Golf Pro: U.S. Open 'Best Thing You Could Win'

For Peter Trenham, Sr., what has happened in past U.S. Opens may be more of an interest to him than what will happen this week.

Trenham, a Berwyn resident and a former golf pro at St. Davids Golf Club in Wayne, is a golf history buff. Most recently he has transformed his golf history website into a thorough resource for the past four U.S. Opens held at Merion Golf Club. 

“The history of the game is what I’m interested in,” Trenham told Patch. After his retirement in 1994, he got to delve into his passion starting with researching the history of the Philadelphia Professional Golfers Association for its web site and then as historian for St. Davids.

He called the U.S. Open the “biggest thing in the United States” for golfers, “despite me being a PGA member. The U.S. Open is most important. It’s the best thing you could win as a golfer.”

Trenham said that before Merion there was a golf course on Rose Tree Lane in Haverford, but wasn’t a “championship course,” so a few members bought the ground which is now Merion. In 1914 it hosted a U.S. Amateur championship, and then again in 1930.

Merion’s course is “unusual,” Trenham said. The way the holes are laid out and the shape—it’s a lot like looking at a painting, he said. Some like it, others don’t. Still, “it’s considered to be one of the top designs in the world.”

During the 1981 Open the course was 6,498 yards long; now it’s just under 7,000 yards.

Part of the interest leading up to the Open is, “Everyone’s wondering what the scores are going to be like. Will the course hold up to the modern game?,” he said.

“Everyone was sure they’d never be back,” he said of the Open.

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