At the upper echelon of American golf courses, Pine Valley is king and Augusta is queen; they are inaccessible and mysterious as royalty. Cypress Point, with its gleaming bunkers, grand coastline, and prehistoric cypresses, is like a finely cut diamond. Shinnecock is a geologic dream, wind swept and stark. Oakmont is the brute, the muscle, cruel and unforgiving. And Pebble Beach is the great beauty - a façade of gold, an interior that leaves your heart cold.

What, then, is Merion?

Some say she is too short. As the technology of golf has evolved, many of the games’ finest venues have been rendered obsolete. They are victims of science, relics of a bygone era. Merion was supposed to be one of them. The courses that have adapted to the times are now unrecognizable. They are once gorgeous women augmented beyond recognition, beautiful only in unexpected fragments.

Some say she is a museum. As the game has trickled down to the masses, as the public course has become the new dominion, the grand old clubs - with their traditions and etiquettes, their haughty smoking rooms, the bastions where ‘the right kind of men’ sought solace from the proletariat - have eased their rules, or been mocked, or, worst of all, gone under. Merion, with her stately clubhouse, is supposed to be an anachronism, irrelevant, fated to slowly fade into oblivion.

But Merion is a finely wrought novel. Her character develops processionally. Her tones are varied. She encompasses the philosophy of her peers - the heroic 3^rd, the penal 16^th - and wrote new guidelines for her progeny - the strategic par four 5^th remains one of the finest examples of natural golf design in the world.

Her greens are as diverse and complex as men. Her endless, blanched bunkers are the existential abysses that must be surmounted. Many of her shots are blind. Your first two drives of the day will be on the only two par fives she possesses.

She is by turns long, perhaps penitently so, and short, perhaps laughably. She will treat you to despair, transcendence, terror, and inexplicable joy. At the 11^th she is beautiful, at the 17^th she is horrific. She is blunt at the 18^th, poetic at the 1^st, and subtle throughout. Her narrative unfolds in three acts: a drama, a comedy, the tragedy. You survive the first six holes to be made a fool on the next seven, perhaps the finest collection of short holes in American golf. The final five holes will bring you to your knees, as they did Nicklaus and Palmer. Or they will deliver you to salvation, as they did Trevino and Hogan.

Some say she is haunted, and she is. The ghosts whisper in your ear, push your wedge into the creek on number 4, hook your drive into the road on number 15. She is carved by two creeks, and lacerated by a quarry. Her bunkers are rocky and uneven, her rough is like corporal punishment. Her greens are like funhouses filled with invisible malice.

She is frumpy and feisty as a grand dame.

I have played Merion twice, once by moonlight and once in punishing heat. I birdied her slight, lissome 13^th beneath a canvas of crystalline December stars. I took a 10 on the 4^th and an 8 on number 11, the hole where Bobby Jones clinched the only Grand Slam in golf’s long history. I four putted the 7^th green from five feet. At 17, I hit a lob wedge over a ferocious maw of sand, watched my ball bounce once, hit the pin, and sit ever so tantalizingly on the lip. Then it fell in. From the tee, 250 yards distant, there were shouts of delight. Like your first lover, Merion is etched indelibly into your memory.

Perhaps she lacks the mystique of Pine Valley. She may not glitter like Augusta. She cannot match the elegance of Cypress, or the superficial brilliance of Pebble Beach. Unlike Shinnecock, that ethereal track, she is tangible, even fallible. And though she is imperious and relentless, she is not the cold blooded monster of Oakmont.

It is Merion’s imperfections that make her perfect.