PITTSBURGH -- When Henry C. Fownes and his son, William, designed the golf course at Oakmont Country Club at the start of the 20th century, they had a clear vision.
Oakmont may be the toughest U.S. Open course ever, but it’s still fair
The USGA’s championship event comes to what is often regarded as the hardest course in America.
“They wanted to create a very, very difficult course, a very penal course, so that if you misplayed a shot, it cost you,” said Gerry Hickel, a member since 1978 and the club’s archivist. “You paid for it.”
That’s the theme that will guide play at Oakmont this week, when the U.S. Open returns to the course outside Pittsburgh for a record ninth time. It was last here in 2007, when Angel Cabrera won it at five strokes over par. The 36-hole cutline that year was 11-over, and two players finished as high as +28.
In many ways, the course hasn’t changed much. It will play at 7,219 yards, almost exactly the same as nine years ago. A few bunkers have been shifted around on a par-5 12th hole that stretches nearly 700 yards. A green has been expanded to allow for more hole locations on the par-3 6th, and the course’s vexing fairways now flow more directly into some of its 210 deep bunkers. The most pervasive change over the years has been the massive tree removal, though that won't make things easy for this edition.
Oakmont’s always been hard, and so it will be again.
“It’s relatively the same golf course,” said Charlie Howe, the USGA’s championship manager for the event, who has coordinated operations since moving to Pittsburgh in 2013. And when players get there, it’ll look like it has for generations.
“They’ll see a course that has really stood the test of time,” Howe said.
Oakmont’s classic features will define it again.
“That’s the thing that makes Oakmont Oakmont,” Hickel said in a recent interview. “The huge greens.”
The greens break hard, and they’ve vexed a lot of good players before. When Tiger Woods finished a shot back of Cabrera in 2007 after charging into the final pairing with a 69 on Saturday, seemingly make-able birdie putts turned wide on Sunday, and a tying bid on the 18th green didn’t come close. But there were — and are — few tricks.
“They’re fast, they’re hard, but they’re also very true,” Hickel said. “If it looks like it’s gonna go left to right, it’s gonna go left to right. These guys are so good as putters, if they can get around the hole, they’ll be OK. It’s when they leave themselves these 30, 40, 50-foot putts that it becomes very difficult, especially if the greens are hard, to get the ball within gimme range, so to speak.”
The biggest impediment to sticking the ball close is finding the right lie to do it. Oakmont’s fairways have small landing areas, and it’s easy to run through them and settle in a deep sand trap that feels like it ought to be green-side but really sits hundreds of yards from the flagstick.
Photo by Justin K. Aller/Getty Images for DC&P Championship
“You’re gonna play it like a green-side bunker,” Hickel said. “Hit it back out into the fairway and put it back in play. But by that time, it’s going to cost you a shot, so now you’re looking at bogey, and if you miss the green, you’re looking at double bogey.”
The club’s groundskeepers and the USGA have made sure to mow a graduated rough all around the course, so there are varying degrees of danger to missing off the tee in the first place. At Oakmont, the devilish bunkers might be preferable to some of the landscape’s 6-inch rough, which the course grows out extra long when the U.S. Open visits. (Players have already complained about the rough’s length, causing much of it to be cut to 4 inches.)
“The further you hit it away from that fairway, the more difficult some of your shots will be out of this rough,” Howe said, “and you might not be able to control your golf ball as much when you’re trying to land on some of these difficult greens.”
This is going to be hard, but at least it should be fair.
After Jordan Spieth played a practice round at Oakmont at the start of May, the world’s current No. 2 player offered a foreboding sort of praise.
“It’s lived up and passed the hype it already receives from everybody,” the 22-year-old Texan said. “What a great test of golf and a very tough but fair test of golf.”
That’s the prevailing wisdom about this course. Most amateurs find its level of difficulty to be nightmarish. Casual golfers will visit and quickly be picking up their balls, Hickel said, and scratch players from around the country find themselves drifting miles away from par when they visit Oakmont.
“The pros don’t complain that much, because it’s a fair course. It’s not one of those courses where you have a lot of blind shots. You can see where you’re going. You know where the trouble is. All you have to do is execute your shots, and you’ll be okay,” Hickel said. “But therein lies the rub.”
As much as anything, Oakmont is a mental test, a constant calculation of risk and reward, of going for the corner of the green or deciding to simply dig out of the sand and take bogey, not double.
“It’s gonna be a fair test of golf, no question, but a very difficult one for the players, which is really gonna test their complete game,” Howe said. “That’s what we want the U.S. Open to do.”
See More:
