Oakmont: Some Random Thoughts

BY Tony Cashmore

This is a personal reaction to the golf course and its preparation which examined the world’s best players in the US Open.

I was fortunate to play Oakmont twice some 15 years ago, when my golf wasn’t too bad (then handicap 6 – 7), in summer, when the ball was running and the greens were shiny slick I loved it, although it was about the toughest test, apart from Carnoustie, I’ve ever played, and in my opinion Oakmont is one of the great strange courses anywhere in the world – I’ll come back to that word’strange’.

Among my strongest memories of it are the slow but significant ’meadow slopes’ defining the direct lines of play, the drivelines if you like, more than cross-slopes to fairways, although some drives needed to respect strongish side cambers, and the positioning of bunkers both sides of many quite narrow drive zones then made for exacting shot-making,

Also, the use of swales through quite a few greens, rather than bringing up swells and ridges – such sometimes deepish and meandering soft grooves, of course, create apparent ’ridges’ anyway in the overall pitching flatness of the entire green, but it’s a question of how compartments in a green’s offering are fashioned: somehow I found such strong swales, often diagonal to my line and certainly not straight or uniform in scope, more difficult to putt than similar bumps and ridges in isolation. I wonder why ’dips’ and swales through greens are not more used with modern golf courses, with exacting construction of greens ensuring total drainage satisfaction.) Think of the swale towards 4 o’clock on Royal Melbourne’s third hole East as an example, but at Oakmont many of these inherent green swales are contained entirely within the scope of the putting surface.

I remember the trees. Look, it wasn’t a densely treed course back in 1992, but most fairways were defined by treelines, more intensely back towards the tees usually, but there were several instances of ’double penalty’, in that trees intruded into the line of play from a fairway bunker. I was told that most treelines had been planted in the mid-late ’60s, so 30 years or so had allowed a pretty strong separating character to develop between fairways. How incredibly better is that course for having the trees taken away, that the vast openness of the terrain is exposed, that the entire visual character of the land now displays the sharply mown playlines, that the multitudinous bunkers have no other visual distraction, so that they define so clearly the challenge, the girth and angling of the play zones.

Because despite its openness, Oakmont for the Open still to me did not have a ’links’ character visually, and certainly the presentation of dense rough close in to greens and defining bunkers is at variance to the links’ feel. To a large extent though I thought this was due to the lack of the ’tumbling’, wild-cap undulations and backdrops I think of with great old links courses: the dry long fescue thrusts at Oakmont rarely intruded into the close-in vision of the players. And the fairways were so narrow out at long drive distance, unlike the best of the old links’ generosity. This is not meant as a criticism of the course set-up, merely a personal point of difference.

I looked at the strong inserts of penal rough into some long-hole Oakmont fairways, set to examine play towards the green from a drive bunker: Hole 18 is just one example. I think of the criticism I’ve received when I’ve done the same thing, like at Hole 17 of the new Henley course, and feel somewhat content. There can be value surely in routing a fairway around such a tongue of half-shot penalty stuff to ask the question of a player far back or in a bunker whether to play short, challenge the thing, or play to the side? Rather than a bunker?

Let’s Talk Rough

So, let’s talk about the rough generally for the Open. My first question is: does strategic value in a golf hole need to depend on the age-old adage that you bunker or examine in some way one side only of the fairway for the drive, leaving the other side open, and then reward by some means the shot into the green played from the ’danger’side, either in the angling or tilting of the green, the positioning of its defences, or in shortening the length of the approach? Bearing in mind that these players can shape and hit the ball so far, so long, that using a 6-iron or an 8-iron into a green is virtually immaterial to them, that they can stop the ball so quickly even on firm greens (from the fairway anyway), that there were no strong winds predicted for the tournament ( and they were right), the answer they came up with was to produce a graded but savage rough throughout the golf journey. I think they were right, strategically.

On a course like Oakmont, with essentially all straight holes, no real doglegs at all, the question asked at the tees was inexorably – have you the skill and guts to hit driver to a 25 yard wide fairway out, 280-340 yards to get an advantage, or do you play short of those rough-clad bunkers with then a much longer approach to a hard and convoluted green? It’s a constant strategic decision geared to the golf course layout and set-up. Unlike most American Open courses perhaps, where positioning the drive to one side or the other of a fairway is the strategic examination because of trees or dogleg considerations, Oakmont uses the long tight sleeve of bunkers and rough beyond about 250 yards, hole after hole, to test the best players in the world.

