There is a sentence the late Doc Giffin, who spent half a century answering Arnold Palmer’s mail, used to put to visiting writers when they asked him about Oakmont. He would say that Oakmont was the only major-rota course in America where the members were proud of how few birdies were made on the property. Most clubs that host U.S. Opens have, over the decades, allowed themselves to be softened in the name of being a venue. The bunkers get raked smoother. The greens get a touch slower. The rough gets cut a half-inch shorter. Oakmont has gone the other way. The members, who play the course three hundred and fifty days a year, want it harder than the U.S. Open setup, not easier. They have wanted it that way since 1903.
The course outside Pittsburgh that Henry Fownes built on a former farm in the Allegheny River valley is, by some distance, the least compromising championship venue in American golf. It has hosted ten U.S. Opens, more than any other course. It is scheduled to host the eleventh in 2025 and the twelfth in 2033. The list of winners reads like a register of the players who have, in their respective eras, possessed the most reliable nervous systems the game has produced: Hogan, Nicklaus, Miller, Larry Nelson, Ernie Els, Ángel Cabrera, Dustin Johnson. The shared characteristic of an Oakmont winner is not power. It is the willingness to keep grinding when the course has already, by the eighth hole on a Friday, drained the last of the joy out of the round.
The design
Henry Fownes was a steel man, not a designer, which matters because most of the design choices he made were the choices of an industrialist looking at a piece of land rather than the choices of an architect imitating Scotland. He routed the course in a way that uses the property’s natural east-to-west slope to make the player work against the ground on most approach shots. He cut the fairways narrow. He put bunkers, the famous Oakmont bunkers, in the spots where a player would most want to land a ball that had been pushed or pulled. The figure most often quoted is two hundred. Oakmont opened with around two hundred and ten bunkers in 1903. The number now sits in the high one-hundreds, which is still more than any other major-rota course in the United States and more than most golf courses anywhere.
The bunkers are not the showy, flashed-face bunkers of the Pacific coast. They are squared off, deep, with the high lip of a feature that was built to swallow a poorly struck shot rather than to look photogenic. The famous Church Pews bunker between the third and fourth fairways is a single hazard, two hundred yards long, divided by a series of grass ridges that resemble the rows of a chapel. A drive that finds the Church Pews has to be hit out sideways. There is no recovery shot. The hazard exists, in design terms, to dictate the line of the tee shot rather than to punish the player who has already chosen badly. It does both, and it has been doing both since before the First World War.
The greens
The thing that keeps coming up in player interviews after a round at Oakmont, and that the broadcast camera struggles to convey, is the speed of the greens. Oakmont has, for as long as the Stimpmeter has existed, run the fastest greens in major championship golf. The course’s own grounds staff have for decades treated thirteen on the Stimp as a Tuesday morning baseline. They will get them to fourteen and a half for a tournament. Most U.S. Open setups elsewhere top out at twelve and a half on Sunday. The half a foot of difference is the difference between a player being able to control the second putt and a player having to play three feet of break on a downhill four-footer.
The reason the Oakmont greens run that fast is that they were built that way. Fownes wanted putting surfaces with no internal contour beyond what the slope of the underlying land already gave them, which is the opposite of the Mackenzie philosophy at Augusta. The result is greens that look flat from the fairway and turn out to be anything but. The slope is consistent across the surface. There is no tier the player can use as a backstop. A ball that lands above the hole, on most of the greens, will keep moving until it reaches a position from which the next putt is significantly harder than the one the player just missed. Players speak about Oakmont’s greens with the kind of muted respect normally reserved for a serious illness in the family.
The trees
The course had, by the late 1990s, been overtaken by the trees that the members had been planting since the 1960s. A 1994 master plan, executed quietly across the next decade, removed close to fifteen thousand of them. The result is the Oakmont the modern broadcast has shown us, the open, almost prairie-like property where the wind has a clear run across the fairways and where the visible horizon from any tee is a long way away. The tree removal was the most contentious decision the club has made in the modern era. It was also the right one. Fownes did not plant the trees. The members who put them in were trying to soften a course that did not need softening. The decision to take them out, taken before tree removal became fashionable elsewhere, was a return to the original design rather than a renovation of it.
What Oakmont asks
The shared description from professionals who have played Oakmont in tournament conditions is that the course requires a particular kind of attention that no other property does. The player cannot allow themselves a single careless shot, because Oakmont punishes carelessness with a stroke and a half rather than the half-stroke that most major venues will charge. The fairways are too narrow, the rough too penal, the bunkers too deep, the greens too fast. The player who shoots two over par on a Saturday at Oakmont is, more often than not, the player who has come closer than anyone else to playing the course the way it was designed to be played. The player who shoots six over has not made six bogeys. They have made one disastrous decision, somewhere around the eighth hole, that has cost them the rest of the round.
The club has not, in the last twenty years, allowed itself to drift the way other championship venues have. The members continue to play the course at green speeds that no other club in America would tolerate for daily play. They take a perverse pride in the ball positions that visitors find themselves in. They will tell anyone who asks that Oakmont is harder for the members than for the U.S. Open field, and they are not joking. The course, in 2026, is closer to the one Henry Fownes opened in 1903 than almost any other major-rota property in the country is to its original design. The U.S. Open will return next summer. Oakmont, as it has done for a hundred and twenty-three years, will not move an inch to meet it.