Before the '51 Open, the club wouldn't let Jones rip into many greens. Trent later wrote, "The remodeling of Oakland Hills called for stringent steps to counter the advantages of power golf which threatened to make such a venerable course obsolete. It was an assignment which had to be done . . . without any wholesale changes to its greens. The greens, fortunately, were of such size and of such strong contour, generally, as to preclude any need for restructuring . . . "
Trent Jones totally reconstructed only two greens for the '51 Open, the one on the par-4 seventh (now 449 yards), which he relocated (and rebuilt again years later) and the one on the far side of a pond on the 406-yard 16th. Over the next quarter-century, as consulting architect, Trent would soften corners of a few other greens for new flagstick positions.
Davis Love III three-putted the 18th green to lose the 1996 U.S. Open by a stroke.
PINCHING PLAY
Trent's big contribution to Oakland Hills was pinching in many fairways with flanks of bunkers. Hogan was the first of many critics to blast him for taking away favorable angles from which to attack treacherous pin positions.
If the pin was far left, Hogan wanted to approach it from the far right of the fairway, and vice versa. But Trent's bunkers prevented that. Trent's response was that players could still hit it close to the pins from the center of fairways using fades and draws.
Prior to the '96 Open, architect Arthur Hills modified four greens very slightly in search of additional pin positions along the edges. Most recently, Rees Jones (younger son of Trent Jones) touched up the bunkering but didn't touch the greens. On the 498-yard, par-4 18th, the far-left fairway bunker (from which Lehman couldn't reach the 72nd green in 1996, made bogey and lost by one) now has an even steeper "exit face." There's also a nasty new bunker on the right side of the fairway, 320 yards from the tee, as deep and inescapable as any on the course.
Rees added one wrinkle to his father's 16th by replacing a back-right bunker with a new cove of the adjacent pond, turning the right side of the putting surface into a daunting peninsula, a Sunday pin placement if there ever were one.
In 1979, then-course superintendent Ted Woehrle dropped a bombshell that hardly anyone heard. He insisted there were only seven original Ross greens left: the first, second, third, ninth, 10th, 13th and 18th. (We think he miscounted. The 14th green, which slopes front to back, had been untouched since 1937, according to photos and descriptions of that era.) Woehrle added that his predecessor, Howard Jones (not Robert Trent Jones), rebuilt the fifth, eighth, 11th, 12th, 15th and 17th greens in the 1960s.
If greenkeeper Jones did rebuild those six greens (there's no documentary evidence that he did), he clearly tried to duplicate the old contours, because all of those greens look much as they did in photos from the '51 Open, and even from the '37 Open. So the preponderance of evidence supports the idea that Oakland Hills' greens are mostly Donald Ross originals, with maybe a few added wings or tongues for new flag locations. They might well be the most dramatic set of Ross greens still in existence.
PLAYERS' REVENGE
Of course, 1979 was the only time tour pros really got the best of Oakland Hills, with 66 subpar rounds during the PGA Championship that year, nine players breaking 280 and David Graham beating Ben Crenshaw on the third hole of sudden death after the two had tied at eight-under-par 272.
But it's the aftermath of that birdiefest that's important. The members of Oakland Hills didn't panic, didn't demand the course be bulldozed into something more formidable. The course had been saturated with rain before the championship, so it was soft and defenseless that week. They knew once it dried out, Oakland Hills would return to form. And it did. That's why the Oakland Hills of today is the same course it has been since almost the beginning. Still fearsome, still feared.
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