“I love Merion and I don’t even know her last name,” Lee Trevino once quipped. Classic Trevino, of course — but he meant it.
And no wonder. Merion was where he won his second U.S. Open, in a playoff over Jack Nicklaus, no less.
He’s hardly the only one who’s fallen for the place.
Merion has that effect on people. Hugh Wilson’s design in the leafy suburbs of Philadelphia — this week’s host of the U.S. Amateur Championship — has long been an architectural darling and a fixture on Top 100 lists (it sits at No. 13 on GOLF’s current global ranking).
Count Jim Wagner among the legion of Merion admirers. A Philly native, he grew up playing the course, thanks to friends in the caddie lot. Even in his youth, he sensed that the craftsmanship behind it was special, an appreciation that has only swelled with his understanding of golf design.
Now an architect himself, Wagner collaborated with Gil Hanse on a 2019 restoration of Merion, a job that made him feel like an artisan entrusted with touching up the Sistine Chapel.
Wagner would argue that Merion is the finest golf course in the world.
Why?
The answer lives in an episode of the Destination Golf podcast, recorded last year, in which Wagner made his case.
Start with the property itself: an intimate site, ripe with possibilities and pitfalls, spliced by a creek and pocked by a quarry. Wilson wanted to incorporate those defining features, a challenging task on the scant acreage that was further complicated by a road that split the grounds in two.
In Wagner’s view, Wilson’s solution was at once ingenious and unconventional.
“I’m not sure there’s another routing that you could have put on this golf course,” he said.
But it would have raised eyebrows — and hackles — today.
Consider the opening sequence alone. After putting out on the par-4 1st, you cross the road to take on the first of Merion’s two par 5s. Yep. Just two, and you play them both in the first four holes. Propose that to a course developer today and they’d laugh you out of the room, Wagner says.
Cobbs Creek and its tributaries threaten shots on the 4th, 5th and 9th holes, and then again on the 11th and 12th, after which you cross the road to play a short par-3 set cozily close to the clubhouse. There’s only so much room and only so many options, which helps explain the next quirk in the routing. On your walk to the 13th tee, you cross the entrance road, the putting green and the 1st tee — another flourish that Wagner says wouldn’t fly today.
“If you asked somebody to walk across or in front of another golf hole, they’d look at you like you were crazy,” he says.
Did we mention that the driving range is also nowhere near the 1st tee?
Working on a tight site, Wilson also squeezed in an exhilarating variety of demands. The routing moves through all points on the compass, while the holes themselves present compelling contrasts. Where the par-3 13th is pint-sized, little more than a baby wedge, the par-3 3rd can stretch into a monster; in the 2013 U.S. Open, it tipped out at 266 yards. Then there’s the gulf on the par-4s: some 200 yards between the shortest and the longest.
“It’s just an incredible test of golf,” Wagner says. “There’s so much to it from an architectural standpoint.”
Merion has been described as an act in three parts: drama in its opening, giving way to comedy and then to tragedy, with the 16th and 17th traversing the quarry and the tough-as-nails 18th taking you home.
No matter how you phrase it, Wagner says, it’s a work of art.
You can listen to the entire interview with Wagner here.
