Deep Dive: Oakmont

00:00:00
Speaker 1: Oakmont Country Club is hosting the US Open for the tenth time. Let's dive deep. I'm Garrett Morrison and this is designing golf, all right, Joseph, how you doing. I'm doing great, Garrett.

00:00:19
Speaker 2: A lot to chew on with Oakmont Country Club in this upcoming US Open, so I'm excited to get your perspective.

00:00:24
Speaker 1: Yes, I'm here with Joseph Lamania, my Friday golf colleague. We're going to do a bit of an Oakmont country Club deep dive in this episode. So we have some stuff prepared. We've both done a little bit of research in our kind of separate analytical areas, mine more in history and architecture, and yours kind of based on how the pros might play this course in the upcoming US Open. So basic plan for this episode is to first talk about some history. I have an interview with David Moore, who is the curator of collections at Oakmont Country Club, where we talk about the early years of this course essentially. Then we'll come back to me and Joseph to talk about architecture, how it will play for the pros or how we expected to play for the pros, and then we'll finish up with some holes to watch, but just to start off with some basics here. The golf course at Oakmont Country Club was originally designed by Henry C. Phones. Construction started in nineteen o three, and the course opened in October nineteen o four. Initially, the course played to sixty four hundred yards, which was a lot for that period, to a par of eighty. Over the next few decades, Henry Phones collaborated with his son William C. Phones and greenkeeper Emil Loffler on continual revisions of the golf course. The golf course was basically in a constant state of flux over its first few decades. A lot of their work involved adding, so that by the mid nineteen thirties the course had well over three hundred bunkers, more than there are today in fact, but with just a few exceptions, Oakmont's routing and greens have remained essentially intact since nineteen oh four, which is incredible. Oakmont has hosted three PGA Championships, two US Women's Opens, six US Amateurs, and next week's US Open, as I mentioned in my introduction, will be its tenth. It is a USGA anchor site, and there's a good argument that Oakmon is the quintessential US Open golf course. It is what you think of when you think of a US Open venue, But it's also a strange golf course in many ways. Like all really great golf courses, Oakmont seems to belong to its own genre. It's hard to imitate, and there aren't many courses like it, and we'll dig into some of those features that set it up part in this episode. Part of our intention here is not just to say the usual things that are said about Oakmont. Yes, it's hard. Yes there's a big church pews bunker on the third hole and another one on the fifteenth hole that are kind of interesting to look at look at, but we're going to go deeper than that. I have recently played this course, and Joseph has a way of finding things about golf courses that other people don't really see. So my hope is that we'll be able to say some new things about Oakmont and offer some new understandings about this course in the process of going deep on it. But before diving into the architecture itself, we're going to hear a bit about Oakmont's early history, who Henry and William Phones were and how the course came to be. And for that I'm bringing in David Moore, who, as I said earlier, as the curator of collections at Oakmont. Really good guy, very fun to talk to. So let's go to that interview now, all right, So, David, any story about Oakmont needs to start with the story of the Phones family. Could you just start off by telling me about Henry C. Phones who he was?

00:04:16
Speaker 3: For sure? So Henry Phones was born here in Pittsburgh in eighteen fifty six, and like the majority of the Gilded Age millionaires here in Pittsburgh, he made his fortunes in iron and steel, and Henry and his brother owned a company called the Kerry Furnace Company, which was a big blast furnace that produced about at its peak about twelve hundred tons of steel a day along the Monongah Halo River, And in fact, it became so profitable that he sold it to Andrew Carnegie in eighteen ninety eight, and then, of course Carnegie sold Carnegie Steel to JP Morgan to create US Steel a couple of years later. But this made Henry Phones an incredibly wealthy man at a relatively young age. He was only in his mid fourth parties at the time of the sale of the carry furnace, and it's right around this time eighteen ninety eight where he really starts to get into golf. He had been introduced to it a couple of years earlier by another steel magnet in the Pittsburgh area named John Moorehead. But by the time we get to the turn of the twentieth century, there you know, Phones is a die hard. You know, he's a golf sicco for lack of a better term.

00:05:28
Speaker 1: And he had a son, right, William C.

00:05:31
Speaker 3: Correct, Yeah, actually Henry had a couple kids, but W. C.

00:05:35
Speaker 1: Phones, William C.

00:05:36
Speaker 3: Phones Junior, was definitely the best player in the family.

00:05:41
Speaker 1: W C.

00:05:41
Speaker 3: Phones, like his father, went into the steel business and was truly one of the best players in American golf in the first twenty five thirty years of the game. You know, when you look at the amateur ranks, you'll let Bobby Jones at the top, Jerum Travers, Chick Evans, and Francis we met there, and then that next tier down, you know, WC. Phones could definitely be in that group. He won the nineteen ten US Amateur at the country club he played in nineteen US Amateurs and you know, more often than not finished in the quarterfinals or semifinals before he got eliminated. He won eight Western Pennsylvania Amateurs, which was a record until just two years ago. He won four Pennsylvania Amateurs, two West penn Opens and really was the catalyst behind the creation of the Walker Cup. And he captained the first US Walker Cup team in nineteen twenty two, and you know, by that point he was kind of more on the administrative side of the game. In twenty four and twenty five he was the vice president of the USGA, and then in twenty six and twenty seven, nineteen twenty six and nineteen twenty seven he was the president of the USGA. So, you know, the Phones family has a long history with not only championship golf, but you know championship golf with the USGA.

00:06:54
Speaker 1: So major figures in the early American game. These were the founders of Oakmont. How did it come about that they decided to found a golf club in Pittsburgh.

00:07:06
Speaker 3: So, as I mentioned, Henry was, you know, he was truly a golf sicco. You know, he gets introduced to the game in eighteen ninety four and then I always tell the story of Oakmont. It starts with what we call the great misdiagnosis. So right after the sale of the carry furnace, somewhere in eighteen ninety eight, eighteen ninety nine, nineteen hundred. We've never been exactly able to nail down the exact year. But Henry was welding a bicycle tire back together in his garage. He was a big bicycle guy and eventually became a big car guy too, in the early you know years of motor vehicles. And he was welding a bicycle tire back together when he noticed he developed spots in his vision, and he went to a doctor and he was incorrectly diagnosed, as we'd find out, with arteriosclerosis, which is, you know, essentially heart disease. And in nineteen hundred, this is a death sentence. He's given maybe you know, a year to two years to live. So, you know, he takes the news and stride. He sells off a lot of his business interests, and it's during that period that he goes and travels to Scotland and Ireland and plays you know, all the classic Lynks courses. You know, he plays the old course in Preswick and Musselborow and you know, the true pillars of the game, at least in Lynks Golf. And you know, he returns home from that trip and he notices the spots in his vision have started to disappear. So he goes to the doctor and he sees a different doctor this time, and he was diagnosed this time with and correctly diagnosed with welders flash and essentially, you know, given this brand new lease on life, he'd lived for another thirty five or so years, you know, and at this point, Henry's in his mid forties. He was already flushed with cash after selling the carry furnace to Carnegie, and you know, he sold off the rest of his business interests after the diagnosis. So he's got the money, he's got the time. So you know, he really started to become more of a golfer and play more. And the courses that were in Pittsburgh at the time just weren't the difficult test that Henry wanted. You know, he wanted to play somewhere that would test him on every single shot. And you know, no offense to the courses that were available at that time, and all of them have since evolved into some of the best courses in western Pennsylvania. But at the time, you know, early American golf was pretty primitive and those courses were rather primitive. So you know, the discussion went from trying to find the best golf course, too, well, why don't we create.

00:09:37
Speaker 1: The best golf course.

00:09:39
Speaker 3: And that process really kind of started in nineteen oh two, and by the following spring they found this property here in Oakmont and partially in Oakmont, partially in Plumborough, and the original one hundred ninety one acres of the golf course was purchased by a corporation that Henry Form called the Oakmont Land Company. Essentially, he sold, you know, five hundred dollars shares to all of his friends and he and his family bought the majority of them, and for seventy eight five hundred dollars they purchased the golf course, which was about three million today. And Oakmond Country Club is officially established in June of nineteen oh three.

