Midweek Musings - Oakmont Edition

The bride and I are off to play Whippoorwill later this morning, so without further ado....

Pair-Shaped -  The USGA has announced tee times for Thursday-Friday, and the absence of a sense of humor in Far Hills is palpable.  There was this:

Defending U.S. Open champion Jordan Spieth will play alongside Zach Johnson and

Bryson DeChambeau on Thursday and Friday at Oakmont. It's traditional for the defending champs of the U.S. and British Opens to play with the reigning U.S. Amateur champ. What's not as traditional is how the pairing came about. DeChambeau forfeited his spot by turning pro earlier this year, but earned a spot through sectional qualifying on Monday. DeChambeau held his own head-to-head against Spieth for two rounds at the Masters two months ago before a closing triple bogey on Friday. That trio will tee off Oakmont's 10th hole at 8:35 a.m. on Thursday.

That act didn't open to rave reviews at Augusta, spawning the fake Twitter account @grellerstowel.   Though I did catch Shack on the tube suggesting that it was the youngster and Zach Johnson that were actually the slowpokes.

OK, I'm disillusioned by the absence of a fat group or, as per my own suggestion, a Grizly Adams group, but there is this:

World No. 1 Jason Day will play with two of the sweetest swings in golf the first two days: Adam Scott and Louis Oosthuizen. All three contended at Chambers Bay last year. They'll start on the first hole at 2:20 p.m. on Thursday. 

And Rory McIlroy will go off No. 1 at 8:24 a.m. on Thursday. McIlroy is paired with reigning Masters champ Danny Willett and Rickie Fowler.

 Pairings don't matter, unless they do.....

Handicapping - Not really, as I'm the '62 Mets of fantasy golf...just some thoughts on the subject.

Golf Digest Equipment Guru Mike Stachura goes all existential on us:

I love the U.S. Open for two reasons. First, it exudes despair, agony and pain. So in terms of how I relate to golf, it speaks to me. As someone who struggles to make pars and routinely finds himself embarrassed and spiritually denuded by the game’s evils, I watch the U.S. Open every year with the kind of schadenfreude that some psychologists might term clinically disturbing. Or so I’ve heard.

Well, good luck with all that, Mike....But I'd ask you not to discuss this with Phil, who has his own issues with the event...

But conversely, I think I love the U.S. Open because it is just that: Open. Meaning there is a way, theoretically, I could find myself playing in it. Just like there’s a way, theoretically, I could find myself living on Mars. 

Of course, the U.S. Open’s open-ness is what makes choosing its winner so difficult. But that hasn’t stopped me, despite the fact that my choices to win the U.S. Open, like all of my legendary major championship prognostications, have been so decidedly and wildly incorrect: Boo Weekley in 2013 (missed cut), Bill Haas in 2014 (T35) and Phil Mickelson in 2015 (missed cut). My ridiculously complicated and relatively pointless statistical formula hasn’t exactly helped, either. Nevertheless, several Excel spreadsheets later I am ready to release my choice to history.

Of course that's ass-backwards, as the inclusion of qualifiers makes predicting the tournament easier, as those guys never win.  You want more along those lines?

But this year’s U.S. Open is rich with another quality I find appealing: Obscurity. Which in its own way is a kind of despair. The field is replete with players who barely have standing in the world of professional golf, unless you consider “standing” to be what Roy McAvoy had in Tin Cup. More than half the participants teeing it up at Oakmont on Thursday have a world ranking outside the top 100, 53 of those are not currently in the top 300 and a full 32 players either do not have a world ranking or are positioned outside the top 1,000 players in pro golf. In a way, no different than you and me.

No different than you and me?  There is that 1.4 or lower handicap index, not a small thing....

 Rory had some interesting thoughts on the subject as well, a scaptured by Gary Van Sickle:

"The majors that I have won have been soft and under par scores and they suit my style

of game," said McIlroy, who plays a power game with a high trajectory. "To win on a course like Oakmont with the conditions the way they are, it would maybe be my biggest accomplishment in the game. It would make me feel like a more complete player, I guess. I'd be very proud if I won on a course like this." 

The odd thing is, McIlroy fits the traditional profile of Oakmont champions from the latter half of the 20th century. They were mostly power hitters or precision iron players. Just run down the list—Ben Hogan, Jack Nicklaus, Johnny Miller, Larry Nelson, Ernie Els and Angel Cabrera.

