Philadelphia Cricket Club and its final four holes a fine tribute to A.W. Tillinghast’s championship vision

Robert Trent Jones Jr., part of America’s most prolific golf architecture family, recently best explained the feeling of walking onto a course designed by A.W. Tillinghast:

“It’s like you walk into Monet’s garden,” he said, “and you play the garden.”

That’s how more than 70 professionals should feel May 8 to 11, when they step onto the Wissahickon Course at Philadelphia Cricket Club to compete in the Truist Championship. They will enjoy, and endure, a test of golf conceived by one of Philadelphia’s most accomplished sons at the height of his creative genius.

Cricket, in Flourtown, Montgomery County, isn’t a typical Tillinghast course. That’s because there is no typical Tillinghast course.

“He was a chameleon,” said Gil Hanse, and he should know. He renovated both Winged Foot and the lower course at Baltusrol, Tillinghast’s most revered courses. But that doesn’t mean he would have been able to parachute into Cricket and do the same.

“His designs were very different,” Hanse said. “The design at Baltusrol would not inform you if you were to go work on Cricket Club. He changed his style. He had a very eccentric streak. Much like his life, he had a lot of character in his designs.”

Hanse is a Long Island native but has been based in the Western suburbs of Philadelphia for 32 years. He considers himself a “super green Philadelphia Eagles fan.”

He drew raves for his 2018 renovation of Aronimink Golf Club in Newtown Square, which will host the PGA Championship next year, and is delighted to be part of the newest class of the Philadelphia school of golf architecture: Hugh Wilson, best known for Merion Golf Club in Ardmore; George Crump, who created Pine Valley Golf Club in South Jersey; George Thomas, who went to Los Angeles and built Riviera Country Club; and William Flynn, a transplanted Massachusetts native responsible for Shinnecock Hills.

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So, when the time came more than a decade ago to refresh Cricket’s historic Wissahickon course, it seemed only fitting that its restorer have Philly roots.

Keith Foster was born in Philadelphia. His father, Richard Foster, is also a Philadelphia native. Though Dad was a Navy man, and the family left by the time Keith was 4, he cherishes his Philly roots. He returned for summers and holidays through his teens, eating Philly soft pretzels, playing stickball in front of South Philly stoops, agonizing over all those Phillies losses.

Foster’s roots might not be as gilded as those of Tillinghast, who was the son of a wealthy rubber merchant and who had Ivy League bona fides, but he senses a kinship with the region and the golf course.

“I just feel fondly,” Foster said. “I feel connected there.”

Soon, the rest of the world can feel that connection. The Truist is a PGA Tour tournament usually played at Quail Hollow Club outside of Charlotte, N.C. It has moved to Cricket this year as Quail prepares to host the PGA Championship next week.

Cricket is a private club of the most exclusive sort, the kind that requires caddies, forbids golf carts, and, as it caters to its stable of elite golfers, seems happy keeping to itself. The Truist will offer a rare public glimpse at one of the country’s finest tracks, whose original beauty was left to Foster to rediscover.

Foster now lives in Paris, Ky., from where he operates his consulting service. Now in his mid-60s, he stays busy, but not as busy as he used to be. He speaks more like a painter restoring the Sistine Chapel or the Mona Lisa than a former contractor who uses bulldozers to move mountains of earth. Whether it’s Tillinghast, or Herbert Fowler, or Donald Ross, Foster takes great care to preserve the original architect’s vision.

Tillinghast learned the game and its foundations from St. Andrews legend Old Tom Morris and competed in 10 U.S. Opens or U.S. Amateurs. So he constructed the course with the idea that Cricket might host championships. It has handled prestigious events in the past, including the 2016 Constellation Senior Players Championship, but the Truist is its biggest tournament to date.

Unlike Merion or Pine Valley, perennially considered among the top 10 courses in the world, Cricket’s featured course is the sort of place that feels playable every day. It’s challenging, but not overwhelming. Crump was a member at Cricket. So was Thomas. It is a lovely, lovely place.

“It’s this classic thing that just feels right,” Foster agreed. “It feels comfortable. It’s old school. It just has this, I guess, softness to it. The best golf courses are places you can play day in and day out, and feel like you’re a part of the game. Cricket has that.”

