Still Crazy After All These Years

90th PGA Championship
Oakland Hills Country Club
Bloomfield Township / Michigan
August / 07-10 / 2008

For those who think technology has ruined America's championship golf courses, we give you the South Course at Oakland Hills: unfazed, unflinching and unflappable in the face of everything every golfer has thrown at it.

Sure, there are some new back tees on the South Course for this year's PGA Championship, and a few new bunkers. But unlike, say, Augusta National, which has been transmogrified into something that Jack, Arnie and Gary barely recognize, Oakland Hills, in suburban Detroit, still looks and plays the same as it did when Nicklaus won a U.S. Senior Open there in 1991 (when no one managed even-par 280 for the regulation 72 holes), when Palmer won a Senior Open there in 1981 (when only two golfers broke par in any round all week), and when Gary Player won the PGA there in 1972 (launching a Hail Mary 9-iron shot over willows and the pond on 16 to within four feet). The willows, by the way, withered away and have been removed.

Heck, if Ben Hogan were still alive, he'd even recognize present-day Oakland Hills. Its design is hardly different from the way it was when he won the 1951 U.S. Open (finishing with a 67, one of only two rounds under par for the week) and purportedly dubbed it The Monster.

Although 57 years later the Motor City Monster might appear a lot tamer, lacking the ankle-deep hayfield rough and ragged, rugged-looking bunkers of '51, it is anything but tame. That's because Oakland Hills has hardly messed with its greens since before Hogan's time. They're the grandest, most glorious set of putting surfaces ever to give the world's best golfers fits of frustration. Oakland Hills is the home of rainbow putts with 25 feet of break, of grass bowls with flagsticks on their rims, of multiple humps and ridges that turn players into pretzels trying to figure out the line.

Older generations might look at the extreme banks and slopes on these greens and compare them to miniature ski slopes or bicycle velodromes. Today's generation would likely compare the contours to halfpipes of a snowboard park.

Nicklaus has called them "the toughest set of greens we play in major-championship golf."

Paul Azinger, this year's U.S. Ryder Cup captain, thinks they're "more difficult than Augusta National's."

The late Al Watrous, who served as pro at Oakland Hills for decades, always said, "When you reach the green, that's when the game begins."

"The plateaus and ledges on our greens make for good risk-reward situations," says Pat Croswell, Oakland Hills' pro since 1987. "They make people play for pars."

Back in '51, Hogan was so leery of the green on the ninth (a par 3, now 257 yards) that he seriously considered laying up and chipping to the flag. Tom Lehman, after tying the competitive course record with a 65 in the 1996 U.S. Open, said the course had a lot of "crazy" greens, and the one on the par-3 13th "is pretty obnoxious."

One sportswriter at that event, sympathizing with players who struggled with putts, labeled the surfaces "carnival golf" and "bush-league greens."

When a set of greens evokes those sorts of responses, a course is usually 1 up on the field before any championship starts. The big question is, which architect is responsible for playing mind games with the world's best golfers?

As an amateur in the 1961 U.S. Open (won by Gene Littler at one over), Nicklaus not only charted every yardage at Oakland Hills but charted every contour on every green. He has always considered them Donald Ross greens.

"When he designed Oakland Hills," says Nicklaus, "Donald Ross used plateaus to define different areas where you can position the flag each day. If you hit your shot to the proper plateau, you're going to have a great chance of making the putt. If you miss that defined area, you might have a hell of a time two-putting."

But Ross first opened Oakland Hills in 1917. Surely his greens have been plowed up and redone by other architects many times since then? Well, Ross remodeled the course before the 1937 U.S. Open, elevating some greens and lowering others. Then, in 1947, Ross did a set of plans to remodel the course again, this time for the '51 Open, but he died in 1948. (Other than expanding some greens back to pre-World War II dimensions, he hadn't planned any extraordinary changes to the greens.)

The job went to Robert Trent Jones, whose work made him the target of Hogan's wrath. Trent capitalized on that notoriety with countless self-promoting interviews. To hear him talk, he had transformed the layout. In truth, he'd done far less.

The par-3 13th, for instance, was pretty much the same for the '51 Open (and for this year's PGA) as it was for the '37 Open, with its ice-cream-scoop green encircled by bunkers. All Trent did was elevate the two rear bunkers for visibility and add one tiny pot bunker in the grass face of a big bunker on the front right. Over the years, countless fans have been led to believe the nasty little 13th was the handiwork of the devilish Robert Trent Jones. Let the record be clear: It's a devilish Donald Ross hole.