Oakmont Country Club

Oakmont Country Club is the most fearsome test in American championship golf, featuring over 160 bunkers, blindingly fast greens, and the infamous Church Pews bunker complex. Located just east of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, the Henry Fownes original has hosted more combined U.S. Opens and major championships than any other venue in the country.

Oakmont Country Club is the product of one man's uncompromising belief that a golf course should punish every imperfect shot. Henry Clay Fownes, born in Pittsburgh in 1856, made his fortune in the iron and steel industry. In 1898, he sold his company, the Carrie Furnace Company, to Andrew Carnegie, who incorporated it first into Carnegie Steel and later into U.S. Steel. With his business career behind him, Fownes turned his attention to golf, which he had learned a few years earlier from fellow Pittsburgh steel baron John Moorhead Jr. Dissatisfied with the courses available in western Pennsylvania, Fownes resolved to build his own. In 1903, Fownes purchased approximately 200 acres of old farmland along the Allegheny River in Oakmont, Pennsylvania, twelve miles northeast of downtown Pittsburgh. The flat-to-gently-rolling terrain, stripped of trees and exposed to the elements, reminded Fownes of the open linksland he admired in Scotland. With a crew of 150 men and two dozen mule teams, he spent a year building the course, which opened for play in 1903. It was the only course Fownes ever designed. Fownes's design philosophy was rooted in penal architecture carried to an extreme. He believed that every errant shot should exact a price, and he expressed this conviction primarily through bunkers — hundreds of them.

Sand was dredged from the Allegheny River to fill strategically placed hazards that dotted every hole. By the time the U.S. Open was played at Oakmont in 1935, the course had swelled to over 300 bunkers, largely through the additions of Henry's son, William Clark Fownes Jr. The bunkers were raked with a custom-built device called the Oakmont rake, whose heavy tines created deep furrows in the sand, making escape a severe challenge. The most famous hazard is the Church Pews bunker, a vast sand pit measuring approximately 100 by 40 yards situated between the 3rd and 4th fairways, its surface broken by thirteen grass-covered ridges that resemble rows of church pews. The name originated in the 1960s, when a newspaper writer observed that if you found yourself in these pew-like bunkers, only divine intervention could help you save par. William Fownes Jr. became the driving force behind Oakmont's evolution after his father's initial construction. Born in 1878, the younger Fownes was himself an accomplished golfer — he won the 1910 U.S. Amateur — and served as USGA president from 1926 to 1927. He captained the victorious American team at the inaugural Walker Cup in 1922. As Oakmont's green chairman for twenty-four years and later club president from 1935 until his death in 1950, William Fownes continually added bunkers, steepened green contours, and intensified the course's already fearsome difficulty. The drainage ditches that crisscross the property — 1.1 miles in total length — were originally built by the Fownes family as functional water management features, but they also serve as lateral hazards immediately adjacent to fairway landing areas, adding another layer of penal consequence.

Oakmont's greens have long been considered among the fastest and most treacherous in championship golf. A 1977 Stimpmeter measurement showed that Oakmont's greens ran two feet faster than any other tournament course in the country, including Augusta National. The surfaces are large, severely contoured, and demand exceptional putting skill. The club's championship history is unmatched in American golf. Oakmont has hosted the U.S. Open a record ten times: 1927 (Tommy Armour), 1935 (Sam Parks Jr.), 1953 (Ben Hogan), 1962 (Jack Nicklaus in his first professional major), 1973 (Johnny Miller's legendary final-round 63), 1983 (Larry Nelson), 1994 (Ernie Els), 2007 (Angel Cabrera), 2016 (Dustin Johnson), and 2025. It has also hosted multiple U.S. Amateurs, U.S. Women's Opens, and PGA Championships, making it the most frequently used championship venue in the country. The course's physical appearance changed dramatically in the decades following the Fownes era. Between the 1950s and 1990s, thousands of trees were planted across the property, fundamentally altering the open, windswept character that Henry Fownes had created. By the 1994 U.S. Open, Oakmont was lined with mature trees that narrowed fairways, blocked wind, and obscured many of the bunkers that were the course's defining feature. Then, in the early 1990s, club officials discovered a 1950 aerial photograph revealing that Oakmont had been virtually treeless at the time of William Fownes's death. That photograph became the design template for a sweeping restoration. Beginning in the mid-1990s and accelerating before the 2007 U.S. Open, between 5,000 and 8,000 trees were removed, a controversial decision that generated national debate but ultimately restored the course to its original open character. The wind returned as a factor, the bunkers regained their visual and strategic prominence, and Oakmont once again resembled the stern, unforgiving test the Fownes family had intended. In 2023, architects Gil Hanse and Jim Wagner undertook further bunker modifications and expanded several greens in preparation for the 2025 U.S. Open. The total bunker count settled at 168 — fewer than the Fownes-era peak of over 300, but still averaging more than nine per hole. The Church Pews bunker was expanded with additional ridges, and the drainage ditches were restored to full prominence as hazards. Oakmont remains what it has always been: a course that demands precision, penalizes error, and rewards only the most disciplined ball-striking. Its character is inseparable from the Fownes family's philosophy that golf should be a stern examination, and more than a century after Henry Fownes first shaped the Allegheny River farmland into fairways, that philosophy endures in every bunker, every contour, and every unforgiving green.