Oakmont Relishes a Rich History of Watching World's Best Golfers Struggle

It’s become a rite of summertime passage for golf fans, as predictable as both the broiling temperature readings and simmering tempers at the world’s toughest major championship, the U.S. Open.

Each June, usually by Tuesday of tournament week, a prominent player will utter a daunting proclamation about the venue, describing it as the most punitive Open site he’s ever seen, before forecasting a dire outcome.

This time around, five-time major winner Phil Mickelson got a head start on sounding the calamity klaxons.

Mickelson spent a few days in early June playing suburban Pittsburgh’s notorious Oakmont Country Club, which will play host to the U.S. Open for a record ninth time on Thursday. A veteran of 25 U.S. Open starts, he came away licking his wounds, not licking his chops, per se.

“I really think it is the hardest golf course we've ever played,” Mickelson told reporters last week prior to the FedEx St. Jude Classic in Memphis, Tennessee.

That sentiment represents orchestral music to the ears of the Oakmont membership, which not only enjoys pushing its beloved course’s playability to the edge, but adding a hard shove between the shoulder blades, too.

Oakmont, with stomach-churning reason, is routinely described as the toughest course on the planet—the sort of place where hardhats and gag balls should be sold in the pro shop, not golf caps and Titleists.

“This course was not designed to offer a grandmotherly hug,” said former PGA Tour regular Bob Friend, a Pittsburgh native and a member of the Oakmont board of directors. “It was designed to be a punch in the mouth.”

It’s like gnawing on a jawbreaker, for sure. For the last man standing on Sunday night, the week feels more like a prosecution than a procession.

“I know that if you win a U.S. Open at Oakmont,” defending Open champion Jordan Spieth said after a practice round at the club, “you can go ahead and say that you’ve conquered the hardest test in all of golf.”

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From the day the club opened in 1904, the founding father-and-son tandem of W.C. and H.C. Fownes unapologetically honed the course to a razor’s edge, sometimes following members around the course and later adding hazards if poor shots went unpunished. Oakmont can be penal and cruel, adjectives the members welcome as easily as a cold beer afterward.

Members at other high-dollar clubs would surely have staged a mutiny by now, but at Oakmont, the self-infliction of pain and suffering is the stuff of legend.

LPGA star Paula Creamer, who won the U.S. Women’s Open six years ago at Oakmont, had heard about the club’s legendary, masochistic reputation. Then she played a few rounds with members and the strangest thing happened.

She became a convert.

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“Their enjoyment of the course actually rubbed off on me,” Creamer said. “I grew to enjoy the course and its challenges, rather than being afraid or intimidated by them. 

“The members of Oakmont really are special. They have seen the best play their course, so they are knowledgeable and passionate about the game.”

Not to mention extremely protective of their home track, which is held in such high regard that it has never ranked outside the top 10 on Golf Digest’s 100 greatest courses since the list debuted 50 years ago.

As for difficulty, it ranks second on Golf Digest’s list of toughest U.S. courses, behind tree-strewn Pine Valley. Those who have survived Oakmont would dispute the admittedly subjective pecking order while reaching for the ibuprofen.

“You’re not there for pleasure,” said Golf Digest architectural editor Ron Whitten. “You’re there for penance.”

Prospective members understand the club’s desire to offer the ultimate test before joining, or they look elsewhere. Truth be told, many Oakmont regulars have memberships at other Pittsburgh-area clubs, where they can salve their wounds and reasonably hope to break 80 or 90.

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“Oakmont members love their golf course, and the tougher it is, the better they like it,” 18-time major winner Jack Nicklaus said.

The Fownes duo viewed sloppy play as something akin to Ebola, prompting W.C. to utter: “A shot poorly played should be a shot irrevocably lost.” When it opened, the course had about 100 bunkers. With Fownes dialing up the pain threshold like a school principal doling out paddlings, the total climbed to more than 300 sand traps at one stage.

