It’s a weird, almost inexplicable, feeling, alien to any genuine fan of the game. Major championships are what we relish most because we know the golf really matters but, while the U.S. Open is highly anticipated, a small part of you may be catching yourself wanting to look away or, in extreme cases, not tune in at all.
Why? Because Oakmont Country Club is a savage beast, a fearsome brute, that will take its pound of flesh and leave some of the best golfers in the world—no, all the best golfers in the world—feeling exasperated to some degree or other.
Cleanly struck, seemingly made-to-order drives will pitch on tilted fairways and roll, inexorably, into rough so thick and punishing a slash to the side might be the best a player can hope for, assuming they can find the ball. Iron shots will bounce hard on concrete greens and need to be struck perfectly if they are to grab the shaved poa annua turf and remain on the putting surface. And putts that catch the edge of the hole will spin out and still be gathering pace as they trundle off the green.
Yes, the fairways are a little wider and the greens a little bigger since Gil Hanse’s 2023/24 modifications (and the one-and-a-half-inch-deep furrows that characterized the river-sand bunkers for decades are long gone), but Oakmont’s teeth are no less sharp.
Opened in 1904 on 191 acres of barren farmland half a mile south of the Allegheny River and 14 miles northeast of downtown Pittsburgh, Oakmont was conceived, owned, and designed by Henry Clay (H.C.) Fownes. The behemoth he built and which his son, William Clark (W.C.) Fownes Jr. (an MIT-educated engineer and the 1910 U.S. Amateur champion) along with superintendent Emil Loeffler, would make even tougher opened with a par of 80 and had over 300 bunkers at one point (Pittsburgh golf writer Marino Parascenzo, who wrote the club history, likened it to “Thor hurling thunderbolts”; there are 168 today).
Hosting its 10th U.S. Open in 2025, most consider Oakmont the quintessential U.S. Open test. The average winning score in the nine previous editions was 285—about 20 shots higher than what wins a typical PGA Tour event these days—and why Mike Davis, former Executive Director/CEO of the USGA, said that Oakmont is the “true gold standard in championship golf.” Just 27 of the 1,385 players who have played in a U.S. Open at Oakmont have finished under par.
Architect Forrest Richardson worked with, and was mentored by, Jack Snyder, who became a golf course designer after serving as Oakmont’s superintendent in the 1950s. Richardson has spent a lot of time at the club and says that while Fownes was certainly influenced by what he saw in Britain, Oakmont is “truly an American course that was its own version of the game.” Richardson continues: “Fownes wanted to create a course with strategy but which was grounded in difficulty to reward accuracy and precision over anything else. At Oakmont you need to pay attention. Sometimes you have to aim well away from the target to have a prayer of stopping the ball anywhere near the hole.”
Sometimes that type of golf doesn’t jibe with the modern PGA Tour player’s idea of what makes good golf. Ryan Moore has played a U.S. Amateur and two U.S. Opens there, making the cut in 2016, but clearly never developed any great affection for the course. “You probably can’t use a lot of what I think,” he says. “It’s just unrelenting and often punishes good shots. It’s a championship course in the strongest sense of the word and sits right on the border between difficult and tricky. You have to play amazingly well to win, but you also need a few breaks.
Having won the U.S. Amateur at Oakmont in 2021, James Piot obviously has an affinity with the club and course but is under no illusions about its demands. “On top of all the other obstacles, the slopes in the fairways are sometimes counter to the type of shot you need to play,” he says. “So, the orientation of the green might favor a draw approach, but you have a fade lie in the fairway.”
The slope in the fairways is something, Connor Lewis, founder of the Society of Golf Historians and a frequent visitor to Oakmont, picks up on. “Take the par-five 12th,” he says. “It doesn’t look particularly scary from the tee, but the fairway cantilevers to the right hard and the green runs away from you making a seemingly harmless par-five quite harmful.”
Hanse focused at first on updating the drainage before reconstructing bunkers (he re-shaped the grassy ridges in the Church Pews bunker to the left of the 3rd fairway so they looked less uniform and more like the pews from the bunker’s early days in the mid-1930s, and also added a 13th pew) and expanding the greens—24,000 square feet lost to years of sand build-up around the edges and years of heavy maintenance were reclaimed, adding numerous pin positions.
The sheer number of bunkers would certainly be a factor, Hanse says, but like Piot and Lewis, Hanse thinks the fairway slopes are an important element of Oakmont’s overall defense. “One of the most under-appreciated aspects of Oakmont’s design is the importance of shaping and holding your tee shots so they stay in the fairway,” he says. “Yes, the bunkers are many and deep and do a good job of defending fairway angles and greens, and the ditches must be avoided, but players must also deal effectively with the fairway slopes.”