00:10:18
Speaker 4: What was the land before it was a golf club, so it was all farmland, you know, I mean, you know, you got to remember when you talk about country club in this era, you know, you truly were out in the country here.

00:10:30
Speaker 3: You know, today it's more built up for anybody that's been here, you know, like you know, Oakmond Town is you know, a pretty pretty big little town and you know everything around.

00:10:40
Speaker 1: Is a suburb, but it's but it's densely developed for sure.

00:10:43
Speaker 3: Yeah, and really all of Pittsburgh is that way now. So but you know, in nineteen oh three, you were truly out in the sticks, you know, in Oakmond and even though you were only really you know, maybe ten miles up the Alleghany from the center of the city. So you know, it was all farmland. It was all rolling farmland. And you know that that was the property that Henry purchased, and he felt it was suitable to build a championship golf course on.

00:11:11
Speaker 1: It's a browny piece of land. Yeah, it must have been slightly intimidating at the time to build a golf course on such a piece of land because there are parts of it that are pretty severe. Tell me about the construction of the course, what methods were used to create golf there.

00:11:27
Speaker 3: So Henry was definitely inspired by that trip to to Great Britain, you know, playing the old you know, the classic Scottish links courses. Really kind of created the idea of what Henry wanted for his own golf course, so that played a huge role in the design. And you know, fortunately the piece of property had was pretty wide open to begin with a lot more rolling terrain than you would find in your you know, traditional links course of that time. But you know, it was wide open and he had all these natural undulations that he could use to create these green complexes and everything else, you know, and truly, you know, I think Robert Trent Jones kind of gets the you know, the moniker of being the father of penal design, but you know, you could really argue that it was Henry phones because you know, what he wanted to create was this Darwinnian test of golf. You know, man versus course hit the perfect shot or be punished for it. And you know it's the only golf course he ever designed in his life. And you know, we gotta give him a ton of credit. He hit a grand slam on the first pitch, and you know, it truly is a testament to you know, his his vision and his understanding that you know, he wasn't a professional architect and he was a quality player, but he wasn't on the same level as you know, say a Tilling Haster or Ceb McDonald that you know, we're building golf courses at the same time. And you know, he went out and with a team of one hundred and fifty men and two horses and hand dug this golf course. You know, they didn't manipulate the land like they do today, and you know, create a hilly terrain out of a flat piece of ground or vice versa. What was in front of him was what Henry worked with, and he just brilliantly created this golf course on these rolling hills here in western Pennsylvania. And what you said, you know, perfectly sums it up. It's it's a pretty interesting piece of terrain. You know, you're kind of on a hillside and some aspects, but it doesn't feel that way.

00:13:31
Speaker 1: M Yeah, because the routing is constantly doing different things with the two hillsides that the course essentially sits on a very interesting routing, which I'll get to later in this podcast. A quote that a lot of people will hear the week of the US Open that sort of is presented as a summation of Phones's philosophy of design, is a shot poorly played, is a shot irrevocably lost? You'll hear different pronunciations of irrevocably or irrevocably, but in any case, that's the that's the saying. Yep. I want to dig into that a little bit. He doesn't mean that the ball should be literally lost, right. He means that a shot should be lost if the previous shot is poorly played. Do I have that right? Correct? Yeah?

00:14:21
Speaker 3: I mean again, what would Henry phones is really the father penal design? It was hit the perfect golf shot or be punished for it.

00:14:29
Speaker 1: You know, so if.

00:14:32
Speaker 3: You know, there were stories around the club that you know, Henry would sit on the porch every day and watch play and if he saw a player hit a shot you know, into the rough and they were able to get it out and you know, up onto the green and have a birdie putter, you know, escape without too much consequence. You know, the next day there would be a bunker there, or there would be a ditch there or something. They would create some sort of obstacle to make sure that you know, you were punished going forward. And you know, I mean that was the way this golf course really got its teeth.

00:15:03
Speaker 1: You know.

00:15:04
Speaker 3: The one interesting thing that Henry did from the onset that you know was really rather ingenious on his part is he was good friends with Corbyn Haskell, who created the very four first rubber core golf ball, so you know, which was creating an achron which is you know, a mere ninety minutes from here. So that was a huge catalyst when he built his golf course because he knew if he built it to be longer than any other course on the planet at the time, he would you know, he would have enough time for you know, technology to kind of catch up. And you know that that was pretty brilliant. So it opens at sixty four hundred and six yards and you know, for the Open now here, it'll play about seventy three seventy four hundred yards total, so it's only about a thousand yards longer than it was when Henry first opened it. In the first US Open in nineteen twenty seven, played at sixty nine hundred yards, so they haven't adee for a distance in a century, you know, for the pros, So you know, the distance was always the big thing. But the thing that makes this golf course so difficult are the green complexes. And I mean you've played it. You know, hitting into these greens, you have to hit the precise shot to have any good chance of scoring. And even if you do, once you're onto greens, they're so fast, there's so much undulation. You have to hit then the perfect putt to hole out or at least make you know, two putt for par, you know, And that is what Henry wanted, That's what his son wanted. You know, when they when they made this place what it was, it was meant to be the hardest golf course on the planet. It was meant to be for the best players and to you know, to test the best players in the world. And that's why, you know, here we are, it's a hundred year almost one hundred years later, we're hosting our tenth US Open and our twenty first National Championship, and you know, the best of the best tend to win here at Oakmont. And I think the big reason why is they're the ones that can navigate that that design the best and you know, they hit the perfect shot, and they don't, I'll revlicably lose it.

00:17:04
Speaker 1: So what's so remarkable about this history is how early it is in the development of American golf. Architecture nineteen oh three nineteen oh four. The course open in nineteen oh four, was built mostly in nineteen oh three. Was so early. This was seven eight years before National Golf Links opened. This was more than a decade before Pine Valley was anywhere near being completed. Those are considered kind of the founding golf courses of modern American golf architecture, National Golf Links in Pine Valley and Marion to an extent, Marion was built around the same time. Those courses all came later, though way later. Nineteen oh three nineteen oh four, the best courses in the US were considered to be Garden City Golf Club, Myopia, Hunt Club, maybe Equanic Up in New Hampshire would get mentioned from time to time as one of the better golf courses in the United States. There are really no rivals for Oakmont in this era. And I don't know if I have a question here, but just how remarkable is it that this course dates back to nineteen oh three? How different was it from all the other courses around it in America at the time or even in the world.

00:18:29
Speaker 3: Yeah, I mean, that's the thing that's just so fascinating about it. And again I think the reason why even to this day where it won't play as the longest US Open venue. In fact, it's probably one of the shorter ones, especially in the recent years. But you know, what Henry created and and what they know perfected over the next twenty thirty years of their involvement here was creating this masterpiece. You know, like you said, you know what we think think of the best modern architecture was you know, National Golf Links in Pine Valley and then later Augusta, you know, created by you know, some of the best minds in golf architecture there ever was. And you know, again Henry was an amateur, just like Hugh Wilson, just like George Crump. You know, he wasn't in CB McDonald two for that matter, but you know he didn't have the pedigree of play that those guys did. So I think it's just you know, a real testament to him that you know, he learned so much from what he saw at those great links courses over over in Great Britain, in Scotland, and you know he was able to take some of those elements and put it in here and then you know, create the bunkers to be penal, but you know, give you an opportunity if you did hit the perfect shot. And you know, but the fact that he was really kind of ten years ahead of everybody else is really truly remarkable. And you know, again, I think it's a testament to why this place is still what it is is, you know, one hundred and twenty years later, is you know what he was able to create.

