When U.S. Open competitors arrive at the Oakmont Country Club outside Pittsburgh, they will find a venue with an unparalleled championship pedigree that includes hosting its 10th national open this week (more than any other venue in history) as well as six U.S. Amateurs in years past, a trio of PGA Championships and two U.S. Women’s Opens. And once those golfers start playing, they will encounter large and undulating greens so slick and sinister they cause even the most seasoned tour professionals to go weak in the knees as they stand over putts, bunker complexes capable of inducing equally debilitating bouts of anxiety, and firm and fast turf that occasionally sends perfectly well-hit tee shots and approaches into those sandy hazards.
But what they will not find on the course that club founder and Oakmont’s first president Henry C. Fownes laid out on 191 rolling acres of farmland just off of the Allegheny River are trees. At least not very many of them, for Oakmont these days looks and plays a lot like the traditional links that the Pittsburgh steel magnate and five-time U.S. Amateur contestant intended it to be when he opened the course in 1904.
That’s due to a tree-cutting program that the club commenced in 1993 and continued up to the 2016 U.S. Open, when the national championship was last contested there. The goal was to rectify the results of a so-called beautification program that had led to the planting of thousands of pin oaks, pines and other species across what had been rather bleak grounds and return Oakmont to its architectural roots. By the time the club was done, it had felled an estimated 15,000 trees.
The results of that undertaking made environmentalists apoplectic, with some going so far as to dub it the “Oakmont chainsaw massacre.” It poisoned friendships at the club and led to protest campaigns and legal threats. But course architecture aficionados applauded the move and how it made Oakmont an inland links again, as well as the improvements in turf health that followed once the grasses were again receiving proper portions of air flow, sunlight and water.
“We probably took down 1,000 trees before we got caught. A lot of people were upset. But what the club was doing made a lot of sense .... ”
BOB FORD
(retired head golf professional at Oakmont)
Those observers also liked how the program had opened up views across the well-contoured property and provided wider corridors of play that gave golfers more shot options – and oftentimes made holes more interesting – as it also eliminated branches that had been obstructing natural lines of play. And without the trees that rose behind most of the putting surfaces like backdrops behind a stage, golfers had to gauge more carefully the actual distances of their approaches into what had returned to being infinity greens. The removal of so many trees also made wind more of a factor again, as there were fewer of them blocking it out.
Ran Morrissett, the creator of the acclaimed Golf Club Atlas website and former architecture editor for Golf Magazine, spoke for many when he told Global Golf Post: “I am very grateful for the tree cutting, and Oakmont did not do anything that Henry Fownes or his son [who went by W.C., for William Clark, and shared his father’s passion for Old World golf] would not have approved.”
The fact that golf clubs all over the country – including some of America’s most notable such as Oak Hill, Inverness, Sleepy Hollow, Plainfield, Garden City, Winged Foot and Chicago Golf – followed its lead by instigating much-praised tree-cutting projects of their own demonstrates that Oakmont had the right idea. And while respected voices in the game have spoken out against those initiatives, Jack Nicklaus, Gary Player and Rees Jones among them, the general consensus is that these have been good moves for golf.
“What Oakmont did certainly changed the narrative and got clubs looking at the intent of their original designs and finding ways to bring them back,” said Morrissett.
To be fair, the National Golf Links of America deserves credit for instigating this trend toward felling trees that had either been planted throughout America’s most classic courses or were “volunteers” that had naturally sprouted from the ground. But it was Oakmont that made people take notice, primarily because it had a much more public profile as a regular site of USGA championships.
The seeds for that renaissance were sown in 1962 when one of Oakmont’s more influential members, Fred Brand Jr., reacted quite adversely to an article Herbert Warren Wind had penned for The New Yorker. In that piece, the celebrated golf writer described the course as “that ugly, old brute.”
According to the Oakmont centennial book authored by Marino Parascenzo, those words prompted Brand, who was also a member of Augusta National and had served on the USGA’s executive committee and as a rules official for multiple major championships, to ask himself: “Why can’t it be a beautiful old brute?”
Beauty, however, is a relative term when it comes to describing a links-style layout. And the starkness of Oakmont back in the day, to say nothing of Wind’s words, might well have been off-putting to a man who admired the tree-nursery splendor of Augusta. But to those who appreciate a traditional track, there was much to like about Oakmont from both visual and strategic standpoints – and therefore no reason to make any radical changes.
