The unabridged musings from Aronimink

This is a longer version of  Tom McNichol's column in the Sunday Times that did not quite fit the constraints placed on it by the printed page

NEWTOWN  — The AT&T National will end its all-too-brief and seemingly successful run at Aronimink Golf Club when the final round comes to a close today.
Ironically, for an event that was anticipated as the chance for Philadelphia area golf fans to finally get a chance to see the great Tiger Woods in action, there were just four mediocre  — by his standards  — rounds in 2010.
Not that the golfing public cared. You can spend a lifetime covering sports and not see anything like the crowds that descended on this Donald Ross gem to see Woods play last year.
Good, bad or indifferent, they didn’t care. They just wanted to see one of the greatest players in the history of the game, play.
 Not that those of us in the media got cheated. When Woods arrived for media day in 2010, it marked the first time since  — you know, the Thanksgiving night fire hydrant thing  — that he took questions in a full-blown press conference setting. It was a media circus to beat all media circuses, not that Woods had a whole lot to say about the state of his marriage or any of the dozen or so “girlfriends” who had come out of the woodwork in the wake of – you know, the Thanksgiving night fire hydrant thing.
  At  media day this year, Woods was taking questions in a full-blown press conference setting for the first time since he walked off the course at TPC Sawgrass after taking 42 shots on the first nine holes of The Players Championship. Even his appearance here Tuesday was the first time Woods had really spoken to media – you know, besides tweets and that kind of  nonsense – since media day and, more importantly, since Rory McIlroy had done a pretty good impersonation of Woods circa 2000 in stomping the field in the U.S. Open at Congressional Country Club.
 But what everybody seems to want to know now that the PGA Tour is leaving town and won’t be back until the U.S. Open returns to Merion in 2013 – and the National Open is something a little more than a PGA Tour stop – will the tour ever come back?
The people at Aronimink have not been shy about the fact that part of their motivation for staging the AT&T was to showcase the course and prove that the overall physical plant has the capability to put on a major championship.
It hasn’t hurt their case one little bit that conditions at Congressional Country Club, where the AT&T will return next year, for last month’s U.S. Open were decidedly un-U.S. Open like. The question of whether Aronimink was playing more like a U.S. Open course than Congressional did was greeted by wry smiles and silence from several players who had no intention of falling out of the good graces of the United States Golf Association.
So yeah, Aronimink is playing more like a U.S. Open course than Congressional did. Of course, if you  ever doubt how much a difference the course “setup” matters, all you had to do was check out guys like Chris Kirk lighting up Aronimink to the tune of a 63 Saturday to understand that moving up a couple of tees and placing pins in accessible locations is all these guys need to go low.
Regardless of all that, the sometimes cranky bunch that plays golf tournaments for a living almost universally gushed about Aronimink this week.
“Every player absolutely loves this place,” Robert Garrigus said
following his opening round of 2-under 68 Thursday. “You know where you can’t hit it and you know where you can. If you hit it there, you’re rewarded.”
Adam Scott, who opened with a 4-under 66, also liked what he saw at Aronimink.
“I have to say it’s set up very, very nicely here,” said Scott, who dimly recalled playing in the 1997 U.S. Junior Amateur at Aronimink. “It’s a great golf course, obviously, and it’s in great shape. But they’ve set it up beautifully.
“The greens are perfect and they’ve got very generous fairways, but severe rough, which is a nice balance. There’s good scores out there, but you have to play well, I think.”
Reportedly there were PGA people and USGA people in town checking things out this week, but even if a major championship was to come to Aronimink, it would be years down the road.
How about a regular tour stop, like the one that used to come to Whitemarsh Valley Country Club every summer until it was discontinued following the 1980 edition?
PGA Tour commissioner Tim Finchem did express an interest in that possibility, although he said it would be unlikely that it would happen until some time after the 2013 Open at Merion. Again, there has been nothing but good vibes from the tour about the way the AT&T National at Aronimink has been embraced by the fans and, probably more significantly, the business community in the Philadelphia area.
“This is a terrific sports town with a terrific economy of its own,” Finchem said. “The PGA Tour hasn’t been here in a while and we have a strong fan  base here and in our early discussions with the leadership here at Aronimink, there was terrific enthusiasm by the  membership as well. We would definitely like to continue an involvement here in Philadelphia and we’re actively looking for ways to do that.”
  The people at Aronimink seem more interested in having a major championship, so a regular tour stop would probably have to go somewhere else. It’s a big commitment for the  membership at a private club to give up its golf course in the middle of a short season in this part of the world. There’s been some talk that the membership at Congressional is already tiring of its annual commitment to the AT&T National.
  So if you’ re a golf fan, don’t  pass up the opportunity to get out to Aronimink today because it might be a while before you get another up-close look at the best players in the world. We got the fireworks The Golf Channel promised all last week in Saturday’s third round. It might not be a bad golf memory at all to see Rickie Fowler claim his first professional win, right here in Delaware County.