00:20:05
Speaker 1: It's one of those things that's a little hard to explain, even, yeah, that this course was built predominantly in nineteen oh three, and that the changes since then have been significant but haven't really altered the essence of the course as it existed originally. But getting into its evolution a little bit, William C. Phones, Henry's son, eventually became the most influential person at the club, probably right that the chair of the Green Committee, the person who is really the custodian of this golf course over the next decades. What was his influence on the course, What kinds of changes did he make and why so w C.

00:20:50
Speaker 3: Is really you know, Henry creates the design. W C is the one that really gives it its teeth. And then you know, the third person to throw into that would be the greenkeeper Emma Leffler, and I always, you know, refer to him here as the father of the Son and the holy Greenkeeper because it was really that triumvirate that really just did everything here for those first forty years. So, you know, Leffler started as a caddy when the course opened in nineteen oh four, and W. C. Phones took such a shine to him that he made him his personal caddy. By the age of twelve, he was the caddy master. By the age of sixteen, he was the superintendent. And then after the pro unexpectedly passed away in nineteen twenty nine, he became the pro as well. But Lefler, Leffler knew every blade of grass on this golf course, and you know, the stories would would go that, you know, Henry W. C and Ema Lefler would walk this course every night and try to find different things that they can do to improve it, you know, to make it more difficult, or to make it more fair, or you know, to do whatever they felt was necessary.

00:21:54
Speaker 1: And you know, W. C.

00:21:56
Speaker 3: Phones is elected Greens chairman sometime around nineteen eight, nineteen oh nine, somewhere in that era. And you know, because he's such a quality player, and he's playing so many of these, you know, now classic courses like you know, the National Golf Links and things like that. You know, he's kind of seeing what everybody else is doing, and you know, taking elements of those other classic courses and bringing them here. But I think, you know, at the same point, let's make it as hard as possible as well. And you know, one of the things that they came up with from the early going was the furrowed bunkers. And what the furrows were are bunkers here for the first sixty years of the golf club was were bunkers filled with sand dredged from the nearby Allegheny River. So it was very coarse, very dense, pebble filled, you know, not the your prototypical white, fluffy sand that you play in.

00:22:51
Speaker 1: This is not linksland the sand. This is this is heavy river stuff.

00:22:55
Speaker 3: Yeah, it's it's almost like hitting that of wet dirt. And if that wasn't hard enough, what they did after that was they would rake the the bunker's perpendicular to the hole with this rake that featured four inch long steel times and you know, the colorful nickname for it was the Devil's backscratcher, and you know, you would rake it perpendicular, and these times would create these undulations, these these these furrows that you know, you would hit your ball into it and it would sit down in this sand. That the only way you could get any club on the ball was to pitch out sideways, and essentially, on a golf course that has no water hazards and no penalties with water, the furrows became the water hazard. Essentially, you had to basically pitch it out sideways and take your you know, take your medicine sort of thing. And if you tried to hit the hero shot, you might get lucky once in a hundred, but the other ninety nine you were going to create a lot of extra pain for yourself. And you know, I mean, by the nineteen thirty eight US Amateur, I mean, players were complaining all the time and all that, you know, this is too hard and blah blah blah, and you know, w C Phones basically told them like, you're the best players in the world, and the members play it like this every day, you can play it for seven days.

00:24:14
Speaker 1: Kind of thing.

00:24:15
Speaker 3: And in nineteen fifty three, the players actually threatened to boycott the US Open if the furrows remained, and you know, the USGA and the club and the players came to an agreement that the furrows would remain in the Greenside bunkers, but not the not the Fairway bunkers, and by nineteen sixty two the practice was gone all together. But you know, the bunkers were difficult enough before the furrows, and then you add the furrows into it. And you know that was all the design of w C. Phones and mL Lefler, And you know that reign of the Phones is you know, WC resigns the whole family in nineteen forty six, after the talk of swimming pools and becoming more of a social club. But you know that first forty years that the phoneses were here, you know they did everything in their power to make this the most challenging golf course on the planet. Now they would say, if you hit the perfect shot, it would be fair. But you know if you didn't, you know you were going to suffer.

00:25:12
Speaker 1: All right, Well, David, thank you so much for coming on the pod. You've got a busy couple of weeks here as the go to historian for Oakmont, so good luck with the rest of your media obligations, but thank you for spending this time with me. Yeah, of course, anytime, happy to do it. This episode of Designing Golf is brought to you by Perfect Practice. Perfect Practice makes the highest quality mats for realistic putting that you can find. They're crafted with this unique crystal velvet material that ensures a smooth and precise ball roll. What I've noticed is that it simulates an actual green really well, and that's something that is hard to find. The putting Matt you can train anywhere, anytime with Perfect Practice. It's great for getting back into putting shape for the warm months. A lot of us are playing our first rounds of golf in a while, and if you have Perfect Practice then you can really hit the ground running with your putting in this new season. 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But let's start with the land at Oakmont. This land borders the Allegheny River, and this is something that can't really be seen from the golf course. You maybe aren't even aware when you're on the golf course that the river is there, a very big river, an important river for Pittsburgh. But the seventeenth tee is essentially one hundred and fifty yards or so from from the north bank of the river. It was previously farmland, so the topography may have been a little bit smoothed out to a degree. It's mostly big, broad slopes on this property, not a ton of micro undulation. But since the course is very natural, there is some odd topography out there that's kind of charming. The soil is heavy clay, and the course essentially sits in a valley. This is two hillsides feeding into the Pennsylvania Turnpike. The highway is well below the level of the golf course. The turnpike was built in nineteen fifty one, but the gorge that the highway runs through now contained a railroad before that. So the turnpike kind of functions like a river in the property. Everything feeds toward it. And I think the tilt of the land, these two hillsides that kind of face each other, and that the golf course goes up and down and across, are really core to the identity of Oakmont Country Club. This kind of determines everything about the golf course. It accounts for a lot of its challenge, It accounts for a lot of its character. So that's the land at Oakmont Country Club. Let's go right into the routing. So how does this course use the land? I think the routing is one of Oakmont's greatest strengths, one of its, you know, maybe two or three greatest strengths. I would say the first three holes get you to the farthest point on the property from the clubhouse. The first hole plays down that main hill that the clubhouse sits on. Then you cross the turnpike, then the second hole plays up the other hill on the other side of the highway, and the third hole plays across to the northeast corner of the site, and then from there the front nine gradually works its way back down the hillside toward the highway. The eighth hole gets you back to the bridges that go over the turnpike, and then the ninth hole climbs back up to the clubhouse. The back nine stays on the clubhouse side of the property and basically works up, down, and across the hillside from southeast to northwest. And the genius of this routing, I think, is how much variety it finds in the natural terrain. The holes are constantly changing direction and finding new ways to relate with the land. There are down slopes, up slopes, side slopes, and the holes just find these endless permutations and combinations of those different slopes. So, for example, the first hole plays downhill while tilting a bit right to left, then the second hole plays uphill while tilting a bit left to right, and it goes on like that. It's constantly changing directions. So if there's wind, you're getting these different looks at the wind, and the land is doing something different on every hole, and I think this is really what gives the core its variety and gives each hole its distinctiveness. It's a big reason why the course is difficult, because you're constantly fighting the slope from tea to green. You have all these weird lies. You have to think about what your ball is gonna do when it lands. But also it just makes each hole memorable, and that's something that is I think surprising about Oakmont because the land doesn't necessarily have any really remarkable natural features aside from its slope. But that's not that remarkable. I mean, it's just a big, brawny slope that a lot of golf courses have. There is no ocean here, there is no you know, you don't get up to see the Allegheny River. You don't find variety through spectacular natural vistas or even like a query like Marion has. You don't have those features that automatically give memorability to the holes. The reason each hole is memorable, though, is that it relates to the land in a different way. And I think it's really impressive that after a rounded Oakmont you have no trouble remembering every single hole, so it passes that test with flying colors, and that characteristic has been there since the beginning because the routing is basically phones is routing, right, So that's that's something that's very remarkable about Oakland. Is that something that was obvious to you, Joseph in kind of looking at the course from afar.

