Oakmont is a fearsome US Open venue – but it was designed to be brutal since day one

Henry Clay Fownes, a Pittsburgh businessman, never intended for Oakmont to be easy. In fact, he built it precisely because the local courses were not sufficiently challenging.

An accomplished amateur in his own right, Fownes’ design brief was to replicate the kind of windswept, bleak landscape of a UK links course.

And in the absence of reliably unpleasant weather to make the course more difficult, he cut the fairways so narrow that at one US Open, so legend has it, the USGA had to ask the club to widen them.

Because of the clay subsoil, he couldn’t make the bunkers as deep as they were back home.

The dastardly Fownes’ solution was to create a rake that left golf-ball-wide ridges in the sand perpendicular to the line of play.

When Ben Hogan was asked how he planned to counter these hazards, he replied, true to form: “I don’t plan to be in them.”

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The enormous greens were heavy-rolled into submission, creating firm and fast surfaces. In short, Oakmont was brutal from the beginning.

As time went on, Henry’s son, William Clark, took over. His philosophy on course design left little doubt that he was a chip off the old block: “A poorly played shot should result in a shot irrevocably lost,” he said.

“Keep it rugged, baffling, hard to conquer, otherwise we should tire of the game. Let the clumsy, the spineless and the alibi artist stand aside.”

Oakmont was laid out in 1903. By the 1990s, it had changed almost beyond recognition. For a start, the Pennsylvania Turnpike highway was built alongside the course, parallel to the railway. And over time thousands of trees grew on the property.

The club tried chopping down the odd one here and there in the 1980s in the hope no one would notice. They did. Following some heated discussions, a new Oakmont was unveiled in time for the 2007 US Open with anything up to an estimated 8,000 trees removed – and even more now.

Oakmont had been in danger of becoming mistaken for a generic country club. Not anymore.

In 2023, Gil Hanse made further bunker modifications on the course and expanded the greens throughout in preparation for the 125^th US Open this summer.

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Greens that already seemed so vast have got even bigger with over 24,000 square feet of green surface restored in the last 24 months. Hanse had seen images of the greens in the 1920s and 1930s, before natural causes caused them to shrink.

Oakmont Country Club course superintendent Mike McCormick admitted the bunkers significantly deteriorated between 2016 and 2022 but, technology being what it is, bunkers can now be drained better to hold and limit contamination.

The members have been all-in on making the greens faster and more challenging than when Dustin Johnson lifted America’s national trophy in 2016.

The course will be 7,372 yards long, up by roughly 150 yards from nine years ago. This doesn’t constitute a huge difference – not like the mass tree removal of the previous three decades and the expanded greens, which will see new pin positions unknown to the players.

“The US Open is played on the country’s grandest golf courses,” former USGA Chief Executive Mike Davis once said. “The US Open is an examination of shot making, strategy, course management and nerves. Oakmont more than meets all that criteria. It meets the gold standard of a rigorous championship test.”

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