Oakmont Country Club – American Golf’s Great Grassy Guillotine

Augusta National may be the most venerable course in America, Pebble Beach may be the most beautiful, and Winged Foot may be the Yankee Stadium of golf, but for my money, Oakmont may be our country’s greatest major championship venue, and it returns this summer for its record 10^th U.S. Open Championship.

Pittsburgh, PA is indeed the city of champions and befitting that moniker, Oakmont, just thirteen miles outside of town hidden in a non-descript suburban sprawl, is the undisputed, hands down, all belts unified toughest U.S. Open venue. Indeed, along with Carnoustie in northern Scotland, it is perhaps the hardest in the world. The thickest rough, the fastest, curviest greens, gargantuan hills and swales, and the sternest bunkers:  every hole is a minefield of unexploded double bogeys waiting to blast your scorecard to smithereens. “Oakmonster,” some like to call it. In America, only cruel and mighty Winged Foot can match Oakmont for sheer terror.

Shocker:  the members love it that way…LOVE IT! They actually prefer to play under U.S. Open conditions for an ordinary weekend round. Is it any wonder that the club is home some of the greatest amateurs in the world?

In fact, at times, the course had to be made easier for the Tour players, whether the U.S. Open or the PGA Championship, let alone a lower tier event. The PGA pros usually play Oakmont with rough averaging 4-4.5  inches in length while it’s usually 5-6 inches for the members. And Oakmont’s weirdly whmsical, wildly sloping greens run at 13-13.5 in the Stimpmeter for the pros and 14 or higher for members. Ever observant, (and unfiltered), Lee Trevino even famously and candidly noted, “They could give the club three weeks’ notice to host the Open and they would be ready.  It’s the only club that can say that.” 

Well not long after Trevino’s “suggestion,” the USGA actually confirmed it, both to Your Author in an earlier interview, then again at a pre-tournament U.S. Open media center interview in 2016.

“I’ve certainly not seen a golf course around this country that is more focused on championships than Oakmont Country Club,” said USGA Executive Director Mike Davis.  “It’s often said that the USGA could host an Open literally on a moment’s notice and while I’m not sure that’s exactly correct with all the grand stands and tents that you see outside, I really do believe this is the one golf course in the United States that, if we had to make a call one to two weeks before the U.S. Open and say, we’re in a pinch, can you host the National Open Championship, this place could do it.”

Related: Oakmont’s John Zimmers

So the legend is actually true:  You could play the U.S. Open at Oakmont with about two weeks’ notice. That’s not by the USGA’s design; that’s the club’s liking, indeed their imprimatur. They relish their reputation – the toughest of the tough, the best of the best.

Of course visiting golfers tend to tire rather quickly of that mantra once triple bpogeys start piling up like Jenga blocks. “Sadistic,” “Masochistic,” “Self-flagellation,” and “Those guys are crazy!” are common refrains heard from guests of the club, who nevertheless never EVER turn down a chance to return. Trust me, that wall feels good against your head.

And besides – you walk in the shadows of golf history with every step. ***BONUS!***

Much of that history is a snuff film, though. Henry Fownes built Oakmont in 1903, and his bedrock, foundational golf architectural tenet was, “a poorly hit shot should be irretrievably lost.” Oakmont was specifically designed it to be penal, indeed backbreakingly so.

Horror stories abound. Take 1962, when a rotund young rookie named Jack Nicklaus burst on to the scene, upsetting local favorite and national icon Arnold Palmer. That was a blow Palmer never recovered from – at the height of his power, le lost the hometown U.S. Open to a then-unsung green rookie. But few people also remember Phil Rodgers should have bested them both. Rodgers’ collapse haunted him till the end of his days; he left the ’62 Open in a skinny, slender evergreen tree on the 17^th hole during the first round. 

While one must adore the genius simplicity of this short, but dangerous par-4, (it says more in 322 yards than most par-4s say in 480), Marino Parascenzo, Pittsburgh’s most celebrated sportswriter focused merely on it’s pint-size when he called it, “the brat….simply outclassed by its siblings….the runt of the litter.” 

But 17 shows how a skillfully designed short hole is far sexier than a long, straight knuckle-dragging behemoth.  With the terrifying “Big Mouth” bunker directly between the tee box and the skyline green guarded by treacherous greenside swales and more bunkers, the shot must be both long and straight to hold the green.

Rodgers was thinking eagle, but instead of driving the green, his tee shot fell just short into some newly planted trees placed there precisely to penalize players who took their chances and missed.  The ball wedged in the tree’s upper branches.  Rodgers, being somewhat portly and unathletic, took three strokes to extricate his ball from the tree branches, carding an quadruple-bogey eight.  His first vicious swipe dislodged the ball, but it settled on the next set of branches down. 

Some report he was lucky not to take a header out of the tree.

Angry but undaunted, Rodgers took another ungainly baseball swing at it, sort of like fighting an octopus in a phone booth. Again, the ball just moved down to the next set of branches.  Finally, a furious flail and a cross between a grunt and a snarl later, the ball dislodged from the tree, but the damage was done.  Rodgers missed the historic Nicklaus vs. Palmer playoff by two shots.  Had he taken a drop and a one-stroke penalty, a double-bogey six was a cinch (that would have put him in the playoff) and a five (or even a four) was not out of the question.  Five would have won the tournament. 

Rodgers drove the green and made birdie the next day, but after the tournament quipped, “I’ve got a long way to go to get even with it.”