00:33:38
Speaker 2: It's interesting you went to the variety piece, because I think the deeper I've gotten into my Oakamont research, the more I've appreciated the variety in a lot of different ways. You know, some greens you can run it up. Others are a little bit more of a forced carry, Like some holes have bunkers cutting into the fair way, like some are sloped one direction, some of the other way. I don't think this style of variety it has necessarily translates as well to TV as it does to seeing it in.

00:34:07
Speaker 1: Person as an absolutely experience.

00:34:10
Speaker 2: Yeah, And a lot of that has to do with the fact that the greens are so wild and the greens are such a strong defense, which I think we kind of have to almost lead with, Like that is the defense at Oakmond. It's it's incredibly penal t to green, but the greens are wild, and that slope is often hard to capture on TV. So I think from watching it historically the memorability it doesn't pass the memorability test on TV as well as I'm sure it does in person. And I think it can feel a little bit like a slog to watch but not to play, And so it's just an interesting golf course to talk about from that perspective.

00:34:49
Speaker 1: Yeah, And that's because what doesn't translate to TV. It's topography, and what makes the holes at Oakmont distinct from each other primarily topography, also bunker rangements and green designs, but there is kind of an Oakmont style of bunker and green design and so once you see one, you're kind of like, Okay, these are similar to each other, but what really makes the whole stand out from each other is the way they relate to the land. And that's not going to translate on TV. If you think about a course that translates as instantly memorable from hole to hole on TV, Augusta National is probably the best example. And what do you have there. You have some remarkable water hazards, you have holes that visually are distinct from each other right away, especially on the back nine. So I think that's the kind of thing that translates to TV. Oakmont doesn't do that as much. I think that's a good point. Or sawgrass, yeah, TPC sagrass, perfect example. Yeah, immediately visually distinct holes from each other, partly because of the variety of different colors and textures of hazard. In a lot of ways, Oakmont's Oakmont's a bit more more is simple in terms of its in terms of its visual impact. Yeah, that's interesting. All right, let's talk about the design philosophy at Oakmont. I'm curious about your thoughts here. Phones's primary point of reference for great golf was links golf. He toured the links of Great Britain around the turn of the twentieth century, and Henry Phones's big intention was to create something like that in Pittsburgh, a links golf course. Now, admittedly, the influence of links golf on Oakmont is hard to discern, especially these days, because of the presentation of the course. The course is presented like an American inland parkland course. The exceptions to that would be the course was nearly treeless during Phones's time and is again treeless. So maybe that's a link to links golf. The greens have open fronts, for the most part, a lot of the greens have open fronts, inviting some run up play, another possible connection to Links golf, and then the architecture adheres to the lay of the land. This might have just been a result, though, of the limitations of construction during this period. They really couldn't have done anything else except adhere to the lay of the land. But when I'm thinking about how Oakmont resembles a links golf course, those are the directions that I would immediately go in Now, I think the lay of the land character of Oakmont is something that really needs to be noted. If you look at the top thirty or so most highly rated American courses, Oakmont might actually be one of the most even if it's not the most natural looking. And I think this is partly a consequence of Oakmont being the oldest, very highly rated American golf course. I mean, this was built in the ancient days of American golf architecture, well before National Golf Links, well before Pine Valley, two decades before Cypress Point, two and a half decades before Cyprus Point, and so the construction approach was relatively rudimentary. If you were to compare the amount of earth that the phones is moved in creating Oakmont to the amount of earth that core and Crenshaw moved in building Sandhills, which is regarded as one of the great natural golf courses. I think it might be similar. I think Coren Crenshaw might have moved more dirt in creating sand Hills. The course was built in the mid nineties as opposed to the very early twentieth century, so it's something to keep in mind. With oak it is an extremely natural golf course relative to the other great American courses. Now, okay, design philosophy, we have links golf as a potential influence. Maybe a little bit hard to see that these days, though, Oakmont's reputation is that of a quintessentially penal golf course. You see this in just about everything that's written about Oakmont. This is penal architecture. So Oakmont, yes, does have many obviously penal holes. The straight lines of bunkers guarding some fairways are a dead giveaway of that. If you look at the first hole, it just has these kind of lineups of bunkers down each side of the fairway. Very linear, very much intended. Okay, if you hook ory slice it. You're going to be in one of these bunkers, or you're going to be in rough That is penal architecture, and many holes at Okemont follow that philosophy. The tenth hole does, the fourteenth hole does. You could go on, but the course also has some holes that strike me as clearly strategic. If you're watching during the US Open, look at the second hole, Look at the fourth hole, par five. Look at the seventh hole, part four that's kind of near the turnpike. Look at the eleventh hole, look at the twelfth hole, the seventeenth hole. I think these are strategic golf holes. They are at least intended in their design to be strategic. They were more obviously strategic in the phones era. If you look at nineteen thirties aerials of this golf course, the fairways were wider, and to me, the strategic intention of the design of these holes comes across more clearly when you look at them back in the day. But Gilhans's work has restored some of the strategic characteristics of these holes that were lost over the years. And so I think that something that goes noted too rarely about Oakmont is how it mixes together penal and strategic holes with the balance tilted toward penal. But there are some strategic holes out there, and I think that this is an example of Oakmont's variety, and I think it's pretty interesting. Is this something that you noticed and looking at the course at all?

00:41:31
Speaker 2: Yeah, I'm like almost overwhelmed with how much there is to talk about with Oakman, Like even just in the last two minutes there that you're talking like.

00:41:38
Speaker 1: Yeah, me too. I have a lot of notes.

00:41:42
Speaker 2: This is probably a topic for almost another day. But I often think there's too big of a distinction made between penal and strategic architecture, or at least that they overlap often more than Yes, sometimes they're described like.

00:41:57
Speaker 1: Strategic holes can also be penal. Right, if you have a strategic design, but then you put hazards down both sides of the fair way, but you still have some of those diagonals within the whole corridor, then he kind of got a hole that's both penal and strategic.

00:42:11
Speaker 2: I mean, Augusta National is a golf course that we probably would often discuss within the context of it being strategic, and I think there's a far more penal architecture out there than is often represented.

00:42:24
Speaker 1: So well just because of the trees.

00:42:26
Speaker 2: That's a huge part of it, right, Yeah, I do think some people may brush over the whole links golf connection. I think it's actually a really interesting way to understand Oakmont and important in that. One of the main ways I think Oakmont's different from a lot of golf courses that look like Oakmont is that the ground is a factor and that the ball on the ground it matters what happens when the ball hits the ground. So it's a clear difference from a golf course like Mirefield Village, where the PGA Tour is right now as we're record this, where the ground isn't really a factor like the greens aren't much of a defense.

00:43:04
Speaker 1: There the golf course for sure, yeah, right, And there's not a lot of slope in the fairway. It's totally and TPC Sawgrass is primarily an aerial golf course at this point. Even if Pete Dye was imagining that there will be some more rollout, Oakmont for sure is a course that prioritizes the ground game. I think this is a great point and something that should definitely come up when you talk about links golf and its influence on.

00:43:30
Speaker 2: Oakmont absolutely And part of the difficulty of that, And I think what makes Oakmont so interesting to talk about is that the golf course is in Pittsburgh and that is not necessarily a climate that is the most conducive to the ground game and so.

00:43:44
Speaker 1: Or a soil type. You know, it's as I mentioned, it is heavy clay.

