Bunker down, pals! The modern PGA championship meets its ideal course

On Sunday evening, if the light cooperates, Aronimink’s bunkers glow. From the clubhouse veranda, they look almost theatrical. White sand lies in long, ragged clusters, scooped into the slopes as if someone tried to erase parts of the fairway and then thought better of it. On television, they are scenic. For the 156 players arriving for the PGA Championship, they are something else entirely: a reminder that the season’s second major has come to a course that remembers who solves it and who flinches. Aronimink, outside Philadelphia, is a Donald Ross design that architecture obsessives have rhapsodized over for years, but men’s golf has rarely trusted it for the majors. This week it will play as a par 70, 7,394 yards, with a routing heavy on exacting par-4s, three par-3s over 200 yards, and two par-5s that reward only very high, controlled second shots. It hosted the PGA Championship once, in 1962, then went quiet as a major venue until the AT&T National visited in 2010 and 2011 and the BMW Championship in 2018. A meticulous restoration has since widened fairways back to Ross’s original corridors, restored green shapes, and re-established his clustered bunkering, more than 170 of them now
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