Time brings change. It always does. The evolution of the golf course at Oakmont Country Club, northeast of Pittsburgh in Pennsylvania, has been ongoing for more than a century. The players who have qualified for next week’s US Open at the famed venue are in for a test of skills and nerve.
The challenge provided by a venue that has hosted the championship more often than anywhere else remains the same. It will be very tough.
Bryson DeChambeau, on a reconnaissance visit ahead of the championship – which he had the decency to share with his followers on YouTube – sought to highlight the depth and thickness of the rough on a course known as The Beast. He did this by dropping a ball into the knee-high grass, where it disappeared from view. He didn’t seek to play the shot, wise man that he is. Perhaps he learned from the past misfortune of others.
That rough, of course, has always retained a share of notoriety. Phil Mickelson showed foresight in making an advance visit to the venue ahead of the US Open in 2007. Unfortunately, his decision backfired when he attempted to play out of the rough in a practice round two weeks ahead of the championship. It resulted in injury and required strapping in the week that mattered.
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“There were dozens of players who got hurt the week of the Open that particular year,” Mickelson recalled. “I wasn’t the only one. I was fortunate that it wasn’t anything serious, it was just a bone bruise. It went away after 12 weeks.”
Oakmont’s beastly reputation has been established through the years. Gene Sarazen, the US Open winner of 1922 and 1932, once said Oakmont possessed “all the charm of a sock to the head”. Johnny Miller – who won the US Open there – described it as “the most difficult test of golf in America.” Tiger Woods, competing there in 2007, described the putting surfaces as “by far the most difficult greens I’ve ever played”.
Ahead of next week’s tournament, it goes without saying that further changes will have been made to the course since it last hosted the US Open in 2016. That was the year Dustin Johnson won his first Major title.
The 2016 tournament was notable for the dramatic change in aesthetics since the 2007 win by Angel Cabrera. Thousands of trees were removed from the course in that nine-year window to bring back back the original design concepts of designer Henry Clay Fownes, who built the course on rolling farmland with the aid of 150 men and two dozen mules. It opened for play in 1903 and has challenged ever since, with lightning fast greens and a vast array of bunker systems.
The latest alterations to the course were overseen by the ingenuity of Gil Hanse and Jim Wagner in a project that started in 2022. Hanse and Wagner are a design team with a list of impressive projects under their belt, including Narin and Portnoo in Co Donegal.
Their work at Oakmont has brought the course closer to how Fownes and his son WC envisaged it. That’s not to say it is identical. For starters, it is almost 1,000 yards longer these days. Suffice to say, the improvements in club design and golf balls compensate for that.
The pews were also rebuilt to be less consistent from pew to pew, much like the ones originally constructed by the Fowneses
— Gil Hanse
Hanse and Wagner were initially brought in to improve drainage and irrigation (the old system was 20 years old) on the course before the club decided that a more substantial restoration project was also needed. The underlying remit never changed. That is, Oakmont was to retain its reputation as one of the toughest championship challenges around.
The greens – the true defence of the course – have been expanded. In doing this, Hanse and Wagner tried to be faithful to Fownes’s original thinking. Their nips and tucks have added an estimated 15 per cent more putting surface and created new hole locations.
“We referenced a lot of early photos, 1920s and 1930s, to come up with the look and feel of the greens,” said Hanse. “In their original configurations, the greens didn’t change much during the Fownes tenure. They were much more of a table-top nature. Over time they had evolved through sand buildup along the edges, to a place where the putting surface was not the high point of the green complex—the edges were higher than the centre. We have reversed that and they now flow directly into the bunkers, rather than the bunkers flowing into the greens.”
The design team estimates that 24,000 sq f of green expansions have been installed across all 18 holes. This is most notable with a 2,500 sq f expansion at the par-four third. There are also green-surface additions to holes two, seven, 13, 16 and 18. Much of the design duo’s work focused on reviving the original plateau greens that fed into the greenside bunkers.
The design tweaking extended beyond the greens, with the famous church-pew bunkering – which align the left sides of the third and fourth holes – also getting a makeover. Two grassy mounds have been added and the length extended to 100 yards.
“We wanted to make sure the pews were still in position to challenge the landing area of the longest players,” said Hanse. “The pews were also rebuilt to be less consistent from pew to pew, much like the ones originally constructed by the Fowneses.”
Hanse remarked on how he and Wager went about their business of reinventing the original.
“We researched the course from 1903 to 1947, the period during which at least one of the Fowneses was involved in the design decisions. During that time, the course underwent changes almost on an annual basis. As a result, it would have been truly difficult to determine what iteration of the entire course was best.
“So we decided, with the club’s support, to look at each hole on an individual basis and try to determine which iteration of each hole would be the best fit for the way the game is played today. This creates an eclectic 18 holes, with the common denominator being that one of the Fowneses was involved in the creation of that version of the hole.”
When the 2021 US Amateur Championship – won by James Piot – was played at Oakmont, some players used unusual cross-country routes to navigate a way from tee to green. They opted to hit tee shots to adjoining fairways to make for easier approach shots.
The design work conducted by Hanse and Wagner will likely put a stop to such uncharted shot-making. This is best illustrated by their expansion of the bunker complex between the 10th and 11th holes, while they also reconstructed the ditch that crosses the 10th fairway at a 45-degree angle.
For all the changes and indeed the throwback to the past, one thing is for sure – Oakmont will be as tough a course as ever. Nothing new there.
The day DJ ruled the roost
The rules of golf, by their nature, are complex. However, the final round of the US Open at Oakmont in 2016 brought a farcical element to their interpretation and implementation.
That was the day Dustin Johnson accidentally moved his ball a fraction on the fifth green of his final round. After initially being exonerated of any wrongdoing, he was informed on the 12th hole that the USGA was reviewing video evidence and considering imposing a penalty.
As it happened, the one-stroke penalty which came his way didn’t affect the outcome. Johnson finished with a four-stroke winning margin, subsequently reduced to three, to claim his breakthrough Major win.
Johnson’s infringement on the fifth green involved his ball moving a couple of dimples. It was a marginal movement. DJ along with playing partner Lee Westwood and the USGA rules official, deemed there to be no issue, only for it to be subsequently reviewed by video evidence. Johnson was only informed after his round that he would incur the one-stroke penalty after being judged to have been responsible for moving his ball a fraction of an inch.
The rule in play for the incident on the fifth green was “18.2: Ball at Rest moved by Player, Partner, Caddie or Equipment”. Based on the information, the referee determined that it was more likely than not that Johnson had not caused the movement. The referee instructed Johnson to play the ball as it lies (from its new location) without penalty. Because of that instruction, the player did not incur a second penalty for playing the ball from the wrong place.
The Oakmont greens are among the fastest on any championship rota and other players had issues. Shane Lowry, in his second round, called a penalty on himself for a similar slight movement when addressing a putt.
The unfairness of the rule – compounded by the delay of the USGA in dealing with the matter – led to a reconsideration of its interpretation. The USGA and the R&A, the worldwide governing bodies, ultimately changed the rule.
Subsequently, a new rule was introduced so that any accidental movement of the ball would not incur a penalty. You can thank Dustin Johnson for that.