00:43:48
Speaker 2: So I you know, I pray that we get no rain and that the conditions are firm enough that the ground game matters. But like, that's a huge part of the story of the weak the story of the setup a golf course like Oakmont is that it is highly conditioned dependent. And I'm not sure how many golf courses in the world are as dependent on conditions for the golf course to play the way that it should as Oakmont. And it's interesting to think about it within the lens of it being a link style golf course, the ground game being a factor as to why that matters. Now, the greens will probably like they're wild enough that even if it gets a little bit of rain, they can firm out. They're going to play fast, So the ground game will still be a factor. Massive greens, right, Like that's a huge defining characteristic of Oakmont. But off the tee, it won't matter that the fairway slopes from left to right if we get a bunch of rain, like you watch some old clips of Oakmont, And this is something that we'll probably talk about later in this conversation. But I don't think there's I don't think golfers should be trying to hit down certain sides of the fairways out here, and if it rains, that's not even going to be a factor because the ball is just going to bounce and you know, only roll out a few yards anyway. So yeah, it's really interesting to understand it within the context of it being a link style course and then thinking about the conditions as a function of how the golf course will play is important.

00:45:12
Speaker 1: Yeah, they absolutely needed to be firm. It's sort of like in pro golf tournaments these days, you either need trees or you need firmness, and Oakmont doesn't have trees, and so the conditions have to be a defense. Now, the agronomy is so advanced at Oakmont, so technically proficient, that I think they can achieve firmness even if the conditions aren't ideal for it. But Yeah, wind and firmness would be a big part of the of the challenge here. And if you don't have those things, then then it's going to be tough.

00:45:47
Speaker 2: First, are you saying that they can Are you saying they can achieve that both on the fairways and the greens or just on the greens.

00:45:51
Speaker 1: Yeah, I think both, but certainly on the greens and on the approaches to the greens because the approach are essentially maintained as green surface. They're astonishingly short and firm, and there will be a lot of inputs that go into the approaches if the weather isn't ideal for firmness. So I'm hoping for natural firmness. I'm hoping for well suited weather to a quote unquote American Links golf course. But there's no guarantee of that, and and so we'll see, we'll see. All right, let's talk about those greens. I said that routing was one of Oakmont's greatest strengths, routing and the variety that the routing creates with the land. The other big strength of Oakmont, I think is the green designs. The way these greens are built is different from anything else I've seen. They were constructed before golf architects really quote unquote knew how to build greens, So at Oakmont the phones is were sort of making it up as they went along, and the result is something completely unique. The greens are generally very large, They have open fronts so that you can run the ball on. They flow with the lay of the land. They are not built up significantly against the natural slopes of the property, or not built up nearly as much as they would be if a professional architect had built them some time later in history. So whatever the slope of the natural terrain is, that is generally the slope of the green. Derek Duncan, for Golf Digest referred to them as tilted basketball courts, and I think that's a pretty good analogy. So you know, if you walk around the greens at Oakmont, you can see some building up, some propping up against certain slopes, but it is surprisingly small. And the result is that the natural terrain determines the basic character of almost every green. Some grains, several greens in fact, just scream away from the line of play one, ten and twelve especially. This is very unusual, but again it comes from the natural topography. The main manufactured elements of the greens are these channels that phones cut through them. They're mostly just kind of straight, linear troughs that go through the greens, and these give some greens a kind of wavy appearance when you look at them from the fairway. You look at them and they have this kind of wave like structure to them. My hacky analogy would be it's almost like corrugated steel, which would be appropriate for Pittsburgh. Pittsburgh, but the greens have that kind of distinctive look because of the channels that were cut through them. And I think that the channels serve a cup purposes. One they create some more easily pinnable areas on what are otherwise very sloped greens. So if you put a pin at the bottom of one of these troughs, it's a little bit friendlier and a little bit flatter down there, so you can pin them a bit more easily. You have a very sloped green, it's hard to find a pin there because everything is just going to work away from it. You're going to have these crazy puts that break five inches over over five feet. So you know, because they have these little manufactured elements in them, you can find some friendlier sections of them. The second purpose these channels might serve is that they help gather water and drain it off the greens, so they're functional in that way. And finally, they just make the greens more interesting. If the greens were just tilted planes, then they wouldn't be nearly as engaging as they are now. So ultimately, this is a very simple, almost rudimentary approach to green construction, but the results are really striking. I think they're again they're like no other greens in the world of golf, and they've remained essentially the same since nineteen oh four. Only eight, fifteen, and sixteen were moved and significantly rebuilt. Only eight was rebuilt after the phone's era. Eight had to be moved because when the Pennsylvania Turnpike went in, they had to kind of widen the gorge that the old railroad ran through, and so they moved the eighth green something like thirty yards back into the interior of the property. But they replicated or tried to replicate essentially what the hole was before. So those are those are incredible, incredible greens that just have have basically stayed what they were since nineteen oh four. There's nothing really like that in America. I don't think you can't find greens that have stayed the same for that long at many high profile courses you might look at, I don't know, Myopia Hunt Club or a Garden City or something like that. But among championship courses that the pros go to, this is this is something totally different.

00:51:27
Speaker 2: The greens I think the biggest that that's what jumps out when you're thinking about the test at Oakmont, and even compared to a golf course like Augusta, these are way wilder.

00:51:38
Speaker 1: And they're way more tilted for sure. And yeah, I mean Augusta is actually a good example of this propping up against slopes that I talk about. Augusta's greens are modern in the sense that if the green site for a green like one or fourteen is really tilted, then what Mackenzie did was lift up a low side so that he had a relatively level surface to work with. And then the interest of the greens that Augusta comes from mostly manufactured contour, and that contour can be really significant in some greens that Augusta have have really big, you know, overall slope as well. But for the most part, on tilted green sites, those greens are built up on the low side so that they're more leveled off. At Oakmont, you just don't see that, and they become wild because of that.

00:52:32
Speaker 2: Yeah, that's one thing that jumped out to me again watching some of these rounds back, like the twenty sixteen US Open. This is not to diminish the test that is Augusta National. I love that tournament, love that test, but those greens that would almost describe as being wild but kind of tame. I don't want to say straightforward, but when you're watching golfer's putt at Oakmont, the number of three footers that they're starting outside the hole or you know that really get away from you, or chip shots that like the second hole is a great example of this, where you see a shot just come up a little bit short and back down that false front. You may get to try that shot again. That there's not as much of that somewhere like Augusta, and I think that's gonna be a big thing from a skill set perspective, is these greens chipping around them, but mainly putting them is completely different than anything we see week in and week out. In professional golf, and I am curious which golfers. You know, Scott is a good example here who's been putting pretty well. But those are those are on tame greens. Like when you put somebody out here, I'm curious who is not going to be ready for just how different these greens aren't. A lot of these golfers are never gonna have seen anything like this unless they played here before.

00:53:49
Speaker 1: Yeah, I think that's a good point. Certain golfers who are very concerned with fairness or with the with the consistency of a type of architecture see often on the PGA Tour might be very bothered by Oakmont in the same way that they can be bothered by links golf courses during during the Link season, or Shinnacock or even Augusta National, Right, I mean, they're just used to Augusta National and it's and it's eccentricities. But yes, those greens are are clearly very different from what they see week in and week out. Oakmont turns up that dial a lot. Yeah.

00:54:27
Speaker 2: And the other point here that I've been reflecting on as we get closer to this championship is that so much of golf has changed over time. There's been so many advancements, but I'd say that the two of the biggest have been three of the biggest. The golf ball and how much straighter it flies the driver head and how much more forgiving it is. And then track Man, which has optimized the way that golfer's hit shots, especially long shots. Course management would be another honorable mention, but my point is the way golfer's putt and hit chip shots is probably the part of the game that has changed the least overtime, and a strong reason why Oakmont will stand up much better than a lot of golf courses where the defense is tee to green. Right, the greens are pretty smooth and tame, but they're really tricked up from tea to green. Especially when those golf courses are soft, they get pillaged, you know. I think a reason to be excited about Oakmont is that its defense stands up better to the modern game than a lot of other golf courses.

