Thoughts From Oakland Hills

By Bill Fields
Photo By J.D. Cuban August 15, 2008

Think, for a moment, of elite golf as a game of tug-of-war to decide bragging rights at recess. The players, equipped with the latest and greatest clubs, balls, swings and pre-shot routines money can buy, hold one end of the rope. The folks who control the golf courses where those players try to strut their stuff grasp the other end, armed with neutralizing agents--equally high-tech fertilizers, mowers and battle plans. Nobody wants to get rope burn. Nobody wants to end up on their backsides. Whether measured by scores or pride, nobody wants to lose, and this probably has been the case since golf balls were constructed of boiled goose feathers stuffed into leather pouches.

A basketball arena can have soft rims, a baseball park a short right-field fence, or a football stadium slippery turf, but the range of possible differences from one locale to the other is minimal. The basket is 10 feet high, bases are 90 feet apart and the football field is 100 yards long. The variables of golf's playing fields help make it the wonderful game it is.

This diversity--the scope of possibilities for where the action takes place--is not without consequences. Bobby Jones, Ben Hogan, Jack Nicklaus and Tiger Woods would have won championships playing in parking lots or through cornfields. But how easy should a course play? Or how hard?

Should the course be the star, or should the stars be the show? The questions have heated up this year, fueled in particular by the setups at the major championships: the Masters, where the modifications of Augusta National have made the course play more like a traditional U.S. Open, grind-it-out pars replacing flurries of birdies and eagles; the U.S. Open, now perceived to be tough, yes, but fairer thanks to graduated rough at Torrey Pines South; the British Open, where four days of very strong wind presented links golf on the edge at Royal Birkdale, yet it allowed creative shotmakers to survive, even thrive.

The major season concluded last week with the PGA Championship on the South course at Oakland Hills CC in Bloomfield Township, Mich., and the conversation about the nature of the proper stage for the world's best golfers continued. Padraig Harrington's victory over Sergio Garcia and Ben Curtis in a taut final round will be remembered for the Irishman's clutch shotmaking and sure putting--particularly the Woodsian, must-have putts he sank on the final three holes to secure his second consecutive major title and third in six starts--but the course also was front and center.

Oakland Hills is akin to a race course with a lot of hairpin turns that forever have a driver on alert. The layout's curves are in the form of the humped and rolling greens architect Donald Ross shaped in 1918. Like the stained-glass windows in an old church that has been repainted and re-roofed through the years, the greens remain as Oakland Hills' distinctive feature. "I've always said these are the most difficult greens in the country, if not the world," said Kerry Haigh, managing director of championships for the PGA of America, who was in charge of the course setup last week. "That fact, with the additional changes that were made, meant that it was going to be a very challenging and difficult course."

Those "additional changes" were carried out in 2006 by architect Rees Jones--with about 350 more yards, new and refashioned bunkers, an enlarged pond and reconfigured green on No. 16 among the biggest touches. It was a 21st century version of what Jones' father, Robert Trent Jones, had done at Oakland Hills before the 1951 U.S. Open, when he toughened the course into what came to be known as "The Monster" by adding length, creating/repositioning many fairway bunkers, and turning the eighth and 18th holes into taxing par 4s. Hogan won that Open at seven-over 287 by shooting a final-round 67, writing another boldfaced line for himself in golf lore. Trent Jones and Oakland Hills also made names for themselves, and major-as-survival test became a recurring theme in the sport, in no small part because of USGA executive director Joseph C. Dey Jr., for whom "protect par" was practically an 11th Commandment.