THE U.S. OPEN TROPHY AT OAKMONT COUNTRY CLUB | PHOTO BY FRED VUICH/USGA

In the early 1900s, Henry Clay Fownes would sit on the porch of Oakmont Country Club, the links he built with 150 men and two dozen mules and horses, and watch his members try to play his favorite game.

He quickly noticed something: When someone missed one of the long narrow fairways and hit their ball into the rough, they were not penalized. That just wouldn’t do. Fownes, a stern steel industrialist, decided he should put in a sand trap to make sure future golfers would pay for their mistakes, says David Moore, the club’s curator of collections.

As the years went on, Fownes would watch more bad shots go unpunished. So he put in another fairway bunker — then another and another. He set out to punish every imperfect shot by dotting his course with strategically placed traps, each filled with sand dredged from the Allegheny River. His goal to make Oakmont one of the toughest 18-hole test in golf still holds true nearly 122 years later.

Related: Oakmont Country Club by the Numbers

Fownes owned Carrie Furnace with his brother before designing his one and only golf course. And what a marvel it is. Oakmont has been called the Sistine Chapel of golf. It’s also been called “Hades on the Hulton” — a reference to its address on Hulton Road.

“It’s a brute with a capital B,” says Jeff Hall, managing director, Rules and Open Championships of the United States Golf Association. “It’s part of its DNA.”

Henry Fownes lived to see the first two U.S. Opens played at Oakmont, held in 1927 and 1935. This spring his course — which was designated a National Historic Landmark in 1987 — will host a record 10th U.S. Open Championship from June 12-15.

For the best golfers in the world, it’s guaranteed to be four days of torture and triumph.

Fownes’ son, William Clark “W.C.” Fownes Jr., became president of the club after his father’s death; W.C. added even more bunkers. He summed up the family’s unmerciful attitude: “Let the clumsy, the spineless, the alibi artist stand aside,” he is quoted as saying. “A shot poorly played should be a shot irrevocably lost.”

“I like to say there are generational people,” says John Lynch, president of the Oakmont Country Club. “Tiger Woods was a generational person in golf. [Henry] Fownes was a generational person in terms of golf architecture.”

Crafting God’s Design

THE FIFTH HOLE AT OAKMONT COUNTRY CLUB | PHOTO BY FRED VUICH/USGA

The iconic Oakmont course might not have been built had it not been for a lowly bicycle tire.

Before he became a golf fanatic, Henry Fownes was a bicycling enthusiast. That might seem like an unlikely hobby for a rich industrialist who sold Carrie Furnace to Andrew Carnegie. But according to Moore, owning a bike and being in a bicycle club in the 1880s and ’90s was a show of wealthy status.

Fownes was around 15 when his father died. He quit high school to work in the mills and to help run the family iron and steel business, Fownes Brothers, with his uncle. The company ran Carrie Furnace, Midland Steel, Reliance Coke and other industrial entities, according to the book “Oakmont,” which was published in 2017 by the Fownes Foundation and authored by award-winning golf writer Marino Parascenzo.

When Fownes was in his early 40s, he decided to weld the broken rim of a bicycle tire in his garage and didn’t bother to wear a welder’s mask. After seeing spots in his eyes, he went to a doctor, who misdiagnosed his “welder’s flash” with arteriosclerosis, or hardening of the arteries. The doctor delivered some sobering news — he had only one or two years left to live.

“It was the great misdiagnosis,” says Moore.

Depressed and staring down his own mortality, Fownes sold his business interests and traveled to the British Isles to learn to play golf at such storied Scottish courses as St Andrews and North Berwick.

He fell hard for the game and became an accomplished golfer. He improved his game on the links-style courses of Britain, the ones without trees, linking the ocean to the farm and featured big greens, long fairways — and lots of bunkers, Moore says.

Fownes’ infatuation with golf set in a few years after John Moorhead Jr. brought the game of golf to Pittsburgh in 1893. Moorhead, who discovered the sport while visiting Massachusetts, returned to his then-wealthy East End neighborhood and put six holes and six pea cans in the grounds of a thoroughbred racetrack that existed in Homewood at the time. Moorhead introduced the game to Fownes.

The primitive, home-made course evolved into the sophisticated Allegheny County Club by 1895 (now in Sewickley Heights). And though other clubs such as Edgewood Country Club and Pittsburgh Golf Club sprang up, Fownes couldn’t find a golf course difficult enough in his hometown that evoked the traditional Scottish ones he loved. In fact, he wanted the toughest “track” in the world: An 18-hole beast.

So Fownes built his own. In 1903, he bought 191 acres of former farmland that straddled Plum and Oakmont. Selling shares for $500 each, he became the largest shareholder of the Oakmont Land Company. He paid $78,500 (about $2.83 million in today’s money) for the land, Moore says. The clubhouse, which still stands today, cost $38,000 to build — or $1.37 million today.

To design the course, Fownes followed the contours of the farmland. “I like to say God designed the golf course and Fownes just found it,” says longtime Oakmont member Mike Chutz.

Anticipating changes in golf technology and bigger, stronger players, he designed fairways that were 6,404 yards long — about 20% longer than most courses back then. He also planted fescue grass in the rough, making it extra tough to hit an errant ball (if you were even able to find it). The bunkers were especially treacherous. Their sand was deeply furrowed by rakes with 4-inch-long steel tines, which made blasting the ball out extremely difficult.