00:55:26
Speaker 1: We see. Let's talk about trees. Oakmont had hardly any trees in the phones era, you know, so for the first four and a half decades of the twentieth century, the club did start planting trees in the nineteen fifties and sixties. David Moore, the historian, told us a few weeks ago that the tree planting program at Oakmont was in part a response to Herbert warrenwind the great golf writer, referring to the course as an ugly old brute. But Whend wrote that in nineteen sixty two, and my understanding is that Oakmont's tree planting started before that, So I'm not sure if that was the sole reason that they began to plant trees at Oakmont, but that was definitely an influence, and it's a quote that many Oakmont members still remember, ugly old brute. They didn't like that at the time, and it helped justify or motivate more tree planting. The truth is that a lot of courses added trees in the post World War two period. Nineteen fifties and sixties were high times for planting trees everywhere, not just golf courses, and the justification was beautification. It wasn't necessarily about enhancing the challenge of the courses. It was about beautifying the courses. And this was something that was happening across America. You know, keep America beautiful, make America Beautiful, plant more trees. This was something that had wide support and it was something that was happening at golf courses. Now. Over time, as on many golf courses, tree planting got a bit out of hand. At Oakmont, small trees became big trees. They started to crowd each other, and the turf began to suffer. The playing characteristics of the course began to suffer. A lot of the intended character of the golf course went away. Now there's a great article that I want to recommend to people about how tree removal began at Oakmont in the nineteen nineties. This is an article by Peter McCleary and it appeared in Golf Digest in two thousand and two. It's called Mission Unpopular, and it's a very very good article. If people want to dig deeper into this tree removal movement at Oakmont, then check this out. But there's a story in that article about the head pro at the time, Bob Ford taking a group of members to a bunker on the first hole, and Ford showed them how if you were in that bunker, you also had to hit over a tree to get toward the green. So this double hazard was, in Ford's mind, a problem. So the head professional was saying, by the nineteen nineties, at least the trees were a problem at Oakmont. So the club started to take out trees in the mid nineteen nineties under the superintendent. Mark Kunes, the Greens chairman at the time, and the club board supported the removal program, but not all members did. I'd like to know more about how exactly the leaders at the club became radicalized on this subject, so to speak, while while a number of other members at Oakmont were not in support of tree removal. But usually in these situations there is a mix of motivations for tree removal. One superintendents tend to push for tree removal because of the agronomic benefits, and especially since the nineteen nineties, superintendents have become very influential at clubs because their job is so important, and because the market for hiring good superintendents is very competitive, and so club leaders really want to find and keep great superintendents. And so if that a great superintendent says, I want you to remove trees that carries a lot of weight, and so I think that was a factor at Oakmont, then the people who are most familiar with the history and architectural ethos of a golf course do tend to be the people who serve on boards and green committees, and they're the ones who are likely to push for a restoration of the look, feel and strategy of original course designs. Again, I think that's something that happened at Oakmont these days, Oakmont's standard justification for the tree removal is that Henry and William Phones wanted the course to be links like. That's the line that they get, But I think there were a number of other things feeding into this. So at first, the maintenance crew at Oakmont removed trees starting very early in the morning, when it was still dark. They would take a tree down, haul away the limbs, grind up the stump, and replace the turf over the hole where the stump used to be before members were out on the course. So they were essentially doing this in secret. The superintendent at the time, Mark Hunes, said, we took down so many trees before anybody knew what was going on. Eventually, the caddies at Oakmont caught onto this and words started spreading around the club. Many members were absolutely furious. Some threatened to start a petition, there were rumors of a lawsuit. A neighboring church started saying prayers for the trees survival, but ultimately thirty five hundred trees were removed in the first round of restoration work, and I think one members saw the views that were being opened up, the topography that was revealed. Once they understood that the agronomy was getting better, they became much more supportive of ongoing tree removal and now essentially every tree has been removed from the golf course property. The only notable one remaining is an elm next to the third te And so it was a remarkable thing that happened at Oakmont. How many trees came out, and this tree removal program is probably the most important and influential in the history of golf. It's still a lightning rod. A lot of people are still pissed off about it. Joseph, do you wish the trees were still there? A lot there, Garrett.

01:01:45
Speaker 2: I think based on how many people out there think that trees are the solution to a the distance problem, but be also testing accuracy, which are different things. There's probably a lot of people praying for the tree removal to stop. Outside of those churches around Oakmont that they think that's the solution.

01:02:03
Speaker 1: Here's what I will say on that.

01:02:05
Speaker 2: I can't speak as much to the agronomic benefits or to some of the history at Oakmont, but from a setup perspective and how that informs the test. Way too often, and I'm a broken record for anyone who's listened to other pods, but way too often we focus just on the width of a fairway and the length of the rough. And what matters, what's a crucial component to how much accuracy is tested, is what happens on a very wide miss. And there are certain golf courses I always throw out Tory Pines as an example, where you can miss wide of fairway bunkers and it's often better than just missing by a little bit.

01:02:43
Speaker 1: We've also seen that.

01:02:45
Speaker 2: At other golf courses, some classic golf courses like Winged Foot and like oak Hill, where wide misses, especially with tournament infrastructure, where you often get relief, you sometimes have a clean look at the green. It's not that much a penalty. I don't think that's anywhere near as much of a concern and issue at Oakmont, where the hazards are big, like the bunkers out there are wide, and so you're not missing, you know, left of the church pew bunkers and getting away with it. So from purely the standpoint of hey, could you add a bunch of trees out there and test accuracy a little bit more? I mean you could, like it could slightly bring up the penalty associated with some of the wide misses if you had some trees on the perimeters, but I don't think that's necessary here. I don't think it would elevate the test also blocks people's vantage points, and I am a proponent of the tree removal, and in particular here, I think this golf course sets up a little bit better to not have that problem of super wide misses just just getting away with it. There are some exceptions to that, like there's some getting away with it, but overall, I think the test off of the tea is pretty stout and would not be enhanced by adding a bunch of trees.

