‘Let the alibi artists stand aside’ – why Oakmont is toughest US Open test

Pittsburgh, America’s historic steel city also famed for coal mining, is known as a hub for hard industrial labour.

And these qualities extend to its most famed golf course. There are few, if any, tougher more uncompromising tests than Oakmont Country Club, the home of this week’s US Open.

This is a place where players have to roll up their sleeves and get on with it despite the golfing environment’s stark harshness.

Defending champion Bryson DeChambeau summed it up for his legion of YouTube followers when he said: “This course doesn’t just challenge your game, it challenges your sanity.”

This is the latest in a long line of observations about a course that will stage the US Open for a record 10th time, starting on Thursday. Seven-time major winner Gene Sarazen started the trend when he said Oakmont possesses “all the charm of a sock to the head”.

Huge undulating, sloped greens are lightning fast. Another legend, Sam Snead, joked: “I put a dime down to mark my ball and the dime slipped away.”

It was seeing a Sarazen putt run off an Oakmont green at the 1935 championship that inspired Edward Stimpson to invent the measuring device known as a “Stimpmeter” to calibrate just how fast a green is running.

Six times major champion Lee Trevino noted the difficulty of the greens when he observed: “Every time I two putted at Oakmont, I was passing somebody on the leaderboard.”

The rough is thick and juicy and its 175 bunkers are harsh, penal hazards. Phil Mickelson, who this week plays his 34th and most likely final US Open, thinks it is “the hardest golf course we have ever played”.

Geoff Ogilvy, the champion in 2006 at Winged Foot – another brutal venue, said: “Playing Oakmont was like the hardest hole you have ever played on every hole.”

The course was built in the early 20th century by Henry Clay Fownes after he sold his burgeoning steel business to Andrew Carnegie. The Fownes family were among the best players in Western Pennsylvania at the time.

Now they had the wealth to indulge their sporting passion and they transformed 191 acres of farmland at a place called Plum on the outskirts of Pittsburgh into one of the most feared pieces of golfing architecture ever built.

It was the only course HC Fownes designed and it has more than stood the test of time. He did not see golf as any kind of beauty contest.

“Let the clumsy, the spineless, the alibi artists stand aside, a poor shot should be a shot irrevocably lost,” he stated.

When the course opened in 1904 it measured 6,406 yards and was par-80. This week it is stretched to 7,431 yards and the par score is 71.

Dubbed “Soakmont” when it last staged the US Open, heavy rainfall softened fairways and greens, Dustin Johnson’s winning score was still only four under, admittedly including a controversial penalty for unintentionally moving his ball on the fifth hole of the final round.

Joint runners up Shane Lowry, Jim Furyk and Scott Piercy, who were three shots behind, were the only other players to beat par.

This time we can anticipate a similar scenario to the one that yielded Johnson’s first major nine years ago because the Pittsburgh area has suffered its wettest spring on record.

The greens will still be very quick but perhaps more likely to hold approach shots than they were in 2007. But the five-inch deep rough will be damp, lush and brutal.

And unlike most recent US Open venues it will not be ‘graduated’ with shorter grass nearer the immaculate fairways. It will be short grass and then long grass with nothing in between – classically uncompromising in the finest Oakmont tradition.

The bunkers are not designed to be a bail out. The sand is unsympathetic and forms a genuine hazard, as do strategic ditches that criss-cross the layout.

Between the third and fourth fairways lies the famous ‘Church Pews’ bunker, more than 100 yards long and up to 43 yards wide with a dozen turf islands (the pews) striped across to punish wayward tee shots.

The par-three eighth could be stretched to more than 300 yards and is the longest ‘short’ hole in championship golf. “I haven’t played it since they lengthened it to be a short par five,” Jack Nicklaus, the winner at Oakmont in 1962, recently joked.

Some hate the idea of par-three holes playing at such length. Nicklaus called it “crazy” but it is a good golf hole and par is just a number, albeit one that can mess with a player’s head.

And therein lies the ultimate aspect of US Open golf. Yes the United States Golf Association want to test every club in the bag but they also want to examine the 15th club – the one that resides between the ears.

The winner will be the player who deals best with the inevitable setbacks inflicted by a course known as “the beast” but who also plays the best golf.

That might seem an obvious statement, but accurate driving and unerring approach play can yield rich rewards. After a third-round 76, Johnny Miller fired a final-round 63 to win in 1973 with what is still regarded as one of the greatest rounds ever played.

In 2016 Lowry shot a 65 to take the 54-hole lead, so low scores are possible.

But over four long days, which may well suffer weekend weather interruption, there will be sufficient snakes to counterbalance the very few ladders afforded by this ultra-demanding course.