That list of winners does point one towards the big boppers, though I think it's a bit misleading as well.  When Oakmont opened at 6,900 yards in the 1920's there's little doubt that it was a beast.... But let's note that the last two visits we've seen guys like Jim Furyk, Loren Roberts and David Toms, with a cumulative record of three days in the gym, compete and almost win.

But this is the nub of it I think:

The game has changed, however, even since Cabrera's win. This week is the first time anyone has talked about Oakmont being on the short side. It has always been a beast. 

Sorry, The Beast. But even an aging Phil Mickelson isn't intimated by Oakmont's length anymore. 

"The reason why I'm optimistic about Oakmont is that it doesn't require me to hit a lot of drivers," Mickelson said at the FedEx St. Jude Classic in Memphis last week.

That's right, a course with a par three that may be stretch to 300 yards plays short.

Ummmm Gray, the USGA just released a study the approximate thickness of the Tokyo phone book that assures us the guys aren't hitting it much further than they did in 2003.... They wouldn't con us, would they?

As a side note back on the open theme, Gary's spawn Mike just got into the event, and I'm hoping that Dad will be on the bag.

Shack grabs a couple of quotes from the pressers that seem to point to different strategies:

Q. So you see taking a risk off the tee as being worthwhile, ultimately?

RICKIE FOWLER: To a certain extent. You can't try and be very aggressive on this golf course. You kind of have to take what it gives you. You can't try and push it too much. 

There's some holes where it's just as wide with driver as it is with a driving iron or a 3 wood, and I feel like I hit my driver just about as straight as any of those.

So I'd rather take my chances of having the shorter iron in and having a chance to possibly play aggressive and get a shot close, versus just trying to get one on the green.

Contrasted with this from Rory:

I don't think there's going to be many drivers out there this week. Maybe the two par 5s you'll hit driver. 7th hole. I think, if the 2nd hole is downwind, you can hit driver there and try to hit it up on the green. But, yeah, I don't think there's going to be many drivers this week, to be fair. I'll hit 2 iron off the tee much more than I'll hit driver.

 I'm very interested to see how the guys play certain holes, but I'd remind all that their default setting is "Bomb and Gouge".  And Cabrera definitely followed that strategy in 2007, hitting less than 50% of his fairways.... though he was in Beast Mode as per this:

In 2007 Angel Cabrera averaged 310.9 yards off the tee (ranked second for the week) and hit enough fairways to rank T-3 in greens in regulation.

Obviously a decision to bomb it is taken with an understanding of the playability from the rough.  Ernie, a man one assumes favorably disposed to the course, had this keen agronomic insight:

It's crazy. I don't know how many of you guys were here in '94. Oh, there you go. A couple. But it's amazing how we played the game in those days and how we play today with the golf ball, and a lot of us were still using wooden drivers back in '94 and so forth. 

And it's amazing how the golf course has also changed. You could definitely move the ball out of the rough on to a lot of these greens. Nowadays, you can't really do that.

I don't know what kind of chemicals they put in that grass, but it's growing. So that changed a lot. It's been how many? 22 years since '94. Obviously, a lot of tournaments have passed. I think I played in my second U.S. Open then, and I think I'm playing my 24th. It's been quite a journey, to say the least. It's all good. 

I would say they've really upped the ante the last five to ten years with the rough. Whatever they call it, the graduation of the rough, whatever, it's just thick, and it's a lot more dense than it was back in the day. We could move the ball around. It was almost more fun to play that way because you could advance the ball, you could get the ball to run towards the green. You're not always going to hit the perfect shot, but you had a chance of actually hitting a shot. 

Now it's at least a half a shot penalty. You try to get a wedge out to where you can play your next shot from. That's just the way it is. They've really got the premium on accuracy and ball striking. It is what it is. I'm just saying, back in the day, it was a little different. We could maneuver the ball out of the rough.

Here's an explanation from the USGA's Jeff Hall:

“The whole idea is if you have 10 golf balls in the rough, we'll like to see six or seven be able to play to the green,” Hall said. “Maybe three or four you have to chop it out. But the 5-inch rough will be just the opposite.

