Why players nearly boycotted a U.S. Open at Oakmont

At next week’s U.S. Open, you’ll see Oakmont Country Club’s bunkers meticulously manicured, perfectly raked and sparkling with gorgeous white sand.

But it wasn’t always like this.

In fact, the notoriously difficult championship course was even more maddening decades ago, and the bunkers specifically were the reason players nearly boycotted a U.S. Open there.

GOLF recently toured Oakmont’s historic clubhouse with David Moore, Oakmont’s curator of collections, and Moore took us behind the scenes and into the locker rooms, grill room, SWAT room, library and more while also explaining the significance of dozens of historic pieces on display or on the walls. (You can watch the full video tour here.)

One of those exhibits was on the stairs off the living room, and it was dedicated to Oakmont’s original bunkers.

Oakmont’s inafmous ‘furrowed’ bunkers

“One of the things that has been sort of lost to history here at Oakmont is the history of the furrowed bunkers,” Moore said. “When the course was first founded, the sand bunkers was not your prototypical golf sand that you are used to today. The original bunkers here were filled with river sand from the nearby Allegheny River. It was coarse, it was dense, it was pebble-filled, and the way they raked it that really created a true penalty for finding a bunker is what they called the furrows.”

According to Moore, the club used heavy steel rakes — weighing about 50 pounds each — with four-inch tines to rake the bunker perpendicular to the hole and create the deep furrows. Balls would settle into those ridges and, with the mounds of sand in front and behind the ball, the only way to make clean contact would be to pitch out sideways.

That’s how Oakmont designer Henry Fownes and his son, William Fownes, wanted players to be penalized. The golf course had no water, so the bunkers needed to be a true penalty.

“A shot misplayed was a shot irrevocably lost,” Moore said. “So if you found the bunker, what they wanted you to do was chip out.”

Although if you know anything about current-day pro golfers, you know they don’t like to be humiliated. The same can be said for past pros.

“[The bunkers] became such a controversy that in 1953 the players actually threatened to boycott the U.S. Open until there was an agreement made that the furrows would be taken out of the fairway bunkers but remain around the greenside bunkers,” Moore said. “The Fownes believed in a true Darwinian test of man versus golf course.”

Geoff Shackelford’s Quadrilateral newsletter recently resurfaced the topic of Oakmont’s furrowed bunkers as well, even finding old newspaper clippings.

“When W.C. Fownes had those 240 bunkers raked so they left furrows an inch and a half deep, he eliminated one of the finest shots in golf — the recovery from a bunker,” Olin Dutra, the 1934 U.S. Open champ, told the Associated Press prior to the ’53 Open.