OAKMONT, Pa.—Let’s be clear that Oakmont Country Club is not ugly. Put another way: If you were to play a golf course this ugly every day, no one would feel bad for you.
It’s worth noting that Oakmont is fifth in Golf Digest’s ranking of America’s 100 Greatest Golf Courses, and of any course in our top 10, it scored lowest among our panelists in aesthetics. In fairness, its “low” aesthetic score isn’t even that low—a 8.2718 score lags behind Cypress Point’s 9.2926 or Augusta National’s 9.1302, but it’s still the 13th-best aesthetics score in our top 100. In that sense, maybe Oakmont isn’t winning the beauty pageant, but it is pretty enough to be one of the contestants.
But given the company it keeps, on the short list of premier settings in the game, course experts wouldn’t attribute Oakmont’s greatness to the scenery. Of the six criteria used by our panelists in Golf Digest’s rankings, we define aesthetics as how well “the scenic aspects of the course and architecture add to the pleasure of a round.” In Oakmont’s case, the other five criteria—shot options, challenge, layout variety, conditioning and character—are what distinguish the course more. The comments from some of our 1,700 panelists are consistent in their praise—”a wonderful test of your skills,” “one of the hardest courses,” “really gets in a player’s head.” Those comments and the corresponding scores emphasize the setting less than they do the golf experience, particularly its difficulty. Only Pine Valley has been rated a more challenging course. Think of Cypress and you think of golf holes hugging the Pacific. With Augusta, it’s loblolly pines, lush green hills and flora. With Oakmont, it’s church pew bunkers, punishing rough, and ditches . . . plus the Pennsylvania Turnpike running in between.
When the golf writer Herbert Warren Wind called Oakmont an “ugly brute of a course” in 1953, the membership responded with an aggressive tree-planting program, but almost all of those trees were removed between the 1990s and 2015. Depending on one’s perspective, the absence of trees either restored the course’s character or diluted it, although the barren landscape is consistent with founder and architect H.C. Fownes’ aspiration to replicate the feel of the links courses he visited overseas. What it did provide was more sweeping vistas of the golf course, but even then, what you mostly see are some masterfully designed, pristinely conditioned golf holes that also look really, really hard.
To golfers, that doesn’t necessarily mean ugly, even if the scores they post here usually are.