“Where we think the benefit of that is at Oakmont, when firm and greens are bold, we want that players can chase a 6- or 7-iron onto the green and let the architecture take the ball where it's going to go as opposed to hitting a sand wedge out then wedging it onto the green. We don't want to lose some of the excitement. It's about the characteristics of the ground, which are used masterfully with the design."

This something to watch for in early round play.  Shack has noted in his tube appearance that, while the rough is not especially long, it's got a cushy feeling under foot and it's so think that he's concerned about the playability, especially around the greens.

The late (and great) Jim Murray once dubbed the U.S. Open  “Beelzebub in plus fours”, the first part of which I'll confess to not understand.  Anyone with time on their hands can explain it to me...But John Strege uses that as the tent-pole for a fun column, which includes this from Murray himself:

The late Los Angeles Times columnist Jim Murray, an unapologetic fan of the 18-hole train wreck for the material it provided him, noted this in discussing club pro Tony Lopez, an unfortunate qualifier for the 1972 U.S. Open at Pebble Beach, who had rounds of 86 and 91. 

“You have to understand,” Murray wrote, “the pros not only volunteer for this misery, but they fight to get in. Imagine a guy playing in two qualifying tournaments, then paying to play and then having a guy walking around behind you with a sign saying you’re 33 over par. Tony Lopez ought to at least get Green Stamps.”

Do green stamps still exits?  This form the much-missed Frank Hannigan is so true:

“All you have to do is take one hole that’s called a par 5 and don’t do anything to it and call it a par 4,” the late Frank Hannigan, former executive director of the USGA, once said. “It’s a mind game.” 

Indeed. The ninth hole at Oakmont, 477 yards, was played as a par 5 until the 2007 Open. That year, it was the fourth most difficult hole, its average score 4.49. In 1994, as a par 5, it was the easiest hole of the tournament with a scoring average of 4.62. 

“You want to make an easy hole hard what do you do? Just change the par,” Fran Nobilo said on Golf Channel.

Ain't that the truth, though Webb Simpson did post this to ease the pain of his fellow players on the 8th hole, that notorious "Reachable Par-3":

Loose Ends - Shack does his usual merchandise tent thing, and I'm all in on this item:

For those scratching their heads. that's an Official Church Pew Bottle Opener that is way cool....

That Long Shot - If you scroll back up to that list of previous winners of Oakmont Opens, can you identify the missing name?  Doug Ferguson has the answer for you:

OAKMONT, Pa. (AP) — Sam Parks Jr. rates among the most unlikely winners in U.S. Open history, especially compared with the Hall of Fame list of champions at Oakmont.

He was a 25-year-old club pro from Pittsburgh who played on the winter tour without ever winning. And then he took down a field in the 1935 U.S. Open that included Walter Hagen and Gene Sarazen, Denny Shute and Horton Smith. 

An upset?

Maybe in pedigree. But not in preparation.

Here's Doug's point:

In the months leading up to the U.S. Open, Parks played nine holes at Oakmont every morning before going to work at nearby South Hills Country Club so he could learn the nuances of the fastest greens in golf and develop a strategy. Sarazen wrote of Parks in a column going into the Open, "His knowledge of Oakmont and its pitfalls should be a great asset." And it was. 

USGA executive director Mike Davis only wishes more players would take note.

That last bit harkens back to Chambers Bay, where Davis famously suggested that arriving on Monday of Open week was a bad strategy, serving only to piss off today's delicate flowers.  We could spend much time debating this, but it's a damn major and some additional prep work is not excessive.

This is eerily similar to jack Fleck's preparation at Olympic in 1955 where the only limiting factor on practice rounds was daylight.... and, same story, it was the only tournament Fleck ever won (at least until a Super Senior event decades later).

The Perils of Paula - We recently heard from Paula, the last major winner at Oakmont, about her strategy that week.  This I thought was wise:

While not presuming to offer advice to the men playing next week on the USGA's most-experienced Open venue, Creamer graciously shared her formula for victory. Here, then, are Paula's tips for winning a U.S. Open at rough, tough Oakmont.

But you know what else might have been wise?  Returning Bubba's yardage book.  Bubba was seen on video yesterday complaining (though with tongue firmly in cheek) that the yardage book he loaned her in 2010 hadn't been returned, and that he and caddie Ted Scott were busy recreating it....  

Paula is having none of it:

I trust she sent it certified....