Alas, Brand did not see it that way, and the interrogative he had posed to himself eventually led the club to begin planting trees, putting in more than 3,200 by the time Johnny Miller was winning the 1973 U.S. Open there and then adding thousands more before the championship returned to Oakmont in 1994.
“In the beginning, this tree-planting program was fairly benign, and in the eyes of proponents added a little needed definition and dimension to the course,” one-time Oakmont president and grounds committee chairman, the late Banks Smith, told Parascenzo for that book. “But just as cute little kittens grow up to be cats, the trees matured into a very dominating influence. We went from a links-type course to a full parkland-type course, much like all other courses in western Pennsylvania.”
Having arrived at Oakmont in 1973 to start work as an assistant professional under the legendary Lew “The Chin” Worsham, Bob Ford went on to serve as head golf professional there for 37 years, retiring from the club in 2016. Which means he had an inside-the-ropes view of both the tree planting and cutting that occurred at Oakmont.
“Fred wanted to make it like Augusta – pretty, and with lots of trees,” Ford said. “He spearheaded the beautification program, hired Robert Trent Jones Sr. to oversee it, and they planted trees everywhere. In front of bunkers and beside them. Around the ditches. Behind the greens, too, and so close that a player would sometimes brush against a branch as he walked on the edge of the putting surface.
“They were planting them when I started to work at Oakmont and through the 1980s as well,” Ford added. “We had beautification days on Fridays back then. A member could bring a guest, the club would charge a green fee of $25, and all that money would go to paying for the tree plantings.”
It was not until the early 1990s that members of the grounds crew started firing up the chainsaws. At first, the takedowns were modest, and mostly unnoticed given how many trees had come to dot the course. Then, the club accelerated the process, and to keep things on the down low took to conducting much of their work in the evenings. That meant felling trees under the cover of darkness, using floodlights to guide them and then employing chippers, stump grinders, high-powered vacuums and sod to remove all possible remnants of the carnage that had just occurred. By the time the sun came up, the course was ready to play.
For a spell, the members were none the wiser to what was going on.
But Ford’s wife, Nancy, realized something was afoot when she started to hear the whirr of chainsaws when she rose in the middle of the night from her bed to feed one of their babies in the course-side cottage that was their home. Surprised by the racket, Nancy asked her husband what was happening. After putting her off a few times, he finally spilled the beans.
“That’s Banks taking down a few trees,” Ford said, referring to the grounds chairman himself.
Eventually, word got out as to what was going on.
“We probably took down 1,000 trees before we got caught,” Ford recalled. “A lot of people were upset. But what the club was doing made a lot of sense, and we had been consulting with the USGA about it and also the golf course architect Arthur Hills.”
By the time that Oakmont hosted the 2007 U.S. Open, the course looked and felt much as it had 60 years before. And the club was no worse for wear from all the tensions that had arisen during the tree cutting. In fact, it ended up bringing Oakmont members together as they came to appreciate how it had enhanced an already great golf course. In addition, they were pleased that the results of that undertaking were being so well received in the greater golf world, with a number of top clubs following suit by initiating tree-cutting programs of their own.
Having no doubt spun in their graves for several decades, one could safely assume that both Fowneses, father and son, were resting in peace once again.
The club certainly seemed to be back in a good space as well.
“Once it was done, everybody seemed to like it, and everyone took credit for it,” Ford said. “You could not find one person who said it was a bad idea.”
John Zimmers, who was Oakmont’s head golf course superintendent from 1999 to 2017 and now holds the same position at another former U.S. Open stalwart, the Inverness Club, agrees. “People actually loved the views and how they could look across the golf course and see the ditches, bunkers, greens and stretches of fescue,” he said.
The only negative feedback Ford has received has been from a few of the old tour professionals, such as Nicklaus, Player and Lee Trevino.
“I ran into Jack once at a dinner, and he said he hated that so many trees were taken down,” Ford said. “I think those guys all feel that way because they want to remember Oakmont the way they played it in their era.”
As for its ripple effect, the program led to something of a renaissance in the design realm that saw dozens of classic courses go back to the looks and feels that made them great.
“You cannot believe the number of people from other clubs who came to see what we were doing,” added Zimmers. “They wanted to know what we were doing and why we were doing it. And I think by having the vision as well as the will to cut down those trees, we helped a lot of clubs do the same.”
Top: The 15th, 16th and 17th Holes of Oakmont Country Club, circa 2024
Fred Vuich, USGA