01:04:00
Speaker 1: All right, let's talk a little bit about esthetics, a little bit about renovation work, and then we'll move on to some other subjects. But the esthetics of Oakmont are really interesting. I think it has its own completely distinctive look, I'm not sure i'd call it beautiful, but the land is impressive and handsome. Again, you can't see the river, but when you look in that direction, you have the sense that there are some spectacular vistas over there, even if you can't really see them. The turnpike is right through the middle of the course, which a lot of people object to, but I think that's kind of ridiculous when you're actually on the golf course. The highway is way below the level of the golf course, and it doesn't really feel like it factors in. You can hear it, but it's not that big of a deal. The thing that is interesting to me about Oakmont is how the built features have this very utilitary aesthetic to them. They're not trying to be beautiful. The bunkers and the other artificial features at Oakmont are not trying to blend into the natural landscape or give you the impression that they've always been there. They're just trying to serve a function. They're trying to create challenge and strategy, and there is a kind of honesty and simplicity to this approach that suits the ethos of the course really well. Oakmont is not about delivering pleasure. It's not about delivering pleasure in play, It's not about delivering pleasure in esthetics. It is trying to do a job, test good golfers to the full extent of their abilities. And I think the esthetic of Oakmont, the utilitarian nature of how the artificial features there were built, fits that to a t. Now, one detail I did notice about Gilhans's recent renovation work is that the bunkers don't have perfectly straight edges. There is a little squiggle to them, which makes them look handmade, which of course they originally were. And I think that's a nice touch because a less sensitive architect might have just created the bunkers at Oakmont with a bulldozer and made those lines perfectly straight, because that is the overall direction of the features at Oakmont, these straight lines. But when you make something by hand, it's never going to be perfectly straight. And so there is a slight variation of the edges to the features at Oakmont that I think is really well executed. Tom Doak has compared the look of Oakmont to a battlefield, and I think that's spot on. You sort of have these trenches, craters and built up fortifications and they're all all built in a very straightforward way. You know, when you're building battlefield fortifications, Beauty is not the primary motive, and so that is Oakmont's aesthetic. It's kind of an anti esthetic, but it works for the golf course. It's not a beautiful course, but it is a striking one, all right. So moving on to the renovation work. Gil Hans did this work between twenty twenty three and twenty twenty four. For the most part. The superintendent, Mike McCormick refers to it as the single biggest project that the course has done in its history. An old irrigation system was replaced. Hans touched every bunker in every green, installed new bunker drainage, and reconstructed mini bunkers. He added length to the championship tease, but he did not, I don't think, really transform the golf course. It's going to look substantially similar to the course that we saw in twenty sixteen, and I think that part of the reason for that is that the big work that Oakmont did it did gradually between the nineties and when Hans came in. It was the tree removal that was the big transformation, but the features in the ground haven't really been monkeyed with that much. And so if you compare the telecast of the twenty sixteen US open to the telecast of this one coming up, I'm not sure that unless you look closely, you'll see massive differences. So this was not a transformation renovation like Hans has done at Southern Hills or other courses that just came out looking completely different than they did before. This was more of a fine tuning. But a lot of work was done, a lot of stuff was rebuilt and rearranged. The effect of it all, though, is going to be relatively subtle. So Hans based his work on historical evidence from the Phones period again, this is about nineteen oh three through nineteen forty six or so. But instead of restoring the course to a particular version or year, Gil assembled the kind of greatest Hits collection. He chose bits and pieces from different periods of Phones's tenure at the course. Probably the most significant work that he did was restoring the dimensions of the greens, so he pushed out a lot of the greens to the edges of the green pads. This will open up some new and sometimes more difficult pin positions. This has given back the greens some of their original quirky shapes. And he also reduced a lot of the sandy build up at the edges of greens. When courses evolve over time, often the edges of the greens start to get propped up by this build up of organic material. Right when people play out of bunker, sand will fall on the edges, and over time the edges will kind of come up so that the edges of the greens are higher than the middle. A lot of what Hants did was to bring those edges back down, so that although the greens are bigger, they're going to feed into the middle a lot less. They're going to run off the edges a lot more. Because he brought those edges down, he did widen the fairways in certain spots. You know, from what I can see, Hans did a lot of widening in spots where the members are going to play, and also widening in spots where you might try for a provocative little angle at a certain pin. So, in this way, you know, the green expansions and the fairway expansions worked in tandem. If a green expansion opened up a certain new pin position, then often the part of the fairway that might let you best access that pin position was also widened slightly. He shifted the position of some of the bunkers, you know, in some cases to account for distance gains and other cases to restore some concepts from the Phones era. So certain holes are just to have completely different bunker arrangements. You know, they might have the same greens as they always did, they might have the same routing as they always did, but the bunker positions will will be different throughout the holes. But we don't really have time to go into whole by whole what changed. Just note that that some holes have have different bunker arrangements and orientations. Now, so that's Hans's restoration work. That's pretty much all I have in my notes. We've gotten through. We've gotten through my many notes on Oakmont. I skipped over some stuff, but that is the that's the core of the research I did on the course. You've already put some of your thoughts in here, Joseph, But you know, as you were researching the course, let's talk a little bit about how it's going to play for the pros. So what are some of your general thoughts about how Oakmont is going to serve its purpose as a US Open venue. This time around, we've.

01:12:09
Speaker 2: Hit on some of it, and I think the importance of the ground game and how conditions will dictate that as a huge facet of the test. You talked about increasing the size of some of the greens. I think I saw that the USGA has a whole by whole YouTube video. It's excellent, said the green on seventeen is fifty two hundred square feet and that's the smallest green on the course.

01:12:32
Speaker 1: And just to give.

01:12:32
Speaker 2: People some reference point, like, there are a lot of golf courses we see in professional golf where the average square footage is smaller than fifty two hundred square feet and that's the smallest green on the golf course. So big greens, And I think it's a huge mistake, a misguided notion to suggest that big greens make golf courses easier, right, because sure, holding everything constant, if you took a green and you just made it a little bit bigger and it didn't have interesting contour, yeah you'd decrease the scoring average a little bit. But the greens at Oakmond are wild, and when the significant part of the green is a false front, for example, or a steep runoff into an area of trouble that's not easy. So I think conflating size of greens with ease or with difficulty is not the right way to look at it. And that's kind of a cousin of thinking that shrinking fairways with is a good idea, right that it's same sort of idea that that more short grass makes things easier, which is not always the case. So I'm really excited that the greens are going to be a significant defense. As we've touched on, main other thing that came up through my research is that there's always a conversation around how much will a golf course test distance, how how bomber friendly will it be, and often that gets framed as bombers or accurate drivers. I've never looked at golf that way that that those are that it's a spectrum of distance or accuracy. Like to me, golf courses are always more of a quadrant like how much does it test distance and how much does it reward accuracy, not necessarily one or the other. And to that point, I don't think this golf course is going to be quite as distance friendly as it may be described.

01:14:16
Speaker 1: You see some short.

01:14:17
Speaker 2: Hitters contending in past editions of the US Open, you will need to be an elite ball striker. I would not expect some golfer who hits it kind of short and accurate but isn't a great iron player to contend. I don't think that kind of golfer will contend. But somebody like a Colin Morikawa, for example, who is not the longest driver of the golf ball in the world, but is lethally accurate and an excellent iron player through the bag. The setup at Oakmont does not prohibit him from contending in the tournament. So I do think you could see a wide range of golfers compete. You're gonna have to be an elite ball striker, and I do think there's an opportunity to separate yourself on the greens as well. So I think the golfer that wins will have a solid week on the greens. But the good, the really good putter who doesn't hit the ball super well, it doesn't have much of a chance here at Oakmont.

01:15:14
Speaker 1: Why don't you think distance is an outsized advantage at Oakmont?

01:15:20
Speaker 2: Well for some of the holes like and this gets to the effective playing with some of the drives are they play a little funky for a golfer who hits it three hundred and twenty five yards.

01:15:37
Speaker 1: There's a couple.

01:15:39
Speaker 2: It's going to be court like I expect the winner to be a long hitter. But you've seen historically some of the shorter hitters like Jim Furick finished T two here in twenty sixteen and in two thousand and seven, and I think that model works if you're an elite iron player. So there's certain holes where like there are, there aren't that many holes that are going to be massively correlated with distance, Like whole eight's going to be a controversial one, right the two hundred, however long they're going to play that part three like, that's going to be correlated with distance, because if you're a long hitter, you're going to have a better chance of hitting less club and hitting it higher lofted. But there are runoffs, There are run ups into some of the greens, which mitigates the distance advantage. Sometimes when you can chop something out of the ruck and run it up, you don't have to hit. It's not all forced to carry. So that's another reason that the shorter hitters will have a little bit of a or less of a disadvantage, but just in general, I think the main thing is the effective playing with like it for Bryson to get up there, he can't just pound away like he can at Winged Foot at Tory. At some of those golf courses where wid misses aren't penalized, you do have to keep it in the playing areas, and some of them are really narrow, some of them are twenty to twenty five yards wide. So it should be a diversity of styles that succeed. And then the last point is there's some randomness at this golf course, so like you could chip something that comes back to your feet and turn a three into a five or six pretty quickly, and sometimes that just introduces a level of randomness that benefits golfers who aren't the best golfers in the world. And I think that's a good reason why you see golfers like Scott Peercy in the top ten. Jerry Kelly was in the top ten in two thousand and seven, and he was a great golfer, but he wasn't the type of player that you necessarily expect. It wasn't a top five golfer in the world at the time.

01:17:23
Speaker 1: Right, And I think that part of the effect of greens like you have at Oakmont is a certain randomness. Yes, that is what you get when you have a green like the Twelfth Green that just absolutely runs away at a grade that you don't see pretty much anywhere. That is challenging, but it also introduces some element of chance that you might make it. So Oakmont doesn't reliably sort for the best players in the world. So what I'm hearing is that you don't expect Oakmont to be like a pure bomb and gouge exercise just because this is a tree lists inland course with heavy rough and one that's going to play very long. It's not necessarily going to be one where it's bombers only.

