Oakmont On Our Mind

It's time to turn our attention to the looming U.S. Open at storied Oakmont.  The Open was last here in 2007 when Angel Cabrera won,

The USGA has this short intro to Oakmont on their website:

A Course That Stands the Test of Time

Oakmont Country Club was founded in 1903 by industrialist Henry Clay Fownes. The

layout he created and tweaked through the years with his son, William, has set the standard for championship competition ever since. The nation’s first golf course to be recognized as a National Historic Landmark, Oakmont has previously hosted 15 USGA championships, including eight U.S. Opens (1927, 1935, 1953, 1962, 1973, 1983, 1994 and 2007).

Tommy Armour, the Silver Scot, won that first Oakmont Open in a playoff over Lighthors Harry Cooper to earn all of $500.  Except for the unknown local boy Sam Parks, Jr. Oakmont has produced champions with names like Hogan, Nicklaus, Miller, nelson and Els.

The missing name on the list is of course local boy Arnold Palmer, who lost to Jack in that 1962 playoff.

For a deeper dive into Oakmont, the place to go is Golf Club Atlas, Ran Morrissett's playground for all things architectural.  Here he introduces Henry Fownes:

An avid golfer who qualified for five U.S. Amateur Championships, Henry.C. Fownes decided at the turn of the twentieth century to start a golf club. In 1903, Henry Fownes found property well suited and oversaw the purchase of nearly 200 acres of pastureland above the town of Oakmont. The property was open in nature and remained so through the 1950s. Grantland Rice wrote in 1939 that he enjoyed the view of seventeen of Oakmont‘s eighteen flags from the clubhouse porch (only the 16th obscured by a hill was out of view). 

Henry Fownes and his team of 150 men and 25 donkeys constructed a course over the open farmland that resembled the unobstructed sweep of a links course. At the time of construction, the Haskell ball was making its presence felt and Henry Fownesrecognized that the gutta-percha days were quickly ending. Consequently, he built the course to handle this new technology. When it opened in 1904, Oakmont had a par of 80 and was over 6,400 yards in length, a very long course for its day. Much to the credit of Henry C. Fownes‘ feel for the land, today’s holes occupy the same general playing corridors as his original routing. Well under one hundred bunkers were constructed and Henry Fownes relied more on the natural landforms to present the challenge. The original scorecard shows the twelfth hole at 560 yards with a bogey of six (!) while the 225 yard sixteenth had a bogey of four.

One can't overstate how audacious that was in 1908, as the game was merely getting off the ground in the U.S. at that point.  But the legacy might have been lost had not his son gone into the family business:

William C. Fownes is one of the great figures in amateur golf and one of the giants in the development of golf in the United States. An accomplished player (he won the U.S. Amateur in 1910), he also the playing captain of the Walker Cup team in 1922 and served as president of the United States Golf Association in 1926/1927. In addition, he served on the advisory panel at Pine Valley and helped guide that club after George Crump’s death. However, his most important and lasting contribution to the game was the continual refinements he made to his father’s design at Oakmont. 

William C. Fownes spent over four decades getting to know the course and observing how it played. If a particular bunker was rendered ineffective through time (such as the advent of steel shafts in the 1930s), he did not hesitate in working with the legendary Green Keeper Emil Loeffler to build another one further up the fairway to ensure that the integrity of a hole was preserved. William C. Fownes and Loeffler made a formidable team, both in the construction of bunkers and in imbuing the greens with some of the most imaginative interior contours for putting surfaces on this side of the Atlantic. Loeffler accentuated the design’s merit by setting new standards for fast and firm playing conditions in the United States.

Ran runs on at length at that link, and also provides this wonderful photo of a golfer playing out of the famous church pew bunkers on the third hole:

Good luck to you, sir, though that seems an awfully aggressive line you're taking....

The USGA has rolled out it's hole flyovers again, and we'll partake over the next ten days.

Hole No. 1 -  Is there a more difficult opener in major tournament golf?  The first at Augusta is difficult, but this one is just a beast (as is pretty much then entire course).

You might recall that Aaron Baddeley, the 54-hole leader in 2007, made double to start his final round, and pretty much hasn't been heard from since.

