Most golf courses that host a U.S. Open get bigger afterwards. Land is bought, tees are pushed back, a corporate village materialises somewhere that used to be trees. Merion’s East Course, tucked into Haverford Township on Philadelphia’s Main Line, has spent more than a century doing the opposite: staying almost exactly as small as it started, and daring the USGA to keep coming back anyway. The USGA keeps coming back. Merion has hosted five U.S. Opens, more USGA championships of any kind than any course in the country, and its most improbable trick is that it manages this from just 126 acres of land, a footprint so tight that a modern tournament infrastructure barely fits around the edges of it.
A Princeton man’s homework
The credit for the design belongs to Hugh Wilson, a Merion Cricket Club member handed the job in 1910 despite having never laid out a golf course in his life. Wilson did what any careful thirty-two-year-old might do with an assignment like that: he spent seven months in Scotland and England taking notes. What came home with him was a set of ideas about bunkering and strategic width that became, once built, Merion’s “white faces” — the pale, upright bunker lips that top amateur Chick Evans nicknamed and that still define the course’s look today. Jack Nicklaus, who has played most of the great courses in the world at least once, has called Merion “acre for acre” possibly the best test of golf anywhere, which is as close as Nicklaus tends to get to unqualified praise for a piece of land he does not own.
The baskets nobody can fully explain
Any conversation about Merion eventually arrives at the wicker baskets, and it should, because there is nothing else quite like them in the sport. Since at least 1916, the pins on the East Course have been topped with woven baskets rather than flags — red on the front nine, orange on the back, mounted on solid metal poles six inches taller than a standard flagstick. The tidiest explanation traces them to Wilson’s research trip, where he is said to have noticed shepherds in the English and Scottish countryside carrying staffs topped with baskets to keep their lunch away from the flocks. Nobody at the club will tell you that story is definitely true, because nobody actually knows. What is true is that the baskets give no indication of wind direction at all, which is either a charming eccentricity or a small act of cruelty depending on how your read of the 15th green just went.
There has been exactly one exception in the club’s championship history. The 1950 U.S. Open was played with ordinary flags instead of baskets, and the most plausible account has nothing to do with tradition and everything to do with nerves: a player in the previous year’s U.S. Women’s Amateur, held on the same course, was reportedly rattled after her ball cannoned off a basket during a match. Whatever the real reason, the flags lasted one championship before the baskets returned for good, and they have stayed ever since. Win a USGA event at Merion now and the club will send you home with a basket of your own.
Where the big moments happened
Merion’s most famous afternoon predates the baskets’ fame by two decades but not by much. In 1930, Bobby Jones arrived off the back of winning the British Amateur, the British Open, and the U.S. Open in the same season, needing only the U.S. Amateur to complete a feat no one had a name for yet. He beat Eugene Homans 8 and 7 in the final, sealing the match at what was effectively the 11th hole of the afternoon round, in front of a gallery that had swollen to eighteen thousand by the finish. A newsman covering it reached for the phrase Grand Slam to describe what he had just watched, and the phrase has outlived almost everyone who was there that day.
Twenty years later, Merion produced its other defining image. Ben Hogan, sixteen months removed from a car crash that nearly killed him, stood in the 18th fairway of the 1950 U.S. Open needing a par to force a playoff. He hit a 1-iron that finished on the green and two-putted from forty feet, and the photograph of that swing, taken from behind as he followed through, remains one of the most reproduced images in the sport. Hogan won the playoff the next day, and the exact spot in the fairway is marked with a plaque now.
Lee Trevino beat Jack Nicklaus in another playoff here in 1971, David Graham won in 1981 on a course so short by the standards of the day that many assumed it had hosted its last major, and then, in 2013, Justin Rose won his first major title at one-over par, two clear of Phil Mickelson and Jason Day, on a Merion stretched to just under seven thousand yards that had lost none of its teeth. The lowest round of that championship was a 67, proof that a course under seven thousand yards could still hold up against players hitting the ball further than Wilson could plausibly have imagined.
Small, on purpose
The USGA has already booked Merion for U.S. Opens in 2030, 2040, and 2050, and the club is hosting the U.S. Amateur again this year. None of that reads like an institution nervous about its size. Merion’s whole case, repeated across a century of championships, is that width and length are not the same thing as difficulty, and that a course built with genuine care over 126 acres can still ask more of the best players in the world than one built over three times the space. Walk the East Course and you notice fairly quickly that nothing about it feels cramped. It just refuses to waste anything.