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This was a revelation to Foster. As the members sought to freshen the grounds, they invited a series of architects to discuss their vision. On a Monday in 2009, Foster walked the course alone. Afterward, at dinner with some members of the board restoration committee, he shared his ideas and listened to theirs. About 18 months later the club invited him to interview. He crushed it.

“They recognized what it was, and what it had become,” he said. “I recognized what Tillie did there, and what it could become again.”

It took three years to meld Foster’s plan with the club’s membership, and approvals at Cricket are more complicated than at most clubs. Cricket’s extensive properties and holdings include two 18-hole golf courses — a sister course in Flourtown, called Militia Hill, was added in 2002 — as well as the nine-hole St. Martin’s course on an entirely different piece of real estate.

All of it is overseen by a board, and the entire membership has a voice in all matters of change and expenditure. Cricket has experienced a peculiar evolution.

The club formed in 1854 as a group of cricket players who lacked a home. Then, in 1883, it settled in the St. Martin’s neighborhood of Chestnut Hill. It was the original home of the women’s tennis U.S. Open, then the club built a nine-hole golf course there in 1895, and expanded it to 18 holes in 1897. There, the Cricket Club hosted men’s golf U.S. Opens in 1907 and 1910, but it didn’t own the land on which the course was built, and the small footprint meant the course already was in danger of becoming obsolete.

Tillinghast, an elite golfer and a member at Cricket in Chestnut Hill, persuaded the membership in 1920 to buy property in Flourtown, about five miles northeast, and the Wissahickon course opened in 1922.

Cricket’s second 18-hole course adjacent to Wissahickon, Militia Hill, allows golf carts. St. Martin’s reverted to nine holes in 1924, and the club finally bought the land in 2015.

Using photographs and drawings from the club’s archives, Foster has restored — or rather, “recaptured,” his preferred phrase — about a dozen notable courses, including Colonial Country Club in Fort Worth, Texas, which hosts the PGA Tour’s annual Charles Schwab Challenge, as well as Southern Hills Country Club in Tulsa, Okla., which has hosted eight majors, most recently the 2022 PGA Championship.

Cricket is close to his heart, and he was eager to restore it.

That meant chain saws.

In the middle of the 20th century, new golf courses began to mimic tree-lined major-tournament hosts, like Congressional Country Club in Bethesda, Md., and Firestone Country Club in Akron, Ohio, both Robert Trent Jones Sr. redesigns, as well as Hazeltine National in Chaska, Minn., an RTJ original completed in 1962.

“With all classic golf courses, and any club of means, [it] starts out very wide, very spacious, with tremendous scale,” Foster explained. “Everyone started thinking that’s what a classic golf course is supposed to look like: a park, with trees everywhere.”

The problem with that is, as the trees grow, the alleys for shots shrink; often, fairway size would be cut in half. Sometimes trees grew so close to bunkers that they made bunkers obsolete. Trees also demand tons of water, an ever more precious commodity, and, when they’re close to greens, they limit air circulation, crucial for the health of putting surfaces. Trees also interfere with sight lines the original designers intended as part of the course’s aesthetic.

The membership was not always on board with Foster’s ideas. There was a giant tree short and right of the 11th green, one that grew after Tillinghast’s original construction and had become a fond signature feature of the course. Foster insisted that it be removed. Why? Because it was blocking a gorgeous view of half the course.

 “They recognized what it was, and what it had become. I recognized what Tilley did there, and what it could become again.”

“I’m looking at the land, and the sweeping vistas. … That property is so beautiful, so soft, so elegant,” Foster said. “I talked with the club and its membership about what the property could be, and, more importantly, about what it was originally intended to be.”

Trees also can distract from the inherent beauty of a properly situated and contoured green complex, framed by its unique bunkering.

“The greens,” Foster said, “are the signature.”

The greens might be the signature, but during the tournament they will have to share the spotlight, which will be fixed on the final four holes.

Wissahickon will play a modest 7,100 yards as a par-70, rerouted from the usual sequence for logistical and competitive reasons. While the rough will be significant, it won’t challenge players like the notoriously juicy hay at Jack Nicklaus’ annual Memorial Tournament in Ohio or a typical U.S. Open like those played at Winged Foot, another Tillinghast design. That means Cricket might surrender some low scores, especially if the wind is down.

