|
OAKMONT HISTORY -- U.S. WOMEN’S OPEN
By Marino Parascenzo
As golf grew hugely popular through the latter part of the 1900s, rich and powerful men took to building wildly heroic golf courses as tributes to themselves. But the grand and classic American golf courses from the turn of the 1800s-1900s were the product of wealthy men who wanted social playgrounds. There was, for example, W. K. Vanderbilt, of the Vanderbilt millions, who discovered golf on a visit to France. “This game will work in the U.S.,” he said, or words to that effect, and he all but shanghaied Willie Dunn, Scottish pro and course architect, and behold -- Shinnecock Hills Golf Club emerged at the Hamptons on Long Island. Then there was the young lady who showed up at her aunt’s estate in an exclusive Boston suburb, clubs in hand, asking the guys for a game. There being no courses at the time, they couldn’t oblige her. But the boys were taken by the game and soon enough had stuck a course in that bastion of the Boston elite, The Country Club of Brookline. And so it went. Before long, golf had replaced cricket as the game Americans played.
The story of Oakmont Country Club is the story of Henry Clay Fownes, and his equally intelligent, resourceful and willful son, William Clark Fownes Jr. (named after an uncle). H.C., the son of English immigrants, had to leave school at age 15 to work in the family’s iron business in Pittsburgh. Before long, he was running it, and built it into a small empire. H.C. was 21 when W.C. Jr. was born. The family business offered an insight into the character of H.C. Patriarchal even among his brothers, he retained a controlling interest in all the family business ventures. He called the shots.
Father and son were often regarded as brothers, thinking alike and acting alike. This would set the stage for the care and feeding of Oakmont, a club with a history unmatched in American golf. Oakmont has hosted 20 national championships, all of them events that travel to courses around the country. Among these are 11 majors – an unprecedented eight U.S. Opens along with three PGA Championships. There also have been five U.S. Amateurs, and the 2010 playing of the U.S Women’s Open will be the Oakmont’s second.
Oakmont has to be the only course born of a household accident. One day in 1898, H.C., then 39, was using a welding or burning torch to patch a bicycle tire, but neglected to put on a welder’s mask. Later, H.C. had alarming spots in his vision. His doctor diagnosed arteriosclerosis and gave him two or three years to live. Depressed, H.C decided to enjoy what time he had left.
“…he gave up business and traveled about the country seeking relaxation,” W.C. wrote. W.C., in a kind of family biography. Sometime later, H.C. got a second medical opinion: The spots were due to the burning torch. The death sentence was lifted. It was during this time that H.C. had chanced upon golf, and soon, though in his 40s, he became one of the better golfers in the Pittsburgh area. He would qualify for five U.S. Amateur Championships, the most important event in the country at the time. W.C. qualified for 19 U.S. Amateurs, won one, in 1910, and capped his career by becoming president of the U.S. Golf Association, the ruling body of the game.
H.C. Fownes, unlike other wealthy golf movers and shakers of his day, wasn’t looking for a high society playground when he decided to build his own course. He wasn’t trying to create a monument to himself. He was just looking for a fight. The courses in the Pittsburgh area, like most in the United States, were better suited to polite tea-party golf. So H.C. would have to build his own.
The quest was on. A friend found some nice, open farmland rolling over the gentle hills above Oakmont Borough, about 14 miles east of Pittsburgh. H.C., having put together an investment group, bought the land. The work started in the fall of 1903, and play began in the summer of 1904. As in his businesses, H.C. took the precaution of keeping a controlling interest in Oakmont. In effect, he owned Oakmont Country Club, and reserved even summary authority. A member who broke a minor club rule returned to his locker one day to find his gear neatly stacked and an edict from H.C.: He was no longer a member.
Among various Oakmont myths was a delicious one holding that H.C. first designed his dream course and then hunted up the ground to set the jewel in. It would be a romantic tale if it weren’t patently absurd. One has only to look at No. 17, that little waif of a par-4 among all those brutes. Who could possibly dream of creating a 300-yard par-4 to be shoe-horned into barely space for a par-3 1/3. Cleary, H.C. was making do in that little corner, and he ended up, it turned out, with one of the great holes in the game. Not because it’s so difficult, but because it’s so devilishly tempting. A bold golfer going for that green could really cash in -- or could crash.
Reason says this: H.C. studied his land, then fitted his course to it, much like Beethoven listening to a messenger only he could hear.
Most courses are “strategic” in layout, offering the golfer more than one route to the green, but Oakmont was the prototypical “penal” course, offering one way, the straight-and-narrow. If you stray, you pay.