“Let the clumsy, the spineless, the alibi artists stand aside,” said W.C. Fownes of the would-be whiners.

Built outside one of America’s grittiest cities, Oakmont isn’t long on flashy landscaping, fish ponds or superfluous eye candy. The course is a testy throwback even before the round begins—the men’s locker room has no air conditioning.

A busy toll road and set of train tracks bisect the course, which is fitting. On most days, the treacherous greens at Oakmont, truly the club’s defining feature, are firmer than the blacktop on the Pennsylvania Turnpike.

“They’re linoleum,” Friend said.

And then some.

“They’re like a marble table top,” Whitten said. “Except that one of the legs on the table is missing.”

Truly, the putting surfaces at Oakmont have been generating ulcers for decades. When the club hosted the Open for the second time, in 1935, players threatened not to play because of the green speeds. After watching Hall of Famer Gene Sarazen roll a putt completely off an Oakmont green, a man in the gallery named Edward Stimpson Sr. became convinced the surfaces were too darned fast.

He went home and invented the now-universal Stimpmeter, which measures putting speeds, and over time reaffirmed that Oakmont’s greens are like no other set of surfaces on the planet, including those at Augusta National. For instance, the greens at Oakmont are double-cut and compressed by a weighted roller every day, except on weekends, when they are triple-cut and rolled, Friend said.

Every decade or so, when the U.S. Golf Association rolls into town to stage the U.S. Open, many familiar Oakmont fables are trotted out, including one story that has been retold so often it has passed into outright lore. To wit, Oakmont is so tough, the USGA only has to stick 18 flags in the ground and fill out the tee sheet.

“When we come to Oakmont, we virtually don’t have to change anything,” USGA executive director Mike Davis said at Oakmont’s media day earlier this spring.

Hyperbole? Not necessarily. When the USGA conducted a site visit in 2006, exactly one year before the men’s Open was last staged at Oakmont, they offered a rave review to club officials, then were stunned to learn that the greens were running at a glassy 15 feet on the Stimpmeter.

This week, Davis hopes to throttle the greens back to 14, which still sounds downright horrific to some.

“If they're truly at 14, they won't finish,” said Nicklaus, who won his first major at Oakmont, the 1962 U.S. Open. “It would be a really tough golf course at that speed.”

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While frustrated guests might be tempted to take a swan dive into oncoming traffic when crossing the footbridges spanning the turnpike, the members are extremely proud of the place and wouldn’t change a thing.

“It’s a different culture here,” Friend said. “We’re members, but we’re stewards of the club’s legacy, too.”

For the everyday hack, estimating the punishment meted out by Oakmont is difficult but not impossible. The USGA’s online “bogey rating” metric estimates that an 18-handicapper playing Oakmont from the championship tees under normal circumstances—the greens run between 12 and 13 for daily club play, Friend said—would shoot 105.

Under this week’s U.S. Open conditions, that number would surely approach 120. Clearly, then, there’s a reason why the locals dubbed the place “Hades of Hulton” decades ago in homage to both the course’s difficulty and the street that feeds into the area, Hulton Road.

The squirm factor aside, it’s easy to applaud the list of winners the course has produced when staging various majors over the past 90 years, including Hall of Famers such as Bobby Jones, Sam Snead, Johnny Miller, Ben Hogan, Ernie Els, Tommy Armour, Nicklaus and Sarazen. In 2007, Angel Cabrera, a multiple major winner himself, held off future Hall of Famers Tiger Woods and Jim Furyk to win by a shot.

To the club, that list of champions is a validation of everything Oakmont represents. Tough courses separate the best from the rest. Thus, the Oakmont membership isn’t perverted, just a bit peculiar.

“You know what, you have to love the challenge,” said Friend, who played for five years on the PGA Tour. “The vast majority of members revel in it.

“Some might call it a sickness, but we love the challenge.”

Steve Elling covers golf for Bleacher Report. Quotes are firsthand unless otherwise noted.