OAKMONT, Pa. — After a few days of preparing for the U.S. Open at Oakmont Country Club, the best player in the world reached a striking conclusion Tuesday.
“This is probably the hardest golf course that we’ll play,” Scottie Scheffler said. “Maybe ever.”
Scheffler sits at No. 1 in the official world golf rankings and is the prohibitive favorite this week. He has made winning at Augusta National look routine and has beaten fields of the best players in the sport at some of the toughest golf courses in the world with ease.
This week, however, even he is at the mercy of the venue that has hosted the most U.S. Opens, one that has never featured a winner with a score better than 5 under par.
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“I kind of equate some of the major tests to — like the majors in tennis you’re playing on a different surface,” Scheffler said. “You’ve got grass, clay and then the hard court, and it’s a different style of game. The U.S. Open compared to the Masters is a completely different type of test.”
Oakmont, however, isn’t just a traditionally tough U.S. Open venue. It’s more than that.
“When you miss the green at the Masters, the ball runs away and it goes into these areas, and you can play a bump, you can play a flop. There’s different options,” Scheffler said. “Here, when you hit the ball over the green, you just get in some heavy rough, and it’s like, let me see how I can pop the ball out of this rough and somehow give myself a look.”
The topic of Oakmont’s difficulty has been at the forefront of the championship so far. Players have talked at length about the challenge this week will bring, be it the thick rough off the fairways, the deep bunkers or the lightning-fast greens.
“I think everybody knows this is probably the toughest golf course in the world right now,” Bryson DeChambeau said. “You have to hit the fairways, you have to hit greens, and you have to two-putt, worst-case scenario. When you’ve got those putts inside 10 feet, you’ve got to make them. It’s a great test of golf.”
DeChambeau published a video on his YouTube channel last week that detailed every shot of a practice round he played at the course. He shot an even-par 70.
“It’s not like every single hole is Winged Foot out here,” said DeChambeau, who won the first of his two U.S. Opens at Winged Foot in 2020. “You can’t just bomb it on every single hole and blast over bunkers and have a wedge run up to the front of the green. You can on a lot of the holes but not on every one of them. I think this golf course you have to be just a fraction more strategic.”
Two-time major winner Collin Morikawa did not make an early visit to Oakmont this year, but he said he watched some of DeChambeau’s video. Nothing, however, could have prepared him for actually being on some of these holes and having to hit some of these shots.
“I don’t think people understand how thick the rough is,” Morikawa said. “It’s not wispy like the club is going to go through. This is just thick. Clubs will turn over. You’re going to see guys trying to hit pitching wedge out, and it’s going to go 45 degrees left because that’s how thick the rough is. That’s just how you have to play it.”
Morikawa said Tuesday that he almost tried to forget about all the things he has seen of the course before this week, in part to not psyche himself out. Players are already preempting the possible carnage that Oakmont will bring come Thursday, especially if the rain that’s forecasted for the weekend does not arrive.
“Greens are already speeding up,” Morikawa said. “They will get firmer as the sun comes out, as the wind picks up.”
Being in the rough or a fairway bunker will spell trouble for players, but it’s Oakmont’s greens, with their dramatic slopes and potential midteens speed, that could truly determine just what kind of bite the course has this week.
“Being perfectly honest and very selfish, I hope it psyches a lot of players out,” Justin Thomas said of the course’s difficulty. “It’s a part of the preparation, like trying to go hit wedges or trying to get the speed of the greens or anything. It’s getting a game plan for how you’re going to approach the course mentally and strategically. I understand this place is hard. I don’t need to read articles, or I don’t need to hear horror stories. I’ve played it. I know it’s difficult.”
Yet even as they try to forecast how difficult of a task they will have, many are finding at least some solace in the fact that every one of the other 155 players in the field they are trying to beat must face the same golf course they will.
“It’s going to be a nice test, a difficult test,” Jon Rahm said. “And I think one of the truest representations of what a U.S. Open is all about.”