However, the finishing stretch of holes 15 to 18 (usually Nos. 7, 5, 6, and 4) will provide a measure of drama no matter how low the scores are or how big the lead might be. Think the Bear Trap at Memorial, or the Green Mile at Quail Hollow. A massive spectator structure behind the 17th green called the “1854 Club” offers a commanding view of some of the most important shots of the competition.

The 15th is a devilish par-5 with 13 bunkers smack in the middle of the fairway, Tillinghast’s signature “Great Hazard.” The 16th is a well-protected, 215-yard par-3, and both Nos. 17 and 18 are 500-yard par-4s.

“You’ve got a risk-reward par-5, and [the last three holes] have been three of the four hardest holes in all of the events we’ve held here,” said Jim Smith Jr., Cricket’s director of golf. “That will lead to what I hope will be an exciting finale.”

Foster took up residence in suburban Philadelphia for eight months. He hired Tillinghast biographer Phil Young as a researcher and consultant, and their collaboration sold the concepts to an invested, critical membership. It didn’t hurt that the project cost about $4 million, or less than half of a typical, large-scale renovation.

He revived and repositioned bunkers. He quieted some of the more violently pitched greens. He altered three greens for practical reasons; for instance, he slid the 13th green 45 feet to the left to give the 14th tee a little space. Before he moved it, though, he scanned the green’s contours and size, then built an identical green. He raised the ninth and 18th greens by two feet to stop waters from inundating them during seasons of flood.

It was crucial that Tillinghast’s vision was refreshed, not replaced.

“Great golf courses have heart. Have soul,” Foster said. “I’m Tillinghast’s lieutenant. If you can recapture that spirit, then the golf course does what it needs to do.”

Most of Tillinghast’s finest courses need to have a feature called the Great Hazard. Cricket had one, lost it, and now has it again.

It’s No. 7 at Pine Valley in South Jersey, a hole named “Hell’s Half-Acre,” a 638-yard par-5 and Tillinghast’s main contribution to Crump‘s overall design. It’s No. 4 at Bethpage Black, Tillinghast’s best-known course, a 517-yard par-5 on Long Island.

At Cricket, it’s No. 7, which at the Truist will play as No. 15, a 535-yard par-5. All three place a cluster of bunkers in a waste area in the middle of the hole.

Cricket’s Great Hazard disappeared a half-century ago, filled in by a membership frustrated with its devilish difficulty and ponderous maintenance.

Foster decided to revive the series of 13 bunkers. They’d dug only four feet into the loam before they struck … sand. The same thing happened when they dug in front of No. 14. All they had to do was act like archaeologists, carefully remove the earth, and voilá, Tillie’s torture chambers reappeared.

One of the problems with Cricket’s Great Hazard concerned drainage. Rainwater would trickle into it, thereby making it a muddy, penal swamp, which was exactly what Tillinghast planned. However, today’s golfers expect to be able to score out of sand features, whether they’re the Church Pew bunkers at Oakmont near Pittsburgh, the site of this year’s U.S. Open, or the Coffin Bunker at Royal Troon in Scotland.

So, when Foster resurrected this Great Hazard, he cut the drainage to run in front of the bunkers. Similarly, when he reintroduced the mini-Sahara of nine bunkers in front of the 14th green, he had to route the water to dissipate before the bunkers.

Tillinghast didn’t have the option of employing subsurface drainage. He used the contours of the course to direct runoff off the fairways, a technique called “sheet flow.” Foster could have cheated, but did the same and better preserved the aesthetic. Any drains are hidden amid three-inch rough.

It was hard labor, as it was in Tillinghast’s day, and it was a labor of love, even if Foster lacks Tillinghast’s personal flamboyance. He did not ride an open limo to work and stand imperiously above the workers, barking commands as he swilled hooch from a bottle.

“He and I are different people. For him, it was a little more about the show,” Foster said. “I prefer to just be in the dirt.

“But the Philadelphia things? Yes. The hard work? Yes. The connection to the earth? Yes. Yes. Yes.”