Hole No. 2 - This is as close to a let-up hole as you'll find on this course, but there's no such thing as a birdie hole if you miss the fairway or put the ball above the hole on the green:

Note the contours on the green, very typical for Oakmont.  Each green is really three or four far smaller greens, and often a balloff the green but below the hole might well be better positioned than one that counts as a G.I.R.

Hole No. 3 - My plan was to do three holes per post, but you'll quickly see why that's not possible as we happen upon arguably the most famous bunker in golf.    Talk about visual intimidation from the tee, it looks awfully narrow to this observer:

According to Ran Morrissett, the church pews bunker is 135 yards in length.  Thought you'd want to know...

Hole No. 4 - I didn't want to leave you stuck in the middle of the church pews, though you'd hardly be the first to require a tactical extraction.  The fourth, the first Par-5, runs back the other way and offers players that visited the CP's on No. 3 the opportunity for a daily double:

Surprisingly, there are a mere thirteen(!) bunkers on this hole, though that's ninety-one in dog bunkers....

We'll cover the rest of the holes as the week trudges on, but this guy has the horse right here:

If you were looking for a reason to back Rory at Oakmont, he certainly gave punters all they needed to see on some of the tour's toughest greens.

I think most fascinating about the putter grip change from left hand low to conventional is just how much less he "pops" a putt instead of a stroke. Popping is not a good thing on greens running 14. IMHO.

And he quotes Bob Harig of ESPN with this:

But perhaps more important was McIlroy's putting. Typically a sore spot and the aspect of his game that holds him back, McIlroy was second for the week in strokes gained putting and never took more than 29 putts in a round. (He had more than 30 in each round two weeks ago in Ireland.) 

"Off the tee I was really good this week, and I feel like my putting improved a lot,'' he said. "If you look at the stats from my putting, I feel like it's been really good. So all things considered, it's been a decent week. Time to get ready for Oakmont.''

That's a rather dramatic turnaround in one week, though the greens didn't have that fire.  The course would have to be especially soft for me to like Rory's chances, as his iron and wedge play has been simply dreadful recently, and I'm a little skeptical of the value of such a small sample size.  

But he can dominate a course with his driver like few others can, and that's a useful skill at Oakmont.  So, I like Rory less than Jason but more than Jordan...

Lastly, don't miss this Pittsburgh Post Gazette item on the caddies at the 1951 PGA held at Oakmont.  It's nothing profound, but a nice look back at a different era in our game through the eyes of the local caddies:

But, in 1951, with the PGA Championship in his backyard, Cosnotti said he was matched 

up to caddie for a little-known pro from Sacramento, Calif., named Frank Minch. Cosnotti also caught a few glimpses of all-time greats such as Sam Snead and Gene Sarazen. He frequently revisits those memories with fellow former caddies and did so two weeks ago in Oakmont as the club prepares to welcome its ninth U.S. Open and 12th major championship. Such caddies often remark how much things have changed for Oakmont and their former industry. 

On the course, 14-year-olds don’t receive experiences like that anymore. Now, being a caddie at a major is a career. And those 14-year-olds . . . they aren’t the kids of local factory workers who play with a pickup club set of maybe three MacGregors, two Wilsons and whatever else they can find as Cosnotti did. Instead, they are experts who make 5 percent to 10 percent of a golfer’s winnings — the highest-earning caddie in 2014, Micah Fugitt, who caddies for Billy Horschel, made a total of $1.57 million after Horschel won the FedEx Cup. Snead won $3,500 for winning at Oakmont in 1951.

Pretty comical that a writer with Google would cite Billy Horschel's looper from two years ago, when I'm guessing that Michael Greller blew that number away off of Spieth's $22 million in winnings last year.  Just sayin'...

But Cosnotti remembers Minch treating him well. Minch didn’t make it past the second day, but Cosnotti was paid $30 — almost $300 in the money of today — and Minch gave him a dozen Titleist golf balls. He would ask the 14-year-old Cosnotti about how far the green was and what club he should use, as if he were a caddie with decades of experience.

“It was a tough thing to tell him about a club because I had never seen this man hit a golf ball before,” he said.

A different time for sure....