Conquering Oakmont

Only one club in America has staged more major championships than Oakmont Country Club, and that’s Augusta National home of the Masters.

Yet, from the time Oakmont welcomed its first major championship in 1922 and the Masters began in 1934, only five players in history have the unique distinction of winning a major at Augusta National and Oakmont. And they are some of the greatest names in golf.

Ben Hogan. Jack Nicklaus. Sam Snead. Gene Sarazen.

Sarazen (1922) and Snead (1951) won PGA Championships at Oakmont. Hogan (1953) and Nicklaus (1962) won a U.S. Open there. But there is one more player on that list, and an unlikely one at that.

Angel Cabrera.

Cabrera won the U.S. Open the last time it was held at Oakmont in 2007 and followed that two years later with a victory in the 2009 Masters. Only seven players who are in the field this week have a chance to add a U.S. Open trophy from Oakmont to their green jacket and join that club — Phil Mickelson, Jordan Spieth, Bubba Watson, Danny Willett, Adam Scott, Zach Johnson and Charl Schwartzel.

“Oakmont is the toughest U.S. Open venue there is,” said past champion Johnny Miller, who won the 1973 U.S. Open with a final-round 63 that is generally regarded as the greatest round in golf history. “It’s all about the setup.”

Cabrera became the first player from Argentina to win the U.S. Open and the first to win a major since Roberto De Vicenzo won the British Open in 1967. He did it with a final-round 69 that gave him a 72-hole total of 5-over 285, good for a one-shot victory over Tiger Woods and Jim Furyk.

And he did that by making five birdies in the final round and overpowering Oakmont with his length. Cabrera hit drives of 379 yards at the par-5 12th and 346 yards at No. 18. He hit a pitching wedge to 18, a 52-degree sand wedge to the 477-yard ninth and 9-iron to the 500-yard 15th, the latter setting up a birdie.

Known as “El Pato,” which is Spanish for “The Duck,” Cabrera looked the part on the final day when he was the only player to shoot a sub-par score. Despite furiously dragging on cigarettes as he stomped down the fairway, Cabrera looked calm on the outside while his nerves churned feverishly on the inside.

“He’s a perfectionist, and sometimes a missed shot bothers him more than it should,” Charlie Epps, Cabrera’s swing coach, said in an interview on PGA.com. “He has a hard time letting go of a bad shot and bouncing back. I told him a couple months ago, I said, ‘Angel, you’re letting things get to you too much. Your anger is hurting you.’ He said, ‘Listen, I won two majors with this attitude.’ And I said, ‘Yeah, but you could have won eight more.’ ”

Said Cabrera, after winning the Open: “There are some players that have psychologists. I smoke.”

But, even in this age of power golf, where 23 players average over 300 yards in driving distance on the PGA Tour, length is not the key to winning at Oakmont. Putting is. At least, that’s the opinion of three of the four players who won the U.S. Open at Oakmont before Cabrera.

“Putting is always the key,” said Nicklaus, who won the Open, his first victory as a pro, in 1960 in an epic playoff with Arnold Palmer. “The difficulty about Oakmont is it’s really impossible to put the ball below the pin. You have so many things that run away from you, and, if you let it run away from you to get it below the pin, you’re running off the green all day long. You’re not hitting the ball below the pin. You’ve got to use the slope.”

Nicklaus had only one three-putt in five days at Oakmont in 1960, and it came on the first hole in the final round when a helicopter was flying overhead.

“It wouldn’t leave where we were,” Nicklaus recalled. “Usually, I wait until the helicopter leaves, but it wouldn’t. My mind went right back to Cherry Hills two years earlier, I’m playing the last round with Ben Hogan, on the fourth green, a helicopter is doing the same thing and I three-putted the darn green. My mind just went right back to it, and I three-putted the green.”

Miller was so precise with his shot-making in 1973 that he hit all 18 greens in regulation and left only one putt — at No. 12, where the green slopes maddeningly from front to back — above the hole. He began the final round six shots from the lead and with 11 players in front of him, but he birdied the first four holes and put together a round that was so frighteningly impressive it’s almost astonishing he didn’t shoot lower than the course-record 63.

Consider: Miller had a 90-foot sand shot at No. 4 hang on the edge for what would have been an eagle, lipped out a 12-foot birdie at No. 17 and a had a birdie putt at the 72nd hole go halfway down in the cup and slide right back out.

“That was the secret to that round — putting uphill all the time,” Miller said last week at the Memorial. “Number 10 is the craziest green in the world. That 10th green, man, that thing is devious. So is No. 1.”

When Ernie Els won in 1994, he needed 20 holes on an extra day to defeat Colin Montgomerie and Loren Roberts in a Monday playoff. He also needed a couple favorable rulings — including an incorrect one — on the final day of regulation from Dr. Trey Holland, chairman of the USGA’s rules committee. But despite an errant driver that forced him to chop shots from the rough — he hit only seven fairways Sunday — Els survived because of his putting. Curiously, Els said he thought he led the field in putting that week, but the reality is his two playoff combatants ­— Montgomery (26.8) and Roberts (27.8) — finished Nos. 1 and 3, respectively, for the week in average putts per round.

“There was no modern machinery that went into building those greens,” Els said. “It was basically the greens would lay on the land that you saw. Like the very first hole ­— they didn’t try to tilt the green back this way. A lot of modern designers now would tilt that green this way because everybody would complain. That is the way Oakmont is. What you see is what you get.”

Then Els added, “I loved putting at Oakmont. I just loved putting there. I just love the slopes and everything about it.”

Gerry Dulac: gdulac@post-gazette.com and Twitter @gerrydulac