Oakmont, the site of this year’s U.S. Open, and the tall tale that tells it all

You ever hear a story so good you need it to be real?

The kind that reveals the truth at the core of the tale, telling the entire saga of a place and its people. One of those fables passed down and recited from one generation to the next, each version carrying a few new details and a little more punch. The more times the story gets told, the more ubiquitous it becomes. The more it becomes the truth.

There’s a story about Oakmont Country Club the members love to tell. And they’re right to tell it. Because it’s the perfect story about the hardest golf course in America, the place just outside of Pittsburgh that is hosting the U.S. Open this week. It’s the perfect story about the Fownes family, the father and son who built this course and believed so deeply in the sanctity of par that the famous W.C. Fownes’ line goes: “A shot poorly played should be a shot irrevocably lost.”

And this story? The people of Oakmont always believed it to be factual.

Until recently.

“Well …” Oakmont historian David Moore said. “There’s a little debate about that right now.”

It goes like this.

The 1945 war bond drive goes through Pittsburgh, where an exhibition event is staged pitting Sam Snead and Gene Sarazen against Byron Nelson and Jug McSpaden. During a practice round on Oakmont’s seventh hole – a tough par 4 – Snead takes an extra aggressive line and flies the fairway bunker. It leaves him a short, easy pitch onto the green for birdie.

The Oakmont superintendent sees it, and Emil Loeffler rushes up the hill, past the ninth green and into the wraparound clubhouse to find a phone. He calls his boss, W.C. Fownes, who is on a trip in Rhode Island.

“Mr. Fownes, Sam Snead just carried that trap we laid out,” Loeffler says.

“OK, can we take care of that by tomorrow?” Fownes responds.

So the next day, now in competition, Snead takes the same aggressive line. This time, he walks up the fairway to find his ball sitting in a new bunker, Loeffler standing alongside of it.

“Compliments of Mr. Fownes,” the latter says.

They had put a bunker in overnight.

That is the ultimate Oakmont tale. A course with the toughest fairways, the thickest, nastiest rough, the fastest greens you’ve seen and bunkers that were made so difficult by furrowed rakes that they became illegal by 1964. Founder H.C. Fownes used to sit on the porch in his older age and watch play all day, looking to see if any poor shots weren’t properly punished. And his son W.C. may have been even more vindictive in his desire to preserve Oakmont’s challenge. “Let the clumsy, the spineless, the alibi artist stand aside!” W.C. is known to have said.

“There was a little trace of Dante in W.C.,” said Steven Schlossman, a Carnegie Mellon history professor and author of multiple books on Oakmont.

This story encapsulated those truths so well. Until Gil Hanse and his team restored Oakmont two years ago in anticipation of it hosting the U.S. Open for the 10th time.

One day recently, Moore was chatting with an Oakmont board member who helped with the restoration and who is on the archive committee. Moore and Hanse went through old photos for hours one day at the start of the restoration, and they found these old drawings that look like hazy aerial shots of each hole. He thinks they were for a newspaper previewing a tournament.

The member told Moore that they kept staring at this 1938 drawing of No. 7.

“It looks like the bunker – the infamous Snead bunker – is already there.”

Their reality was in question. Shortly after, Moore had a conversation with club pro Devin Gee, a man as good at telling the story in interviews as anyone.

“Hey, we think it might have been there beforehand,” Moore told him.

“Really?” Gee said.

“Maybe.”

“Well, don’t let the truth get in the way of a good story,” Gee joked.

Maybe it’s even more than that. Maybe, it’s best to not let a little ambiguity get in the way of the truth. There’s the famous line from “The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance,” when the Jimmy Stewart character explains who really shot the title character, and he asks why the editor isn’t going to run the story with the truth. The editor says, “This is the West, sir. When the legend becomes fact, print the legend.”