Oakmont Country Club opened on Oct. 1, 1904. It was a serious private golf club made for serious golf nuts. People would take the train from Pittsburgh to Oakmont or arrive by horse and buggy, change their shoes in the club’s front room, play 18 holes, change back into their street shoes and leave, Moore says.

From the start, it accepted women as members. Black members, however, would be shut out at Oakmont and Pittsburgh’s other elite country clubs for decades to come. The first Black members at Oakmont, attorney Eric W. and Cecile Springer of Squirrel Hill, were not admitted until 1991 (It now welcomes members of all races, genders, sexual orientations and religious backgrounds).

Fownes was known at Oakmont as what Moore calls a “benevolent dictator” — friendly and kind to his members, at least until they got on his bad side. Though members affectionately called him “H.C,” or “Pop” or “Cap,” he was known to clean out someone’s locker and boot them from the club if he observed them breaking a rule, according to the “Oakmont” book.

‘Devil’s Backscratchers’

THE CHURCH PEWS AT OAKMONT COUNTRY CLUB. | PHOTO BY FRED VUICH/USGA

His son, W.C., was an even better golfer — a great one, in fact — who brought national acclaim to the course and was friends with golf god Bobby Jones. In 1910, W.C. won the U.S Amateur tournament; as captain he led Jones and his team to victory in the first U.S. Walker Cup in 1922.

W.C. served as the president of the United States Golf Association from 1926 to 1927, and it was because of his prominence in the golf world that Oakmont snagged its first U.S. Open.

W.C. was the fiend who thought up Oakmont’s infamous Church Pews, the sprawling sand bunker between the fairways of holes 3 and 4. It’s lined with a dozen grassy ridges that look like church pews to observers — and like hell to golfers. The unique hazard was unveiled in time for the second U.S. Open at Oakmont in 1935.

Just a few months later, Henry Fownes died of pneumonia. He was 79.

In the leadup to that tournament, golfers were already starting to protest the deep furrows in the sand of Oakmont’s many bunkers — sometimes called “Devil’s Backscratchers.” As unyielding as his father, W.C. told the complainers, “Tough. You play the ball where it lies and deal with the consequences,” Moore says.

The deep furrows became an even bigger issue by 1953, when PGA players threatened to boycott the Open. The club came to a compromise that the fairway bunkers wouldn’t have the furrows but the traps protecting the greens would. The club got rid of those diabolical rakes completely by the 1962 Open.

Devin Gee, the golf club pro at Oakmont, tells a story about a practice round held as a War Bond event in the 1940s. Sam Snead, one of the top golfers in the world at the time, hit his ball over a bunker at Hole 7. W.C., who had taken over the club, was in Nantucket at the time. Emil Loeffler, the pro and superintendent, called W.C. and told him what happened.

“OK, can we take care of that by tomorrow?” W.C. asked, meaning another bunker was needed.

“We’re already on it,” Loeffler said. “We’re digging right now.”

The next day, Snead hit into the new bunker and bogeyed the hole.

Changing Times

THE NINTH HOLE AT OAKMONT COUNTRY CLUB | PHOTO BY FRED VUICH/USGA

While other country clubs added tennis, swimming, equestrian trails, teas and socials for their members in the ’20s and ’30s, Henry and W.C. kept Oakmont strictly a golf club. But by the Great Depression, membership numbers started to decline. The board asked W.C. to add other social amenities, but he felt he couldn’t go against his father’s wishes (Later the club added tennis courts and a swimming pool).

W.C. resigned in June 1946 and cut all family ties with the club. He died four years later, at age 72, of arteriosclerosis, the same disease his father had been misdiagnosed with 50 years earlier.

Oakmont’s original links-style course changed dramatically in the 1950s after a famous New Yorker magazine writer, Herbert Warren Wind, covered a U.S. Open and called it “an ugly, old brute of a course” because of its lack of trees.

In response, the team at Oakmont, like so many courses during that era, planted thousands of trees in an attempt to beautify itself. But when a tree-removal trend swept the fickle golf world, up to 10,000 trees were removed from Oakmont starting in year 2000 — returning the course to its original designer’s blueprint.

Oakmont has been the site of some of golf’s greatest highlights, including what is often called the greatest round ever — Johnny Miller’s final round 63, which won him the 1973 U.S. Open and set the tournament course record there. It’s also where a 22-year-old Jack Nicklaus captured the 1962 U.S. Open, edging out hometown hero Arnold Palmer.

For the upcoming U.S. Open, the greatest golfers in the game will have to contend with much deeper and thicker roughs, 5 to 6 inches tall. But if the rough is rougher for the pros, the greens are slowed down for the Open.

As Lee Trevino, one of the greatest golfers in history, once said, “There’s only one course in the country where you could step out right now — right now — and play the U.S. Open, and that is Oakmont … Take that back, first you’d have to slow down those greens. You couldn’t play the Open on those greens the way the members play them … Man, those members are crazy.”

Indeed, Lynch, the club’s president, says the USGA slows the greens down for the Open — and playing on those super-fast greens are a badge of honor for Oakmont members.

Oakmont’s pro Gee knows the Oakmont mindset.

“I literally was on a phone call this morning with a member,” he says in a recent interview, “and all he talked about for 10 minutes was how this pro that he brought out here got beat up for 18 holes. And he thought it was the greatest thing ever.”

Henry Fownes would approve.

Cristina Rouvalis is a frequent contributor to Pittsburgh Magazine. Her debut middle-grade novel, “Snoopers & Sneakers,” came out in January.