How fast are the greens at Oakmont Country Club, site of this week’s U.S. Open? The legendary Sam Snead, an 82-time winner on the PGA Tour, used to like to say that he once put a dime down to mark his ball on one of those notoriously greased surfaces and the coin rolled right off. Supercharged greens will be far from the only challenge provided by the venerated and diabolical track located in Western Pennsylvania, outside of Pittsburgh. Sloping fairways have a tendency to funnel even well-struck tee shots into a jungle of rough so deep that content creators can’t stop posting videos of it. Should you navigate around that nasty fate, a surfeit of fairway bunkers is liberally sprinkled throughout the 7,372-yard course, which will play as a par-70 this week. Most of those hazards, including the iconic “church pew” bunkers on the third and fourth holes, are functionally one-shot penalties. Should you find a fairway bunker, your best strategy is to take your medicine and wedge out. Attempt to be a hero and you can quickly bring double or triple bogey into play. Even fairway lies tend to yield blind approach shots into finicky greens where a 2-foot miss in the wrong direction can slide off into that ankle-deep rough.
Do you like to see professional golfers lose their shit? If the nine previous U.S. Opens contested at Oakmont are any indication, you are in for a treat this week.
The U.S. Open is famously golf’s most strenuous test, and Oakmont may well be the most cruel and unusual stop in the tournament’s rotation. In 2007, Ángel Cabrera outdueled Tiger Woods and Jim Furyk by one stroke, posting a winning score of plus-5. Consider that for context: A near-peak Tiger Woods could only manage to card plus-6 across four days at Oakmont, and it was almost enough to win. The last time the tournament was held here, in 2016, Dustin Johnson won by three strokes with a score of 4-under, under far more playable, wet conditions. The winning scores posted by Rory McIlroy at the Masters and Scottie Scheffler at the PGA Championship, this year’s first two majors, was 11-under. That ain’t happening this week.
If you aren’t a golf freak, you may be asking: “What is the deal here? Why make your annual national championship such an abjectly miserable experience for the greatest players in the world?” This is a fair question, and as with most things in golf, the explanation is a complex agglomeration of the traditional and the technocratic. Think of it this way: the NBA, NFL, MLB—these are all leagues. They have an overarching in-house structure, with mandatory schedules and top-down expectations that apply to every team and player. The PGA Tour isn’t a league: the players are independent contractors, and the tournament schedule is a loosely constructed and somewhat ad hoc patchwork of corporate sponsored events, which tend to fluctuate year to year based on who is willing to underwrite the prize money and cost of putting on a tournament. This is unusual for a number of reasons. For example, the Washington Commanders and Miami Dolphins are scheduled to play a Week 11 game in Madrid during the upcoming NFL season. Both teams probably wish they didn’t have to fly across the Atlantic Ocean to play a football game. That does not mean the Washington Commanders can elect to say, “Well, fuck it. No one ever says anything nice about Madrid. Let’s stay home.”
Pro golfers, on the other hand, are under no obligation to show up. Just two weeks ago, McIlroy made headlines and raised a few hackles by electing to skip the Memorial, one of the season’s signature events, hosted by Jack Nicklaus. His reason, basically, was that he didn’t feel like it. That is one way in which pro golf is anomalous relative to other sports. Another, even stranger feature is that golf’s four majors—the sport’s tentpole for ratings and media attention—are administered by four separate organizations, all entirely idiosyncratic, all acting independently and none in consultation with one another. The Masters is held every April at Augusta National in Georgia, where the members of this ridiculously exclusive club run everything with an iron fist, down to the players in the field, course setup, and the cost of pimento cheese sandwiches. The PGA Championship is organized by the PGA of America and takes place annually in May at a rotating series of courses. The Open Championship, sometimes known colloquially as the British Open, is held each July someplace in the United Kingdom and is hosted by the Scotland-based rulemaking group the Royal and Ancient Golf Club of St. Andrews, which has existed since the middle 1700s. And then there is the USGA, an American equivalent to the R&A. The United States Golf Association governs the official rules of golf in conjunction with its U.K. counterpart, making sure to keep them as inconceivably byzantine as possible. (Did you think it was a relatively straightforward question as to whether you can legally move a twig two centimeters during a round of golf? Allow the USGA and the R&A to disabuse you of that with roughly 18 million pages of literature on the topic.) The USGA’s other big job is annually organizing the U.S. Open.
