US Open Golf 2025 - What makes Oakmont the hardest golf course in the world?

[JohnS]

While we're waiting for this weather delay to clear, below is an article on why the Oakmont course is so challenging, to bide the time while we wait...

What makes Oakmont the hardest golf course in the world?

By: Zephyr Melton 

GOLF.com's staffers spent the early portion of U.S. Open week finding out what makes Oakmont such a difficult test.

Oakmont ain’t your average golf course. According to the USGA, the course rating is 78.1 with a slope rating of 150.

For the first round of this week’s U.S. Open, the greens are rolling in the upper 14s on the Stimpmeter, while the rough is cut at 5.25 inches. The course features a near-300-yard par 3 and stretches out to over 7,400 yards. If a scratch golfer were to play the course, they’d do well to keep it under 80. Simply put: Oakmont is hard.

“I’m glad we’ve got spotters out there,” Rory McIlroy said earlier this week. “I played last Monday … You hit a ball off the fairway and you were looking for a good couple minutes just to find it. It’s very penal if you miss. Sometimes it’s penal if you don’t miss.”

Obviously the fast greens and deep rough will give even the best players in the world fits. But even when Oakmont isn’t in “U.S. Open conditioning,” the course still has plenty of ways to punish players.

“Assuming the rough is lower on a average day at Oakmont, in a non-U.S. Open year,” Jon Rahm said. “The biggest challenge will be those fairway bunkers. They’re usually very penal. Very often deep enough where you don’t have a chance to get to the green due to the length.”

As GOLF.com’s Sean Zak noted, the bunkers do not have steep faces that funnel balls to the middle of the sand. Instead, balls settle right on the edges of bunkers and you have to contend with steep grassy banks when hitting your next shot.

“If your ball ends up [on the edge], you’re not off the fairway by that much,” Zak said. “But you have to go 30 degrees left back into the fairway. There’s no advancing [the ball].”

Check out the entire episode of Seen and Heard below where our writers and editors try to crack the code on what makes Oakmont so difficult.

Source: https://golf.com/news/why-oakmont-hardest-course-seen-and-heard/

[MickVanWinkle]

Had the pleasure of attending Friday - Sunday.  Had enough of the rain, so I watched the end from home.  

Walking the course gave me an entirely different appreciation on the plethora of menacing features on any given hole. Add to that the humidity and downpours, and I’d have mentally broken down early in the first round. Even still, getting to be humbled by that course would be a spectacular opportunity. 

[CigarCulture09]

I can attest that Oakmont is beyond difficult. I’ve had the privilege of playing it two different times. While the course is incredibly beautiful it will bring out one’s true character. 

[JohnS]

Congratulations to J.J.Spaun to breakthrough for his first Major Championship! 

J.J. Spaun showed he has grit required to win a U.S. Open at a golf course like Oakmont

Adam Schupak - Golfweek

OAKMONT, Pa. – J.J. Spaun needed a Lou Holtz talk from Adam Schriber.

Spaun’s swing instructor had once taught Holtz, the famed football coach, who returned the favor by teaching Schriber how to deal with his pupils.

“He told me, ‘You got to give them a hug or you put the boot right up their butt and nothing in between. Sometimes it calls for tough love and it’s not always as obvious as you think.’ ”

So, when Spaun was warming up on Wednesday ahead of the 125th U.S. Open and was scared of what he might shoot at big, bad Oakmont Country Club, Schriber was prepared for the moment. 

“Everyone wants to be coddled this week,” Schriber said. “I was like, ‘All right, here comes size 15.’ ” 

Overcoming five bogeys in his first six holes with the sandpaper grit required to hang with such a beast of a course like Oakmont, Spaun sank a 64-foot birdie putt on the par-4 18th hole for one of the most improbable victories at the U.S. Open. Spaun closed in 2-over 72, coming home in 3-under 32 after a 96-minute stoppage due to dangerous weather and course conditions.

“I tried to just continue to dig deep,” he said. “I've been doing it my whole life.”

On Sunday, the 34-year-old Spaun, a journeyman pro who contemplated retirement just a year ago, broke out of a five-way tie late on the back nine and finished the tournament at 1-under 279, the only golfer in red figures. He was two shots ahead of Scotland's Robert MacIntyre, who rallied with 68 after being nine shots back early in a final round that the Golf Channel’s Rich Lerner summed up as “insane and intense, excruciating and exciting, messy and memorable.” 

Oakmont already had lived up to its reputation: the clumsy, the spineless, the alibi artists all had stood aside. For the final day, Mother Nature drew up one final test – a rainstorm – that turned the famed layout into a cauldron of speed, impenetrable rough and the elements merging into one final stand in golf’s battle of attrition. Four players began the final day under par but before long there were none.

J.J. Spaun carries around his trophy while celebrating his U.S. Open win at Oakmont Country Club. Michael Longo/For USA Today Network via Imagn Images

Spaun is golf’s version of a Yorkshire Terrier. In a game focused on the Dobermans and Malamutes, the diminutive Spaun long has punched above his weight and with his coal-miner’s complexion fits in well in Pittsburgh, which in its heyday was self-described as “the Workshop of the World.” 

Spaun, who deals with Type 1 diabetes, already was enjoying his best season as a pro, including pushing Rory McIlroy to the limit in a Monday playoff at the Players Championship in March. Spaun refused to rest on his laurels. He told short-game guru Josh Gregory that he wanted to get better. “I want to be elite,” he said.

