Super-sized golf awaits at historic Oakmont

By DAVE HACKENBERG
Toledo Blade
Thursday, May 17, 2007

Our caddies handed each of us a club or two and then asked that we wait a couple minutes before hitting, "so that we can get out a ways and into position to forecaddie."

OK, it's not an unusual request. Happens all the time. Of course, we were about to play a par 3, which made this request more than a tad unusual.

"That's going to be interesting," reigning U.S. Open champion Geoff Ogilvy said earlier this week. "It's the most talked-about hole in the locker room these days. Everybody's been talking about it for awhile."

It is the No. 8 hole at Oakmont Country Club, where the 2007 Open will be played on June 14-17.

The par-3 eighth will play, in at least a couple of the rounds, at 288 yards.

When will the super-sizing of golf end?

Not next month and not at Oakmont, which sports a par-5 hole, No. 12, where the back tees stretch to 667 yards. That will make it the longest par 5, by 25 yards, in Open history.

"Golf courses are getting longer every year, so we're all getting quite used to seeing 500-yard par 4s and 600-plus-yard par 5s," Ogilvy said.

But are the golfers ready for a 288-yard par 3?

"We've never played one like that," he said. "That's going to be interesting."

Yours truly hit a driver, a little short and a lot left of the green in rough that could hide a small puppy. It's impossible stuff, the six-inch rough at Oakmont. Chunked it out of the spinach, managing not to sprain a wrist, and into a greenside bunker. Blasted to 20 feet and two-putted, barely breathing on the first one, for a double bogey. Felt pretty good about it, too.

Tiger Woods visited the course in the eastern suburbs of Pittsburgh three weeks ago. He walked to the back tee, hit a 3-wood pin high and two-putted for par.

"A nice drive-able par 4," Woods said of the eighth hole, which, of course, will become the longest par-3 hole in the history of major championship golf upon the first player hitting his tee shot there.

Mike Davis, the director of competition for the United States Golf Association, said the new back tee was built after Oakmont hosted the U.S. Amateur in 2003 and the flat-bellied college kids were hitting 4-irons and 5-irons to the hole from the championship tee box, then a mere 252 yards from the green.

"A few of us shook our heads and said we don't need shots like that in the Open," Davis said. "We thought this (288-yard) distance would put 1-irons, 3-woods, maybe even drivers back in the players' hands. If we have a few players that just cannot get it there, so be it."

Oddly enough, this may be back-to-the-future golf. Davis talks about the golden age of golf course architecture in the 1920s, when many courses had par-3 holes designed to be played with hickory-shafted drivers.

Oakmont's eighth hole played at 252 yards during the 1927 Open won by Tommy Armour. Today's golfers are armed with 80 years worth of club and ball technology, so a 36-yard expansion hardly seems absurd on a hole that otherwise presents just a moderate challenge.

The other 17 holes will be enough of a test for the Open contestants, who will face a hilly course with a fair number of blind shots, fairways that flow into drainage ditches, deep and strategically placed bunkers, sloppy rough, and, of course, Oakmont's legendary fast greens.

At least there will be no trees to get in the way. And we mean zero. Every tree in play on the interior of the course, more than 5,000, we're told, were removed during the past several years to return Oakmont to its original design as an inland links course. It is a stark contrast to what golfers who were here for the 1994 Open, won by Ernie Els, will remember.

Hosting its eight U.S. Open, Oakmont would be in any discussion regarding the toughest golf courses in America. Davis called it "the gold standard for championship golf." Club officials like to say that Oakmont punishes its members and destroys its guests. I can certainly attest to the latter.

It will be interesting to see next month just how many other guests, among them the best golfers in the world, leave with the same sentiment.

(Distributed by Scripps Howard News Service, www.scrippsnews.com.)