Oakmont Country Club: America's Toughest Test
Near Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania
A few miles northeast of Pittsburgh sits a course that has humbled more major champions than anywhere else in America. Oakmont Country Club was built in nineteen oh three by Henry Clay Fownes, a Pittsburgh iron manufacturer who had discovered golf in middle age and decided the game needed a harder test.
Fownes purchased two hundred acres of old farmland and hired a crew of one hundred fifty men and two dozen mule teams to shape it. His philosophy was simple and merciless: every shot that misses the fairway should be punished severely. He planted hundreds of bunkers, including the famous Church Pew complex between the third and fourth holes, rows of closely spaced grass ridges that look exactly like the interior of a Presbyterian sanctuary. He also built the fastest greens in the game, tilted so steeply that approach shots landing even a yard in the wrong place can roll off the putting surface entirely.
The result is a course that has beaten golfers alive. When the United States Open came here in twenty sixteen, the one hundred sixteenth edition of the championship, only one player in the field finished under par for the week. That was Dustin Johnson, who posted a four under total of two hundred seventy-six. Johnson had to survive a disputed ruling on the final hole, officials determined he had accidentally caused his ball to move slightly on a green, adding a penalty stroke, and he won by three despite the chaos.
Oakmont has hosted the United States Open ten times, more than any other course in the country. The roll call of champions reads like a textbook: Ben Hogan in nineteen fifty-three, Jack Nicklaus defeating Arnold Palmer in a playoff in nineteen sixty-two, Johnny Miller shooting a record sixty-three in the final round in nineteen seventy-three on a rain-softened course that briefly surrendered its defenses. Only a few rounds in a major have matched that score since, including Justin Thomas at the twenty seventeen United States Open, though none have beaten it at Oakmont.
The club is still privately owned, still family-run in the Fownes tradition, and still regarded as the most demanding examination in American golf.
