Oakmont: Still a menacing monster but in new clothing

Want to know what to expect from Oakmont when the 107th U.S. Open tees off Thursday? Who better to ask than the world's No. 1 player? "It's going to be one of the toughest tests that we've ever played in a U.S. Open," Tiger Woods said. "Especially if it's dry."

By Dave Shedloski, PGATOUR.com Senior Correspondent

A squirrel clutching a golf ball is the all-too appropriate logo for Oakmont Country Club in suburban Pittsburgh, where the 107th U.S. Open begins Thursday. Squirrels like acorns, but they're not going to find any at the renowned H.C. Fownes course named in deference to the Oak trees that, oddly, were never part of the original design.

Henry Fownes, a Pittsburgh industrialist, founded and built Oakmont on a piece of rugged, barren, hilltop farmland 14 miles northeast of Pittsburgh. He chose the site near the Allegheny River because the property possesses a links-like personality reminiscent of Scotland. His son, William, who won the 1910 U.S. Amateur, also had considerable influence over the course's make-up in its first half-century. But they were bunker men. The more they added, the better they felt the course became.

At one time there were as many as 350 bunkers at Oakmont. Today, with a recent addition of about two dozen, bunkers number 210 -- 50 more than '04 U.S. Open site Shinnecock Hills Country Club in Southamption, N.Y. -- including the famous, fearsome and incomparable Church Pews that lurk between the third and fourth fairways.

There's never been a water hazard on the course, which opened in 1903. And trees weren't part of the design equation until former club president Fred Brand Jr. got the idea that the Fownes' linksy layout should better reflect of its parkland locale.

But when Oakmont hosts its eighth U.S. Open, it will look much like it did when it hosted its first in 1927.

More than 5,000 trees on the interior of the golf course were removed prior to the 2003 U.S. Amateur. An estimated 3,500 more have been taken since. Other than one small grove of oaks, only two trees remain on the par-70 track, and they are elms.

"It's the same golf course, but it's going to look and play different," course superintendent John Zimmers said recently. "Henry Fownes was a genius. He did things here that you aren't going to see anywhere else. I think he'd be proud of what we've done to restore the course."

While this austere look might suggest a course without defense, Oakmont is veritable monster in wolf's clothing. While typical U.S. Open enhancements such as narrow fairways bordered by graduated levels of thick rough will be employed, Oakmont presented intrinsic complications to scoring.

The bunkers already have received their just due. But the fairways aren't necessarily stretches of oasis. Oakmont's topography moves in turgid fits. A player seldom encounters a level lie, and some of the optimum landing areas aren't visible from the tee. Furthermore, the pitches left and right can send even well-struck drives bounding into undesirable locales.

"I don't care whether it's Tiger Woods or any top player, no golfer plays well off a downhill lie or sidehill lie or uphill lie," said Mike Davis, the U.S. Golf Association's Senior Director of Rules and Competitions. "Oakmont is a very hilly course and that moves into something that's very unique about Oakmont that we simply do not see at other U.S. Open courses: a fair number of blind or semi-blind shots. That's a wonderful attribute to a course where you're standing on the tee and you can't see the drive zone."

Oakmont will measure a maximum of 7,230 yards, considerably longer than the 6,946-yard configuration that the players confronted in their last visit in 1994. That was par-71 to boot. Still, Oakmont's length is modest by today's major championship standards. However, the individual yardages of some holes give it an enervating ebb and flow.

There has been the much-discussed 288-yard par-3 eighth hole. There is a 500-yard par-4, No. 15. Three par-4 holes, Nos. 2, 14 and 17, measure 358 yards or less, and Davis says all will be drivable at some point in the championship, perhaps multiple days. Phil Mickelson, four times a runner-up in the U.S. Open, including last year in a heart-breaking loss to Geoff Ogilvy, isn't so sure.

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"It's not enticing," Mickelson, the No. 2 player in the world," said about the prospects of taking on the hole from the teeing ground. "The rough around (the greens), the penalty for a miss, not really enticing."

Neither are the notorious greens, which might well induce a feeling of dyspepsia, if not downright dread. Smith will have them running at 13 on the Stimp Meter -- which some members might huffily claim to be slower than their usual Sunday morning four-ball. Oakmont's famously slick putting greens are the final and most effective defense. The putting surfaces are heavily sloped from back to front and each has it own special octaves of movement. Zimmers suggests that a 30-footer below the hole is much more palatable than a five-footer above it.

Said No. 1 Tiger Woods, who has two U.S. Open titles, ""Once you get to the greens, boy, that's the challenge right there -- trying to putt these things with the right speed because you're coming over so many different mounds and angles and pitch on the greens ... they are just so severe."

Severe is the authentic identity of Oakmont, which has long been called "an old brute" in the style of Carnoustie Golf Links, which next month hosts the British Open. Past USGA president Jim Hand once said, "There's only one course in the country where you can step right out and play the U.S. Open, and that's Oakmont."

But the USGA will make sure that all its defenses have been reinforced, and players should prepare for the same kind of headaches and heartaches they endured last year when Ogilvy's 6-over-par effort forged outright victory.

"It's going to be one of the toughest tests that we've ever played in a U.S. Open, especially if it's dry," Woods said. "If it's dry, it'll be unreal, because those greens are so severe, obviously the speed ... and the rough that they have there, it'll be everything you want."

And, more likely, everything they don't want.