And Oakmont is built on legends. Like the legend of H.C. Fownes, a successful Pittsburgh industrialist before the turn of the century, getting a flat tire on his bike. To patch it himself, he used a torch to heat a wire, but he did it without protective gear. He soon had spots in his vision, and a doctor misdiagnosed those spots as arteriosclerosis. H.C., 39 at the time, was given a few years to live. So he sold his Carrie Furnace Company to Andrew Carnegie and tried to enjoy his supposed final years. That eventually meant taking up golf and becoming one of the best players in the area. But he wanted a tougher course, so he built his own. It wasn’t until years later a doctor corrected the diagnosis. He lived until 1935.

Every Fownes tale involves some sense of absolutism. Right or wrong. Good or bad, from the result of a bad approach rolling off the green to the behavior of Oakmont members. One time, H.C. spotted a member violating a minor club rule. By the time the player finished their round, his clubhouse locker was cleaned out and stuffed in a box. He was no longer a member. Their course played the same way.As far back as 1915, Oakmont members put on a skit chronicled in Golf Illustrated in which members recited a poem:

Bill Fownes stood by a green one day,

When someone holed in four;

“I’ll put a stop to that,” said he,

“I’ll build two bunkers more.”

And sure enough he build them both,

Where they could sure be seen;

The first one right before the tee,

The other on the green.”

“It wasn’t that they saw it as vindictiveness,” Schlossman said. “More of a sense of the virtuous should be rewarded by the opportunity to hit onto the fairways that were as good as anybody else’s, on holes beautifully designed, fair, challenging, and hitting to greens the likes of which nobody had ever played before in terms of their quality.”

But for each one of these stories that are, as far as we know, factual, people around Oakmont wonder if that bunker story is actually false.

Moore and Gee wondered. They’d always been told the story, but it’s not like anybody outright said which bunker or even which side of the fairway. Maybe it was actually the left-hand side, Moore wondered. That would make more strategic sense with the hole shape.

How does a story like this even start? Moore’s archives didn’t pull up any clear first reference to the lore. I spent an unforgivable amount of time digging through newspaper archives from the 1930s through the present trying to find the first printed reference. As best we could tell, it wasn’t written and published anywhere for decades after the alleged incident.

Marino Parascenzo, one of the great golf scribes and a longtime Pittsburgh Post-Gazette reporter, has written about it most. It was in his 2003 book “Oakmont: 100 Years,” and in many other freelance pieces, including one on the USGA website.

The first shot I saw at the 2025 U.S. Open went 5 feet, maybe, out of the thick stuff at No. 15.

The player, Jacques Kruyswijk, doubled over in laughter, picked the ball up and tried again.

There was an Oakmont history video made around the turn of the 21st century. The producers interview past winners about the course, including Snead, but Snead himself isn’t shown telling this tale. But one of the interviewees is the great Gene Sarazen, the seven-time major winner who was Snead’s playing partner that day.

Sarazen tells the story. He talks about Snead carrying the trap. He tells us about Loeffler running inside to call Fownes.

“Mr. Fownes, Sam Snead carried that trap we put in,” he recalled Loeffler saying.

“He says, ‘Put another one below it!’ ” Sarazen continues.

The man was there. He saw Snead hit the alleged first shot. He saw him hit the drive the next day into the bunker. Of course, Sarazen was not with Loeffler as he made the alleged call, as sure as he was it was to Newport, Rhode Island. He was presumably not there as the bunker was built overnight. And this story happened 50-odd years before. Who knows if Sarazen was really just retelling a version relayed to him over the years.

But then, in all the archive hunting, we found one graphic in the Valley News of Lebanon, New Hampshire, used in advance of the 2007 U.S. Open at Oakmont. When looking further, it became clear it was a graphic made by the USGA previewing all 18 holes that newspapers around the country used.

On No. 7, the graphic tells a story about Sam Snead easily clearing the bunkers during the 1935 U.S. Open. It says Fownes was so angry he added another bunker.

Was that the bunker shown in the 1938 aerial shot of the hole? Was a different bunker added during that war bond event? Was it actually the left side of the fairway, like Moore suggested? Were all of these pieces of different stories slowly morphed together over the years into one grander tale?

There’s just one problem. Sam Snead did not play in the 1935 U.S. Open.

It is at this moment that my sanity came into question. Perhaps, none of this is real. What are we really sure of, when you really think about it? I don’t know, man. I just know Oakmont is really hard.