week, when 75 of the PGA Tour’s top golfers make a one-off visit to Flourtown to compete for a $20 million purse in the Truist Championship.

From Brookline to Balustrol to Los Angeles Country Club, the spirit of ’76 abides. Listen close and you can hear it.

Nobody likes us. We don’t care.

Like a lot of stories about personal shame, this one begins on a Saturday morning in Atlantic City. It was 1909, sometime during the winter. A couple of distinguished gentlemen and competitive golfers — A.W. Tillinghast and George C. Crump — had taken the train from Philadelphia to Pleasantville for their weekly round. At some point during the morning, a member of their group’s derby hat blew off in the ocean wind. Hearty chuckles were had by all, as Tillinghast recounted in his monthly column in the American Golfer magazine.

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

Around this time, Tillinghast began using his column for more serious matters. He and Crump were part of a contingent of Philly golfers who annually competed against teams from New York and Boston in the Lesley Cup. The Philly group had lost four straight as of 1909, according to the New York Times. Like any good golfer, Tillinghast blamed his circumstances.

“Philadelphia must forget the convenience of links within her walls; she must be content to range a bit for her play,” Tillinghast wrote. “Does New York grumble because of the time it takes to go to Garden City, Nassau, Baltusrol or Englewood? Chicago makes light of the runs to Glen View and Wheaton. So my dear old Quaker town I believe that you too, must make up your mind to leave the city behind when you play. Go outside where you can buy your land, but select good golfing country for it, even though you have to take to the sands of Jersey.”

Thus were laid the intellectual seeds for a movement that would help to define an era and give Philadelphia one of its most impressive — and least heralded — sporting achievements. For the first half of the 20th century, the city was a mecca of golf course design, as Tillinghast, Crump, and three other local golfers shared their vision for Philadelphia and scaled it nationally. Their portfolio includes some of the most recognizable courses in golf — Riviera, Shinnecock Hills, Winged Foot, Los Angeles Country Club — as well as the familiar local heavyweights that helped lessen the need for those Saturday morning trips to Atlantic City. A remarkable nine of Golf Course Architect magazine’s most recent World Top 100 are credited in full or in part to Tillinghast and four of his contemporaries — three of them Philly-area natives, one a Boston transplant.

“All of these guys were really good players,” said modern-day architect Keith Foster, who oversaw the 2013 restoration of Cricket‘s Wissahickon Course to Tillinghast‘s original design. “They hung out together, they golfed together, they went to events together.”

In a lot of ways, the PGA Tour’s decision to relocate this year’s Truist Invitational to Philadelphia Cricket‘s Wissahickon Course is a nod to a city that, unbeknownst to many, sits at the foundation of modern championship golf.

The tour long ago stopped regularly swinging through places like Flourtown, for a lot of good reasons, not the least of which was the lack of protest from members of old-money clubs like Philadelphia Cricket. You’ll understand if you head north on the Blue Route, wind your way down Valley Green Road, and pull into the gravel auxiliary parking lot. There is a tiny sign for deliveries — and giant portable aluminum grandstands rising in the background.

The dramatic tension of this week’s Truist is more ethereal than your typical PGA Tour stop. It will be billed as a showcase of new-school players against an old-school course. But it will be just as much a competition between the modern era of made-for-TV golf and the sport as it was intended. It will be interesting to see whether the cameras can capture it. Or whether it even matters.

“It‘s probably something people in the area don’t appreciate — they think of Augusta, Pebble Beach, places they see on television,” said Tom Coyne, editor of The Golfer’s Journal and an architect who grew up caddying at William Flynn-designed Rolling Green in Springfield. “The thing about golf in Philadelphia is our great courses are golden-age 1920s golf courses that aren’t really suited to professional events. Merion makes it possible, but it‘s not easy for them to do it.”

It is easy to forget that the story of golf is a story of time and place. It is a story of landscape, of topography, of nature. Also, of man’s incessant desire to accomplish something rather than simply being present within his environment. Mark Twain’s famous quip about golf being a good walk spoiled has gotten funnier over time precisely because the walking is now more of a consequence than an objective. In the beginning, though, you went for a walk. Only then did you figure you might as well spice it up by trying to hit a ball at a target.

In order to understand the Philadelphia School, and the context of the courses these architects created, you must understand the land.

» READ MORE: Xander Schauffele and most players will be flying blind at Philadelphia Cricket Club

“In the Delaware Valley, there is a softness to the land, an elegance to the land that isn’t overly aggressive,” Foster said. “You’ll go to places where the topography is really dramatic, but in the Delaware Valley, the land really rests within one’s hand comfortably, beautifully. Elevations are soft, fluid. The scale of the property, you are one side of the property and you see all the way across to the other.”

The land is the thing. It is what you remember. Some places, it makes for striking visuals. Others, you have to be there to understand it.

This was not a revolutionary concept in early 20th century America. There was lots of land. And no television. There also weren’t mechanized earth movers or large-scale nurseries or self-driving lawn mowers.

Not long after Tillinghast used his column to bemoan the state of Philly golf courses, a group of amateur golfers in New Jersey purchased 187 acres of pine land and hired Crump to design a world-class golf course. Crump enlisted the help of a number of Philly golfers, including Tillinghast, Hugh Wilson, and George C. Thomas Jr. By the time Pine Valley opened, a movement had been born.

That group — along with the Boston transplant Flynn — would spend the next 30 years designing courses locally and nationally that today are some of the most recognizable in the country. Thomas, who designed Whitemarsh Valley, would eventually boast a portfolio that includes Los Angeles Country Club, Riviera, Bel-Air, and Fox Hills. He was friends with Wilson, who designed Merion East and Merion West. While working on Merion, Wilson enlisted the help of Flynn, who would go on to design Rolling Green and Huntingdon Valley locally before opening his masterpiece, Shinnecock Hills.

But it is Tillinghast‘s narrative arc that will take center stage this week as Philadelphia Cricket Club hosts its first modern-day PGA Tour event on a course that might best be interpreted as a theoretical blueprint for what historians would come to regard as the Golden Age of American golf.

By 1920, Tillinghast had established himself as the highest-profile and most prolific member of group of golfers-turned-designers now known as “The Philadelphia School.” His first course opened at Shawnee-on-Delaware in the Poconos in 1911. Four years later, he unveiled San Francisco Country Club, which is routinely ranked on Top 100 lists. Over the next two decades, he would design courses at Winged Foot and Balustrol that continue to be heralded as marvels. But it was a commission he received in 1920 that was his most personal. His home club, Philadelphia Cricket, hired him to design a new championship 18-hole course in Flourtown.

As at Merion, the process was a collaborative one. Thomas was a member of the Greens Committee. Flynn later assisted with turf conditions and bunker placement, according to the club’s Heritage Committee.

“Cricket and the club were really important to him,” Foster said. “He lays out 36 holes, but the club only builds 18 at the time, routing a golf course through the land seamlessly, effortlessly, beautifully.”

That seamlessness is the key. It is the tie that binds the designers of that era. A classic golf course is a course that adapts its challenge to its canvas. It is not centered around spectators, or real estate, or revenue streams.

“To me, the satisfaction lies in: Can I look at the work I’ve done and can I not even tell I did anything?” Foster said. “Can it fit the land so seamlessly that it seems like it was meant to be there?”

However it plays on television, the PGA Tour will be encountering a course that is the encapsulation of an era.

It is a long walk enhanced.