Owing in no small part to their operational autonomy, each of the majors is known for certain hallmarks. The Masters, which has the smallest field and is the only of the four played in the same location every year, is characterized by its self-conscious, old-money austerity and the grandeur of Augusta National itself, truly one of the most thrilling courses ever designed. The PGA Championship, typically considered the least prestigious of the four, tends to lean toward playable courses set up for shootout conditions. The Open Championship, most often played on links courses, is frequently a wet and windy affair, requiring competitors to play an unorthodox style of golf that defers to the elements. And then there is the U.S. Open and the USGA. Their thing, they decided long ago, is they want the tournament to be impossible. That’s at least how many of the players feel, and over the years a low-to-midlevel animosity has built up between the USGA and its competitors. Golfers at the highest level of the sport are unaccustomed to being embarrassed on national TV, and it turns out they really don’t like it. Take for instance the 2018 U.S. Open at Shinnecock Hills, where the wind blew ferociously, the greens dried out dramatically, and the winning score was Brooks Koepka’s 1-over par, all of which prompted a borderline insurrection. Here’s a quintessential U.S. Open highlight from that year: Phil Mickelson, attempting a 15-foot putt, hits it 20 feet past the hole, and then runs up to the ball and hits it again, while it’s still moving, like a 4-year-old at a putt-putt course. A full-fledged meltdown in front of our very eyes.
It can be very uncomfortable, which is also why it’s fun, although admittedly a conditional and highly specific kind of fun. If major championship golf as a rule is a kind of anxiety porn, this is the hardcore stuff. Does the USGA sometimes go too far? 100 percent. But that’s kind of the point.
“The USGA gets a hard time about punitive setups, but I think some of that is unfair,” Tom Coyne, editor of The Golfer’s Journal, told me over email. “No winner shoots plus-20; they somehow find a way to keep it around or under par, which to me, means the USGA is usually getting it right.” Coyne feels that many of today’s players have been conditioned to think going low every round is their birthright. “Par should be a good score in championship golf, and these guys have gotten so good that respect for par sort of gets lost in pro golf. It’s fun to watch them grind for pars, just like the rest of us.”
For Coyne, the crucial distinction between a successful U.S. Open setup and one that is beyond the pale involves organically marshalling the inherent strengths of the golf course without resorting to gimmickry: “You, of course, don’t want that difficulty to be engineered through sleight of hand or manipulated setups or absurd length.” Oakmont isn’t remotely gimmicky, it’s just relentlessly complicated. It’s not the sort of course where you are likely to hear that the winner prevailed in spite of a subpar week driving the ball, or a loose week with long iron play, or a tough day or two reading the greens. Every element of a player’s game will need to be honed to the sharpest possible edge, or run the risk of a feedback loop of misery. There are no bomb-and-gouge cheat codes for big hitters looking to overwhelm the course with sheer length. And while some holes are harder than others, there are no real cupcakes or obvious stretches of the course to go low. It’ll be a 72-hole bare-knuckle brawl, a metaphorical tightrope walk over an alligator-filled pool of lava. (Or like, say, trying to cross the Pennsylvania Turnpike during rush hour.)
At most venues, top players like Scottie Scheffler, Rory McIlroy, or Bryson DeChambeau can rely on their talent to overcome crucial mistakes to still scratch out pars. That won’t be a viable strategy at Oakmont. “It’s not about watching the best players get humbled, I don’t think,” Coyne says. “It’s about not rewarding mediocre anywhere. For one week, we get to watch these guys appear to be mortal for once. At Oakmont, a mistake on your drive or approach or first putt is going to cost you a stroke. And that’s golf, right?”
It’s golf at the U.S. Open, at least. Let the bloodletting begin.