He and Gregory began working together on Monday to smooth out a perceived weakness in his game and on Thursday, Spaun opened the U.S. Open by chipping in at his first hole and then made just about everything he looked at on the greens en route to shooting a bogey-free 66. He followed up with rounds of 72-69, which led Schriber to provide something closer to a Holtz hug. 

“You had a B-game but your attitude was A+,” he told Spaun after the second round. “That’s what you need this week.”

That attitude would be put to the test in the final round when he flighted a sand wedge from 93 yards that hit the stick and ricocheted off the elevated green, eventually rolling back 50 yards. Spaun’s caddie, Mark Carens, had lost his father, Eddie, to a brave fight with Alzheimer’s and dementia a year ago to the day, and ever since he would credit good breaks to Eddie in the Sky. But on this occasion, he barked, “What are you doing, Ed? Drinking a beer? You’ve got to pay attention.”

Spaun made bogey instead of birdie. Then he hit a rake on the third and lost another stroke to par. Spaun became the first U.S. Open champion to begin his final round with three consecutive holes over par. It only got worse. He dropped shots on five of the first six holes, and his round was spinning out of control. He admitted that he had scar tissue from skying to a final-round 78 to blow the 54-hole lead at the 2022 FedEx St. Jude Championship, and this had the makings of déjà vu all over again. 

But Spaun refused to throw in the towel, and he received a reprieve as he reached the ninth tee when a horn blew suspending play. During the break, while crews squeegeed the fairways and greens to remove casual water, he changed his outfit and cleared his mind thanks to his coaches.  

“That break was actually the key for me to winning this tournament,” said Spaun, who became the first player on Tour since 2003 to shoot in the 40s on the front nine of the final round and go on to win.

It was the ultimate halftime adjustment. Hug or the size 15 shoe? Schriber smiled and said, “It was a bit of a foot up the ass. I told him, the course bent you over for the first six holes like no other. Now it’s your turn. No regrets – that was the tagline.”

During his warmup session at the range before the resumption of the final round, Gregory delivered the hug. 

“I looked at him as he went to the tee and I said, ‘Bud, you’re a dad, this is Father’s Day, you’ve got two beautiful babies, and you’ve got a chance to win the U.S. Open. You would’ve signed for this on Monday.”

Recalled Spaun: “They were just like, Dude, just chill. Just let it come to you, be calm. Stop trying so hard.” 

When play resumed under a cement-gray sky, Spaun smoked his driver into the fairway and his confidence surged. Then after Eddie in the Sky arranged for a good lie at the par-5 12th, Spaun took advantage, nailing a 40-foot bomb, his first birdie of the day, and a 22-footer at 14 Meanwhile, the rain resumed and Sam Burns, the 54-hole leader, fought his swing and the soggy turf. He imploded with a pair of double bogeys at Nos. 11 and 15. He ballooned to a 78 and finished T-7.

“I didn't have my best stuff today,” Burns said. “But I can hold my head high.”

Adam Scott played alongside Burns in the final group and the wheels fell off for him too. He had described Oakmont as “not blow your brains out kind of hard just yet,” on Thursday and was the only player among the top 10 entering the final round to have won a major. His dream of winning a second one 12 years later and becoming the second-oldest U.S. Open winner at age 44 was deferred as he stopped hitting fairways and shot 79, tumbling to T-12. Carlos Ortiz (73) shared the lead for a stretch until he made double bogey at 15, tying for fourth with Tyrrell Hatton (72) who stumbled to a bogey at 17. Viktor Hovland (73) hung around to the end and finished third. And MacIntyre grabbed the clubhouse lead at 1-over 281 but failed to convert his birdie putt at 18.

Spaun surrendered the lead with a bogey at 15 but he saved his best tee shot for the 314-yard, par-4 17th, driving the green to 18 feet and a 2-putt birdie.

All Spaun needed was a par at the last. He left himself a sweeping long-range birdie putt. But Hovland — or was it Eddie in the Sky — gifted him another break when his second shot stopped just outside Spaun’s ball on the same line and he had to putt first. Huddled behind the green with his teenaged son, Gregory celebrated Spaun’s good fortune. “We get a read,” he said.   

A three putt would force a Monday playoff like the one Spaun lost at the Players Championship in March. Carens, Spaun’s caddie, wanted no part in extra holes – he’s been on the bag for seven playoffs in his career and is winless. Spaun’s putt broke left-to-right at least 5 feet as it climbed to the hole. 

“About eight feet out, I kind of went up to the high side to see if it had a chance of going in, and it was like going right in. I was just in shock, disbelief that it went in and it was over,” he said.

Spaun flipped his putter in the air, lifted his arms skyward and pumped his fists before hugging Carens. It was the longest putt made on any hole during the championship, the ultimate exclamation mark on his second career PGA Tour title, and turned a sleepy affair into one of the more chaotic and memorable major-championship days in some time.

And then Spaun had the perfect Father’s Day moment, walking off the green to sign his card and make it official with daughter Emerson in his arms. 

“Every time dad goes golfing, she's like, ‘Were you the winner today?’ Sometimes I'm like, Yeah, I was.” Spaun recounted. “So today she's like, ‘You're the winner today.’ Like she got to see it. She didn't have to ask me.”

Source: https://golfweek-eu.usatoday.com/story/sports/golf/majors/us-open/2025/06/15/j-j-spaun-demonstrated-grit-required-us-open-oakmont/84223355007/