There are other high profile collapses at 17 as well. A generation later the next superstar golfer from the region, Jim Furyk arrived, carrying the same hopes as Palmer and seemingly the same huge galleries. They’d yell “West Chester!” “Lancaster!” and even his high school “Manheim Township!” at him both in 2007 and 2016, as he twice had a chance to do what Palmer could not. But trying to drive the 17^th green sank Furyk’s chance in the final round like so many others before him. He took so many swings in Big Mouth bunker you had to worry he might develop Black Lung Disease.

17, even with its “you get the girl or you get the coroner” all-or-nothing, risk-reward design proves just getting to the green is only half the battle.  The adventure continues as all Oakmont’s greens break every which way.  In the final round of the 1935 Open, long hitting Jimmy Thompson wanted to press his advantage in length over Sam Parks, with whom he was tied.  Thompson drove the 17^th green and promptly four-putted.  Parks won by two shots.  “I’m actually relieved,” said Thompson after the round.  “I could have six-putted.”

Now let’s dispel another rumor – Johnny Miller’s supposed miraculous 63 in the final round of the 1973 Open. Most people know about Miller’s 63, but few remember the prequel to the Sunday surge.  As Parascenzo wrote, “If Rodgers left the ’62 Open in a little tree, then Miller nearly left it in his other pants.”  Miller fired 71-69 the first two days thanks to his trusty yardage book and notes.  As he prepared to tee off on Saturday, Miller opened his golf bag to get the book.  After rifling through the bag like a frustrated purse-snatcher realizing the old lady he robbed had $3.66 on her, Miller realized to his horror he had left the book in the pants he wore the day before.  He went five-over for the first six holes and carded an ugly 76. 

Luckily for Miller, Oakmonster was Soakmont that week.

In 1973, between seven and nine inches of rain fell during tournament week, including a drenching the night before the final round, and that was on top of a 100-year downpour the region endured that spring.  Oakmont is built on clay, not sand, and in 1973 no one even dreamed about sub-air systems, misters, or any of the other modern techniques we can employ now.

So on Father’s Day in 1973, Johnny Miller wasn’t playing golf; he was playing lawn darts.

Don’t believe it? Think I’m minimizing? Stop and consider this statistic:  that week there were also two 65s, two 66s, a fistful of 67s and 68s, and a total of 29 rounds in the 60s that week. At a U.S. Open?!  Like I said:  Soakmont.

Why do you think we got the Massacre at Winged foot the following year? Where the winning score-to-par that week was 7-over?

Finally, Oakmont is also a pivotal mile-marker in golf architecture history as the modern trend of clearing trees that serve no architectural purpose started at Oakmont.

They started an avalanche, in fact. We may not know whether a tree that falls in a forest makes a sound, but we know for certain that when a tree falls at Oakmont it makes a tempestuous noise!  Those felled trees ignited a heckuva ruckus.

Over 4,000 trees were removed from the property, many in the dead of night without the knowledge or input of the membership at large.  Almost all of the trees in question were not originally part of the golf course.  Some were added for “beautification.”  Some were planted in dedication of a deceased member.  Nevertheless, they encroached on airspace and overly shaded some of the greens. 

“The removal brings the course much closer to what Fownes wanted” noted golf course architect and historian Stephen Kay. ”Trees are bunkers in the sky” he quipped, quoting Alister Mackenzie.  “They could plant trees in Scotland, but they don’t.  Why?”

Because you can grow trees or you can grow grass, but you can’t grow both, that’s why! And the roots of Oakmont’ suddenly ubiquitous tunnels of trees were damaging the greens. So, they could have Opens or they could have trees; they couldn’t have both.

Easy decision. And hundreds of courses nationwide have followed suit, to the betterment of all.

So who is going to win the U.S. Open this year? Why Oakmont, of course. Oakmont always wins. If the U.S. Open is a final examination in golf, then Oakmont is the doctoral dissertation and it demands you dissect each shot with surgical precision.

The greens will tell the story in the end. Despite 210 bunkers, a ditch that meanders drunkenly and dangerously throughout the golf course, slender band-aids of fairway for targets, and fast, firm conditions that will make runout on the fairway more likely, meaning more balls in the rough, it is Oakmont’s wonderful, diverse greens that are her heartbeat and lifeblood.  Some fall away from the player, some are canted to one side, some have hogsbacks and all will be at staggering speeds.

“You can have a 10-foot putt that breaks eight feet or you can have a 20 foot putt that breaks three ways before you get to the hole, but you’re not going to have too many that are just right edge firm,” observed Tiger Woods after Angel Cabrera nipped him at the post for the 2007 U.S. Open.

So that’s Oakmonster – a perfect 10 of a golf course, a beautiful firebreather, majestic grandeur that transports you 100+ years in the past. And it does it without a lake, an ocean, a waterfall, a canyon, or anything other than rumbling terrain, gargantuan green contours, and the creative eye of Henry Fownes. And that means the viewing public will win the U.S. Open this year too.

When not reporting live from major sports championships or researching golf courses for design, value, and excitement, multiple award-winning sportswriter Jay Flemma is an entertainment, Internet, trademark, and banking lawyer from New York. His clients have been nominated for Grammy and Emmy awards, won a Sundance Film Festival Best Director award, performed on stage and screen, and designed pop art for museums and collectors. Twitter @JayGolfUSA