"A shot poorly played should be a shot irrevocably lost."
There never has been a more precise summation of the design philosophy behind a particular golf course than the one attributed to Oakmont founder H.C. Fownes and his son, W.C. From the course's inception in 1904 under the guidance of H.C. to the end of the Fownes' (pronounced "phones") reign in 1946, Oakmont fully earned a reputation as the toughest course in the land. In fact, it's the course that gave birth to the term "penal architecture."
The bunkers were most penal of all. W.C. roamed the grounds observing play. When he saw a player get away with a bad shot, he would write it down. Soon, a new bunker would appear in that spot. By the 1930s, Oakmont was dotted with some 350 bunkers.
The Fowneses were admirers of Scottish courses, particularly the pot bunkers. They wanted their hazards to be just as difficult to escape from, but the clay-based soil of the Pittsburgh area didn't allow them to build the bunkers very deep and still drain properly. So they devised an ingenious, and diabolical, solution. The Oakmont bunkers were raked with a special, heavy implement that left deep furrows in the sand. If your ball ended up in one of them, the only option was to blast it out a short distance.
As M. Ellsworth Giles wrote in the program for the 1927 U.S. Open, ñThe committee in charge of the Oakmont course has little sympathy for bunkers which permit a player to make a long midiron or spoon shot to the green, to the accompaniment of vociferous applause from the gallery.î
Oakmont's committee had little sympathy for much else, including golfers. They skinned their greens much closer than any other course of the day, making the putting surfaces extremely treacherous. ItÍs said that W.C. would stand at the back of the 2nd green and drop a ball onto the surface; if it didn't roll all the way down the back-to-front slope and off the front, he would call for the greens to be cut.
The course overwhelmed competitors at the 1927 and 1935 U.S. Opens. The winning scores„Tommy ArmourÍs 301 in '27 and Sam Parks' 299 in '35, were the highest in their respective decades. When the Open returned in 1953, Armour described his victory. "Every hole was bordering on becoming a nightmare, not a single one that could even be called slightly easy," he wrote. "After you hit a perfect drive and after you hit a second shot onto the green, you had accomplished a little, but not nearly all.
After manipulating, not putting, the ball into the hole, you then had completed the one hole. But, this nightmare continued for 18 holes, and it was a feeling of relief when the round was finished."
He went on to write, "People reading this must think I didn't like Oakmont. They are right, I didn't!"
It's hard to imagine what those who didnÍt win the championship must have thought. In his report on the 1927 Open in Golf Illustrated, Kerr N. Petrie marveled that an overnight rain on the eve of the tournament didn't seem to slow the greens, while it did make bunker play more difficult as water settled between the furrows.
"Some of the players complained that the greens were skinned too fine and declared that a player had no sooner passed than the putting surfaces were again being manicured and massaged," he wrote. "These glassy greens, the furrows in the bunkers and the artful placing of the cups formed a never ceasing source of annoyance, criticism and contention."
Indeed, it's been said that the greens were cut at 3/32 or even 1/16 inches for the U.S. Opens at Oakmont, shorter and faster than they are for the championship today.
