Standing the test of time

Oakmont Country Club has been labeled as a course built on behavioral psychology — stimulus and response, reward and punishment. Its creators didn’t view golf as merely an act of recreation. It was a test of character.

Hit a ball into one the many brutal bunkers or ditches or grass mounds at Oakmont and struggle to get out. That should teach a lesson. There aren’t hero recovery shots at Oakmont. A player isn’t meant to be able to make up for a poorly played shot.

“A shot poorly played should be a shot irrevocably lost.”

That’s the famous saying from William C. (W.C.) Fownes, the son of founder Henry C. (H.C.) Fownes. It’s a course that historians agree remains one of the least changed major golf courses in terms of layout. But Steven Schlossman, a professor of history at Carnegie Mellon, views Oakmont as a course which has evolved constantly, especially in its early decades.

There’s the addition and subtraction of mass quantities of sand traps, the increased speed of the greens and the furrowing of the bunkers. No matter whether H.C. or W.C. Fownes had the actual final say, it was a course continuously working to maintain the sanctity of par as the standard for great golf.

“It wasn’t that they saw it as vindictiveness,” Schlossman said. “More of a sense of the virtuous should be rewarded by the opportunity to hit onto the fairways that were as good as anybody else’s, on holes beautifully designed, fair, challenging, and hitting to greens the likes of which nobody had ever played before in terms of their quality.”

Oakmont was an inland course. It didn’t have water hazards to penalize players for their mistakes, and the heavy clay soils of Western Pennsylvania prevented the deep pot bunkers of Scotland. So, H.C. and W.C. Fownes made bunkers and other land hazards that punished players much like a water hazard would.

Somewhere in between the 1910s and 1920s, they introduced furrowed bunkers made by rakes with thick, round two-to-three inch teeth that resulted in balls buried under furrows. Maybe there wasn’t the stroke penalty of a water hazard, but it may take as many shots to get out.

As technology made weaker golfers seem better, H.C. and W.C. Fownes worked the course to make it match that change. Except it wasn’t just technology. Former Post-Gazette golf writer and Oakmont historian Marino Parascenzo tells the story of Sam Snead figuring out a shortcut on No. 7 during a war bond fundraiser to score a birdie.

The superintendent called W.C. Fownes. The next day, Snead tried hitting in the same spot only to find his ball in a bunker — Fownes had the crew put it in overnight.

“There was a little trace of Dante in W.C.” Parascenzo said.

By 1950, after H.C. and W.C. Fownes had died, Oakmont members were pushing for a “beautification” of the club, with trees and flowers planted throughout.

“Oakmont had begun to have the look of other golf courses, which wasn’t necessarily considered to be bad,” Schlossman said. “A lot of the members considered it great. They wanted a prettier place.”

Many did consider this to be bad. In the 1990s, there was a covert operation to remove many of these new trees. Once John Zimmers took over as course superintendent in 1999, those efforts intensified, to the point where somewhere between 5,000 and 8,000 trees were removed by the start of the 2007 U.S. Open.

The goal was to return Oakmont to its origin.

In preparation for this year’s U.S. Open, USGA Executive Director and CEO Mike Davis said they have cut down some rough between the fairways and bunkers to make balls roll into the bunker easier. He said it is more in line with the Fownes’ view.

And as Zimmers takes care of a course made by men who believed in punishment and reward, he makes sure to keep his founders in mind.

“Every day I kinda say, ‘What would Mr. Fownes think?’” Zimmers said in a USGA video about Oakmont. “And I think he’d be pretty darn proud when you go out there now and look around. I mean, it is just remarkable of what this club has done.”