# The Best Golf Courses in Ardmore, Pennsylvania

Source: https://thecourserankings.com/blog/the-best-golf-courses-in-ardmore-pa/

[The Course Rankings](/)

Town Rankings / Pennsylvania


A deep sand bunker guarding a green. Photo: Santeri Viinamäki, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Ardmore is a Main Line suburb where the train station matters more than the skyline, and it contains, on a compact piece of ground between the commuter rail and the old neighborhoods, one of the most famous golf courses on earth. That is the whole situation here, and this ranking will not pretend otherwise. Ardmore has two courses. They share a clubhouse, a name, and a designer. One of them hosted five U.S. Opens. The other is its little brother, and being Merion's little brother is a better fate than being almost any town's big course.

So this is a two course list, stated plainly. We rank the golf first, and the golf in Ardmore starts with a course that has been settling arguments about greatness since before most American clubs existed.

## 1Merion Golf Club East Course

The East Course at Merion hosted five U.S. Opens, and in 1930 it hosted the last leg of Bobby Jones's Grand Slam, the U.S. Amateur win that completed the only calendar year sweep of the game's four majors as they then stood. Jones finished it here, in front of galleries who understood they were watching history close. The wicker basket pins are still there, red baskets on the flagsticks instead of flags, a detail every golfer knows from photographs before they know anything else about the place.

Hugh Wilson designed the East on land that should not have held a great course. It is too small, too tight, crossed by a road and an old quarry, and the genius of the place is that Wilson and the club turned every constraint into the test. The opening holes ease you in. The middle tightens. The closing stretch, down into the quarry and back up, asks for the best shots of your life in sequence, on a course that gives away almost nothing in length by modern standards and takes it back in angles, rough, and greens that punish the wrong side without apology.

The honest concession is that Merion East is a difficult day's golf for ordinary players, narrow and exacting, and its intimacy means it will never host the modern U.S. Open circus as comfortably as the giant new venues do. The USGA keeps coming back anyway, because the course keeps identifying the best player. Justin Rose won the Open here in 2013, the last of the five, on a Sunday when the East Course took apart a field of bombers with placement and patience. First in Ardmore does not begin to cover it. The East is the standard the rest of this state's rankings are measured against, and a two course town gets no apology for saying so.

## 2Merion Golf Club West Course

The West Course is the members' other option, Wilson's second routing a short distance from the East, built for the everyday game the East is too stern to host comfortably. It is shorter, friendlier, and entirely real golf, not a practice ground with flags. Members play it constantly, juniors learn the game on it, and more than a few Merion members will tell you, after the second drink, that a steady diet of the West is the saner way to belong to the club.

Ranking it second in Ardmore is the easiest call in this entire series, and the distance between the two is the largest first to second gap we will publish. The West loses to the East on history, on architecture, on the closing stretch, on everything a ranking measures. What it does not lose is its dignity. Strip the name away and the West would be the proud home course of a good club in any state. It just happens to live in the shadow of a course that completed the Grand Slam, and shadows that long fall on everyone eventually.

Sun going down behind the wicker baskets, the quarry holes empty, a train crossing toward the city. Ardmore's golf does not need a longer list. It needs a witness.

**Reader responses are open.** Please cite a specific hole, a price, or a round you have played.