Cabrera most often hit driver, very long and usually straight for the 64 holes out of the 72 holes played requiring that; Tiger for example used 3-wood or stingers very often. Inexorably, in my view, the difference in shot length into greens played a part in Cabrera’s win. (Although Tiger and many others found those swales in the greens I spoke of tough to read: another aspect of this strange, wonderful golf course.)

The Bunkers

Bearing in mind how well such players can fashion shots from sand, especially when the fairway bunkers at Oakmont are generally not too deep, is there anything wrong with allowing the steep faces of them to be presented in truly penal, hold-up rough? If the objective was to put the fear of God into the minds of these fine golfers, and force them to keep straight, and playing from sand itself was seen as basically easy, then those horrible holding slopes achieved the result desired. Golf is a game of luck, and chance, as well as of risk and reward, and the course as presented in this aspect was brilliant. Speaking of bunkers, I muse over why the ’church pews’ idea hasn’t been used to my knowledge anywhere else? I’m not saying I necessarily like them at all, but in an age where all ideas find their way into designers’ vocabulary of ’things to try’, it seems strange perhaps that we don’t see something like that especially in sand country, where to stop sand blow from wide bunker expanses is always a problem. Visually, and in shot-value terms, do I like them less than a myriad rash of pit/pot bunkers covering the same area? I wonder?

The Par 3’s

The length of a couple of par-3’s was a point of discussion, the 8th particularly, playing near 300 yards (270 meters) on two days. Well, with these guys and the modern equipment and balls, such colossal length really only equates to the driver or brassie length private club 1-shotter of my youth. And put such holes in the context that Oakmont also had 3 virtually driveable par-4’s (2, 14, 17), with only the protective rough inhibiting the strongest guys from having a free go. Perhaps now, after Oakmont’s Open, I am less adamant about not having a super-long par-3, even at a club or resort level, but I would need to design a range of preferably lateral as well as down the hole tees to serve it. The use of a shared tee for Holes 10 and 12 brought back memories and posed a question in my mind. I recall that in my early days at Kew Golf Club here in Melbourne, the 4th and 5th fairways crossed each other, and so did the 17th and 18th. It’s not the same as a shared tee situation, but Oakmont’s set-up pulled the thought up anyway. There was never a safety problem with Kew’s arrangement, (possibly manners were stronger in those days?, or less impatience?), but the question is whether anyone would accept cross fairways today, say on a tightly constrained site? ( I think Greg Norman fashioned such a ’crossing’ routing in an early plan for his course at The National, but it was rejected?)

But on the shared tee matter, we have recommended this for two situations in a major Sydney club course for which we have prepared masterplans for the future. Given the close proximity of one tee to another, and without room to move in either case, to rely on golfers’ manners really only continues the’stand aside’ approach the members sustain with the present situations. At Oakmont of course, the use of a shared tee was to define the changing challenge of the two holes round by round, and tempered perhaps by the wind direction for the day. The Americans do this sort of thing well: tees are often set in major tournaments depending on the conditions of the day, and it’s the same for everyone anyway.

We see this too in the set-up of the course for these great golfers as a par 70, allowing a couple of ’all-but’ par-5 holes to sternly test them for long approaches. Why on earth we don’t do this at courses prepared for tournaments here beats me: the composite course at Royal Melbourne is simply a par 70 for these guys, isn’t it?

So, in my appraisal of Oakmont as the Open venue, this strange course was wonderful and convincing. And boy – didn’t strong and brave golf over 4 days win?

Why Strange?

Well it was open, essentially tree-less, but not by any means a links-feel course. It has no real doglegs at all. It therefor uses the long-neck bottle shape for fairway format, the early areas relatively generous, beyond that very narrow ribbon-like space between awful rough and bath tub sand craters scribed with precipitous but grabbing and holding faces. (How strong, brave and skilful are you?) It rather uses swales through firm, canted greens instead of the usual built-up swells and ridges. It has the church pew bunker format now in a couple of places, a strange visual accent certainly not well known elsewhere. It presented a near 300 yard par-3, yet still had 3 nearly driveable par-4 tests if you were brave or silly enough. It exploited a shared tee arrangement for variety. It insisted on one par-5 (12) being a 3-shot examination, ( and Hole 4 was nearly that in the conditions as well), requiring strategic and placement thinking unusual with American tournament play.

Strange too,to us, perhaps is the club members’ attitude to their golf course: they love it, of course, but more than that they absolutely revere its great difficulty. They don’t conquer it in club play, and don’t want to: they love the huge challenge of it and like to come in exhausted by it. Pine Valley members adopt the same general approach I found, and nothing makes Oakmont members happier than listening to the woes of their friends, and particularly of their (lucky) visitors who have shared the agony with them.