Enter another Oakmont myth, the one that says although H.C. designed the course, it was W.C. who turned it into a legendary monster, throwing furrowed bunkers all over the place and making the greens wickedly fast. W.C was also the most vocal, with historic pronouncements. As to the many bunkers, he said, “A shot poorly played should be a shot irrevocably lost.” And as to the unrelenting difficulty of Oakmont, he sounded a bit like Captain Ahab in pursuit of that whale: “Let the clumsy, the spineless, the alibi artist stand aside.” Compared to W.C., H.C. was silent. Indeed, little of H.C. is known, apart from the fact that he liked golf, cards, a drink, a smoke and fast cars. The key lay in W.C.’s writing. It was clear in W.C. idolized his dad, and that he recognized him as supreme in all things. Would H.C. turn his club over to anyone? Even the British betting houses wouldn’t touch that wager. W.C. tinkered extensively with Oakmont, adding bunkers, working on greens, but it’s clear he was either under his dad’s orders or had his permission.
What H.C. had intended to be a sturdy and worthy test for him turned out to be one of the great golf courses in the world. Many called it the fiercest course of all. Such things are impossible to prove by any method. But nobody ever contradicted the notion. And few if any courses, have had the praises and curses sung as Oakmont has over the years. Ron Whitten, noted golf course architecture writer, said Oakmont would be “front and center” if there were a Mount Rushmore of great courses. Back in 1927, Tommy Armour, the Silver Scot, spoke of “muscle-tightening terror.” At the 2007 U.S. Open, Ernie Els spoke of the speed and undulations of the greens. “These are the toughest greens we’ll ever play in U.S. Open history, or any other golf tournament we play,” Els said. It was an echo of Sam Snead, many years earlier, saying, “I put a dime down to mark my ball, and the dime slid away.”
“This course,” said Ireland’s Padraig Harrington, “makes Winged Foot seem very -- pleasant, let’s say.” And Spain’s Sergio Garcia, at the ’07 Open, noted that Oakmont, a par-70 course, was pretty good for a par-78. “And I’m not kidding,” he said.
H.C. was president of Oakmont from its founding, in 1903, until his death in 1935, and W.C. was president from then till his resignation in 1946. Oddly enough, the authoritative father-son combination sowed the seeds of discontent at Oakmont. They envisioned a golf club, much like the celebrated courses of Britain. But American clubs, family-oriented, needed a variety of pastimes and social events in order to attract members, the financial life blood of any club. The Fownses granted some things, but drew the line at a swimming pool.
W.C. knew Oakmont was in danger with a shrinking membership. He realized the pool was necessary for the good of the club, but he refused to be part of it. He resigned in 1946. He died in 1950, and the pool was installed in 1954.
Oakmont survived, and was still Oakmont. History was funny. H.C. Fownes, the man who never thought of building a monument to himself, ended up with his monument.
These are among the landmark moments inscribed on H.C.’s monument:
- 1919 U.S. Amateur: It was one of the game’s “majors” at the time, and Oakmont son Davy Herron won it, beating the young Georgia phenomenon Bobby Jones, 17, by a decisive 5 and 4 in the championship match. This was the first of only two times Jones would lose in the final. He would win five U.S. Amateurs.
- 1925 U.S. Amateur: Jones made this one the second of his five U.S. Amateur championships, crushing his good friend and fellow Georgian Watts Gunn, 8 and 7, fueling his skyrocketing reputation.
- 1935 U.S. Open: Little-known Sam Parks Jr., a club professional from Pittsburgh, became golf’s most famous dark horse winner when he plucked this Open out of the fingers of the best in the game. Parks turned course knowledge into a gold mine. He had practiced religiously at Oakmont before the Open.
- 1953 U.S. Open: Ben Hogan had one of the greatest seasons ever in golf. He entered only six events, and won five of them, and three of these were majors – the Masters, the U.S. Open and the British Open, three legs of the Grand Slam. He wasn’t able to play in the fourth leg of the slam, the PGA Championship, and the slam has never been won.
- 1962 U.S. Open: In a historic victory, young Jack Nicklaus, 22, scored his first win as a pro, beating the iconic Arnold Palmer, the world’s greatest golfer, in a grind that ended in an 18-hole playoff. Palmer was done in by Oakmont’s fierce greens. He three-putted 11 times to only once by Nicklaus.
- Early 1960s – The tree-planting beautification program began.
- 1973 U.S. Open: History was made again at Oakmont. Johnny Miller won by shooting an 8-under-par 63 in the final round, a record not only for a U.S. Open but for all four majors.
- Early 1990s – The tree-cutting restoration program began. When it was completed, some 5,000 trees had been removed, restoring Oakmont to its original condition.
- 1992 U.S. Women’s Open: Patty Sheehan made up for a crushing disappointment in the 1990 Women’s Open with a playoff victory over friend and former college teammate Juli Inkster. Sheehan birdied the last two holes of regulation to tie Inkster, then won in an 18-hole playoff the next day.
- 2007 U.S. Open: This was the first championship on an Oakmont restored to its original state after the removal of some 5,000 trees. And Argentina’s Angel Cabrera joined Sam Parks Jr. (1935) and Orville Moody (1969) as obscure players who surfaced to win the U.S. Open.
|