Part I: Furrow Furor
Extreme bunker raking practices have been retired, but U.S. Opens at Oakmont have always made players angry while igniting fierce philosophic debates.
Oakmont’s U.S. Opens have traditionally presented an unusual blend of strategic and penal design infused with notes of rage, perniciousness, vitriol, and even boycott threats. This year’s early reports of mindless hack-out hay and fast greens set us up for another grumpy week outside Pittsburgh and the inevitable, probably legit cries of excessive de-skilling merely designed to produce a high winning score for Oakmont’s sadistic members. But history also tells us that any decent amount of rain can render Oakmont defenseless by Pittsburgh’s rough-and-tumble standards (i.e., someone daring to finish under par).
While Oakmont’s former practice of “furrowing” bunkers has been retired for over sixty years, I thought it’d be fun to revisit the arguments, complaints, debates, and changes of heart at the center of Oakmont’s first four U.S. Opens. Some of the banter even fueled 1920s brouhahas between advocates of the strategic and penal schools of architecture. We will probably hear similar but less articulate refrains next week. Either way, it’s always enjoyable to be reminded of the first-world problems faced by professionals whenever majors turn up at Oakmont.
1927: Jones Was For Furrowing Until He Wasn’t
Two years after hosting the U.S. Amateur, a field headlined by defending champion Bobby Jones, Gene Sarazen, and Walter Hagen faced a renovated course for the club’s initial U.S. Open. One key setup element of Oakmont would remain in place as long as Henry Fownes was around: furrowing the bunker sand.
The practice of plowing the sand with deep-tined rakes became Oakmont’s thing early on. As strategic as the course was even in its early iterations, the Fownes’ philosophy dictated that a “shot poorly played should be a shot irrevocably lost.”
Prior to the event, Jones previewed the championship in his syndicated newspaper column. He wrote how the 1927 U.S. Open “will mark the first organized attack by foreign professionals upon our Open Championship,” then reflected on the U.S. Amateur without mentioning his 9 & 8 win over George Von Elm. Or that he had lost in the U.S. Amateur final match as a 17-year-old in 1919, handily beating William Fownes 5 & 3 in a week that “stripped eighteen pounds off me.”
Jones declared Oakmont “the best course on which either championship has been played within my limited experience in national competition.” (Humility note: he was already a two-time U.S. Open champion at this point and had been playing all over the land for a decade).
Jones curiously went out of his way to defend the club’s sand furrowing and even offered a little instructional advice on how to deal with them.
“They have been uniformly cursed by the players and glorified by the press, and I think the press is right,” he wrote on championship eve. “It has always appeared to me that going into a bunker should incur a penalty of at least one stroke unless the recovery be particularly brilliant.”
Jones then recorded a career-worst T11 U.S. Open finish in 1927, the only time in eleven U.S. Open appearances that Jones finished outside the top ten.
Four months and at least 140 neat bourbons later, Jones pulled out his Underwood and vented as only a Harvard-schooled English lit student could.
“I was afraid, after Oakmont, that any criticism I might make of the sand hazards there would be interpreted as an ill-natured grumbling against the course, because I had made such a miserable showing in the tournament,” he wrote.
Right, Bobby. Now get to your point!
The rationale for furrows, as Jones understood it, was to reward “superlative excellence in the play through the green.” Here comes the change in mindset on the blast method for furrowing.
“There was no amount of skill in bunker play which would avail.”
After more writing about how we’re all human, make mistakes, need room to recover, blah, blah, blah, Jones delivered his verdict.