Town Guides / Pennsylvania
The Ardmore Golf Guide
Ardmore, Pennsylvania is a Main Line suburb with a train station, good restaurants, and the most consequential golf address in the Philadelphia region. Merion Golf Club sits here, and Merion is not a normal club with a famous course attached. Its East Course has hosted five U.S. Opens. In 1930, Bobby Jones completed the Grand Slam on this ground, winning the U.S. Amateur to close out the single-season sweep that nobody has repeated. And the pins are not flags. They are wicker baskets, a Merion signature for over a century, perched on the standards like something woven for a picnic. First-time visitors do a double take. Then they understand: a basket does not flutter, so it tells you nothing about the wind. Merion keeps its secrets.
The East Course is the whole argument
Start with the honest structure of golf in Ardmore. There is Merion East, and there is everything else, and everything else is mostly private too. The East Course is a championship venue in the full historical sense: five U.S. Opens across the decades, Jones's 1930 clincher, and a reputation among architects as one of the finest routings on a compact property in American golf. The finishing stretch runs through a former quarry, and the course's defenders will tell you, correctly, that it tests every shot a championship can ask for without needing modern length to do it. We place it where it belongs in our Ardmore ranking and at the sharp end of the Pennsylvania state ranking.
Access reality, stated plainly: Merion is private, and there is no public window, no resort tie-in, no charity Monday that a visitor can count on. If you have a member connection, use it and clear your calendar. If you do not, Ardmore is a town you visit for the history and the Main Line, and you play your golf elsewhere in the region. A guide that pretends otherwise is lying to you.
Planning around an invitation
Because everything in Ardmore runs through access, the practical guide is short. If a Merion invitation is even a possibility, build the trip around its date rather than the other way around; Main Line golf is a spring through fall pursuit, and the East Course in firm, fast condition is the version its history was written on. Stay in the town, ride the train in from Philadelphia if you are combining the trip with the city, and leave a day unplanned. Merion rounds have a way of expanding: the walk, the wicker baskets, the history in the clubhouse. Golfers who schedule a second commitment the same evening regret it. And if no invitation materializes, Ardmore still repays a stop for anyone who cares about the game's history, the way a baseball fan detours to a closed ballpark just to stand outside it.
The West Course, and the mistake visitors make
Merion's West Course is the members' second course, shorter and friendlier than the East, the round members play when they want golf without the championship interrogation. It gets dismissed by visitors chasing the famous name, which is backwards in one respect: the West is where you see how the club actually lives, day to day, away from the tournament glare. If an invitation ever includes a choice, take the East for the history, obviously. But do not treat a West Course round as a consolation prize. Two-course clubs where the second course is genuinely loved are rarer than famous first courses.
The one mistake visitors make in Ardmore is treating Merion as a sight to check off rather than a club to understand. The wicker baskets are not a gimmick for photographs. They are a century-old refusal to give the player free information, at a course where Jones finished the greatest season golf has ever seen. Drive through Ardmore slowly. The stone walls, the quiet streets, the club sitting in the middle of a suburb as if a five-time U.S. Open venue belongs there. In Ardmore, somehow, it does.