01:18:16
Speaker 2: Now, and a lot of the best players in the world hit it really long. So I think the winner is going to be one of the top six names coming in. I do Scottie Bryson, Rory Xander Ram or Colin Morikawa, like I expect the winner to be in that camp. And I think this golf course sets up incredibly well for Bryson. Despite him being a very long hitter, he's also an incredible putter, and I think that is going to shine through Bryson on the greens. His calculated approach. He's going to turn a lot of potential three putts into two puts that a lot of other golfers will struggle. So the reason I'm saying that is that if we get a bomber who wins, like some of that could be the distance advantage that are realizing. Dustin Johnson won here in twenty sixteen, Like distance is still an advantage, But I think if we see Bryson win, it's not necessarily necessarily a reflection of the golf course being bomb and gouge.

01:19:11
Speaker 1: Yeah, well, Bryson has a number of other skills, and so I mean that will be the narrative surely if Bryson does win that this was a bombing gouge fest. But yeah, we know that he can do a number of different things and this might be a very good course for him. He did well here in twenty sixteen, and he's a very different player now, But but he proved in twenty sixteen that he can handle this golf course, that he's that he suited to it, that it doesn't bother him, And I think that's a big deal.

01:19:45
Speaker 2: I think Bryson may win this golf tournament.

01:19:47
Speaker 1: Well, I'm picking him. He's my one and done pick from kicking Scotty. I've been saving him for Oakmont, Scotty yet in our one and done league, I'm picking Scott No.

01:19:58
Speaker 2: I think I've probably already used I didn't want to done, but like official pick Scottie. But I think Bryson is a very very strong contender here.

01:20:05
Speaker 1: All right, let's get to some holes to watch at Oakmont, some holes that were excited to see the pros tackle. What comes to mind for you first here, Joseph. Three holes stand out for me. I think number two.

01:20:20
Speaker 2: I love watching the second hole, short four three hundred and forty five yards or so. A bunker that cuts in that kind of separates whether or not you want to hit something like two sixty two seventy off the tee and then.

01:20:34
Speaker 1: Have big barker cuts in on the right yeah.

01:20:37
Speaker 2: Correct, yes, or if you want to go for it extremely severe runoff on the front that made a mockery of a lot of golfers in twenty sixteen who thought the hit good shots in whether it was a wedge or their te shot that kind of runs up onto the front of the green, but then ends up rolling way back into their feet.

01:20:54
Speaker 1: It gave Brooks Koepka fits.

01:20:57
Speaker 2: Was rewatching the twenty sixteen final broadcast, and yeah, that's a shot where some golfers will probably complain that it violates the fairness doctrine that you hit some good shots that you think should be rewarded and then end up in a worse spot than you started. I think that's going to be a really cool hole to watch. And then I like sixteen and seventeen a lot coming down the stretch. The final stretch is one where there's a range of scores that are available to you. The sixteenth hole, long par three, has a bunker short right that's been removed since the twenty sixteen US Open. I actually really like removing that bunker, and now you'd have a shot from the rough to a severely elevated green that would be impossible to get any spin on and would result in a very difficult up and down.

01:21:42
Speaker 1: I was there, Actually I had that shot impossible right. It was completely blind. I mean I actually hit my shot of the day and hit it within about four feet. Nice, but it was like it was fly. I was flying blind with that shot for sure, and it is it's one of the few places that Oakmont where you can really see the construction work on the green because that part of the green was very lifted up, probably initially by just building the bunker, but now it's just this deep hollow and the rough is going to be very very thick down there.

01:22:16
Speaker 2: And then the other seventeen there is another short four that's going to get a lot of attention. Small landing area, but I do think you're going to see the aggressive strategy payoff both on two and on seventeen. But those are cool holes to watch where it does get narrower the farther up you hit the t shot a lot of range.

01:22:37
Speaker 1: You know you can make birdie there. You could see some bogies.

01:22:40
Speaker 2: To me, those stand out as being a few of the most distinctive holes and some where the tournaments could be not necessarily one or lost right, especially on the second hole. It's too early in the round to win or lose the tournament, but those will be pivotal holes and I think they play well for professional golfers.

01:22:54
Speaker 1: Yeah. I like seventeen a lot, both as a pro golf hole and a hole for amateur I think it might actually play better for amateurs because the choice for the choice of you know, going at the green or playing out to the right in the fairly wide fairway out there is actually a great choice, and there's a lot of risk for going out the green. Probably most pros are going to attack this hole, But what I've heard is that they've added some some deeper rough to the left of that green, because left was the big bailout in twenty sixteen, and so we'll see if that is any kind of deterrent. But there's some room to play up short of that green, so I'd expect that the pros to kind of go at that portion of the hole. But the design of that hole is super cool. It's almost like George Thomas hols. It's got a little bit of ten at Riviera in it because the green is kind of lifted up and tilted away from the safe portion of the fairway, and so if you play out safe, you just have this really really tricky short approach into that green.

01:24:03
Speaker 2: That's interesting. I'm not sure I would have would have described it as a George Thomas inspired Well, it wouldn't be inspired, but it was inspired. But it's a similar, but it is kind of it has a little bit of ten in Riviera now that you outline, especially with left kind of being the bailout and then hitting a chip shot out of the rough up the spine of the green.

01:24:20
Speaker 1: So it's a good point. The green. The green put me immediately in mind of the of the tenth green at rivi Air. They're not exactly the same, but they have this similar kind of really striking tilt to them, and they're and they're pretty narrow, and if you play safe off the tee then you face a very very tough shot into a shallow angle into that green.

01:24:43
Speaker 2: In a bunker shot, that's what. That's way uphill and difficult to stop.

01:24:46
Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, it's it's a cool hole, and it used to be way wider. The configuration of the bunkers used to be a little bit different. If you look at at an aerial shot that exists for that hole from the mid nineteen twenties, you're looking at it and you're thinking, I'm looking at Rivier, I'm looking at Lacc North. It is just kind of interesting to see that type of hole at Oakmont of all places. So holes that I'm looking forward to seventeen would be one of them. I really like the twelfth hole, side hill par five with staggered bunkers and a wildly tilted green falling away from the line of play. If you're left of that green, you're absolutely dead. And I'm just interested to see how players kind of tack their way up that hole, what happens when players try to go for the green on their second shot, because if they miss left, then it's not worth it to go for the green. So yeah, I'm curious to see how pros approach that hole. And then of course I'm looking forward to number eight, the long par three, because people apparently hate long par threes. We found out during the tournament and at Merefield Village that there are certain pros who don't think that a part three can be any good if it's over two hundred yards, which has been just an astonishing revelation to me. Can't I can't believe what I'm hearing. Yeah, again, that's a big topic.

01:26:14
Speaker 2: I do think part of where that comes from is a little bit of an anti rollback take that is adjacent to, hey, you don't have to make golf holes long for them to be difficult, and I do think that is part part, not entirely, but part of what is motivating that comment.

01:26:30
Speaker 1: All right, so those are some holes to watch for. That is a lot of information about Oakmont. We really went deep there. Hope people enjoyed that. This is something I'm thinking about doing for major courses every once in a while when there is a meaty topic to dig into, then we'll do a longer version of the Designing Golf podcast like this. But thanks for doing this with me, Joseph. I appreciate it. This episode of Designing Golf was produced by PJ Clark. Thank you, PJ. If you like this kind of deep dive approach to golf architecture, then join Friday Golf Club. What are you waiting for? This is basically what we do in Friday Golf Club. There's a lot on offer there content wise, and you also get exclusive access to Friday Golf events as well as nice little merchandise deals and various things of that nature. We're building a great community in Friday Golf Club and I'd love for you to join us. All right, thank you for listening, Enjoy the US Open, and we'll be back again soon with another episode.