Standing on the back porch at Oakmont Country Club, site of the U.S. Open, which begins on Thursday, you can see 16 of the 18 greens. This is something that was not possible and was downright undesirable when the club hosted the Open in 1994.
At that Open, Oakmont, considered then and now to be among the toughest tests of golf in America, looked like a forest, with trees lining the fairways. The club also had hundreds of bunkers, meaning an errant shot would be punished by a tree or a bunker — or in some cases, both.
The course, near Pittsburgh, that will be on view this week began its transformation under cover of darkness after that Open and culminated in 2023 with Gil Hanse restoring it to the original vision of Henry Fownes, the club’s founder and principal architect.
As strange as it may sound today, those trees began to fall at the hands of members cutting during the night.
“Absolutely true,” said Bob Ford, once the longtime head pro who used to live in a house adjacent to the 18th green. “They went out at 4:30 in the morning with lights. My wife would wake up to the sounds of the chain saws, and I’d say, ‘Banks is at it again.’”
Banks was R. Banks Smith, a corporate lawyer and the president of Oakmont at the time. Known as Old Chainsaw, Smith was the leader of the tree removal project that largely went undetected for years.
“We took down 1,000 trees before we got caught,” Ford said. “We got caught by a caddie who went to go to the bathroom behind his favorite tree, and he couldn’t find it. Then he looked around and there was some newly planted sod. He ratted us out.”
Other club members didn’t take kindly to it. But more than what the tree removal meant for Oakmont — where some 15,000 trees were ultimately removed — exposing the terrain to what it had looked like when Fownes designed the course set off a debate about trees in American golf that is still going on today.
The winning score at that 1994 U.S. Open was five under par. When the Open was next played at Oakmont in 2007, with far fewer trees, the winning score was five over par.
“It paved the way for us,” said Hanse, who has established himself as a leading restoration architect. “It allowed us to point to something that was tremendously successful, and we could do it from a historical and architectural perspective. It dispelled the myth that cutting down the trees made the course easier.”
How a course designed as an inland links style, and not on the water, came to be choked with trees started off out of a sense of patriotic duty.
“Golf courses built 100 years ago were built on farms or on the water where there was minimal vegetation in the first place,” said Michael McCormick, the grounds superintendent at Oakmont. “It was cheaper. You couldn’t cut down thousands of trees.”
But in the 1960s and ’70s, planting trees was tied to Lady Bird Johnson’s campaign as the first lady to beautify America. Millions of trees were planted across the United States. “They had tree-planting committees who would go out on the course,” McCormick said. “It was trendy in that generation. What people always forget is when you plant a tree, it gets bigger and bigger and bigger.”
And however beautiful trees are in parks or along boulevards, they make it harder to maintain a golf course. Trees compete with grass for the three things a course needs to thrive: air, light and water.
“Trees impact how you play a golf course, but they also have an impact on turf health,” McCormick said. “As they compete, you start losing grass. The easiest thing to do is turn it into rough. But then playing surfaces begin to shrink. Over decades, fairways and greens here got 30 to 40 percent smaller than they originally were.”
By the 1994 Open, every hole at Oakmont was lined with trees. Between that Open and the one in 2007, all the interior trees were removed. From 2007 to 2016, the club focused on trees around the perimeter.
“Tree removal was extremely contentious at first, and the old guard pushed back in a major way,” McCormick said. “Fast-forward to today. Tree removal was the first step to taking the course back to Fownes. There were times when you could hit your ball in a bunker and then there was a tree between you and where you wanted to hit it.”
The course continued to play tough, validating that first step. Without as many trees, Oakmont’s fast and frustrating greens got plenty of sun and air and became even slicker.
But Hanse said not a lot of restoration was done at that point. He was brought on in 2020 when the club realized it needed to redo its irrigation system. That project was the catalyst to create a master plan for the course.
Unlike other restorations, where Hanse and his partner Jim Wagner could look to an architect’s breadth of work, Oakmont was the only course that Fownes designed. And he tinkered with it for decades.
A Fownes was in charge of the club and the golf course for over 40 years, Hanse said, with Henry’s son William taking over after his father died in 1935.
“During that period of time, Oakmont underwent almost annual changes,” he said. “If they found a weakness, they filled it in. If they saw something irrelevant, they took it out.”
Hanse and Wagner set about researching the best version of every hole — and stopped looking in 1947, when William Fownes left the club.
Rethinking bunkers overall was a major step. At its height, Oakmont had about 330 bunkers in the 1920s, McCormick said. The Fownes family had reduced that number to 170 in the 1930s, which was what Hanse based his reiteration on.
Still, the bunkers that remain cover 330,000 square feet. (Many courses have around 50,000 to 70,000 square feet of bunkers.) The hole with the fewest bunkers is No. 16 with just one. The fourth hole has the most, with 23.
Hanse also expanded the size of the greens by 24,000 square feet. This allows for many more hole locations. It’s also part of a broader movement to reclaim greens and fairways after decades of mowing patterns changing their size and width.
“Oakmont starts this, and all these other clubs start looking at it and going in that direction,” McCormick said. “At Oakmont, full-scale removal of all trees was applicable because that’s how it was when Henry Fownes started it.”
But that strategy isn’t right for every course. Hanse pointed to Winged Foot, a U.S. Open host site in New York that he has also restored. When A.W. Tillinghast designed it, there were trees on the property, and trees play a strategic role on the course. So they were worked into the restoration.
“We said if these holes were cut through the woods, we should try to keep them,” Hanse said. “On the other end, Oakmont was wide open. You take every course with its history, and you’re respectful to it.”
Smith’s original tree cutting made the Oakmont restorations possible. That work also changed the conversations at many golden-age courses around the country.
“Over a longer period of time there became more of an acceptance of what was done,” Hanse said. “Now, it’s widely regarded as being amazingly successful. There’s not a stigma. Back in the early 2000s, you had to be careful with what you said.”
This year, it’s likely that what is said during the U.S. Open will be less about the agronomy and more about the psychology of players who rise to the Oakmont test.
Paul Sullivan, the Wealth Matters columnist from 2008 to 2021, is the founder of The Company of Dads, a work and parenting site aimed at fathers. He is also the author of The Thin Green Line: The Money Secrets of the Super Wealthy and Clutch: Why Some People Excel Under Pressure and Others Don’t. @sullivanpaul
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