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Oakmont Country Club and Its Disappearing Trees

oakmont logo 2Much has been made about the “new and improved tree-less” Oakmont Country Club.  When it was first built it was built to be tough, no, the toughest course in the land.

Years later members planted thousands of trees that grew and enfringed on the original layout of the course.  Now after two periods of intense tree removal over 15,000 trees have been removed revealing the course in all its original splendor.

Here’s a great piece from Matt Ginella of The Golf Channel detailing the divisive battle between the tree cutters and the tree lovers at Oakmont.

Ron Whitten of Golf Digest chronicles the “Oakmont effect” in his “Gorilla in the Mist” article in the U.S Open Preview issue.  Oakmont is one of the courses that sets the standard for courses in America and the tree removal program made it acceptable for dozens of classic, older courses to do the same.

Why does this tree removal matter? Because Oakmont is the standard for American championship golf. Besides U.S. Opens, it has been the site of five U.S. Amateurs, three PGA Championships and two U.S. Women’s Opens. Much of what happens at Oakmont affects the game. After all, it had fast greens decades before they became fashionable. Those swift greens caused the Stimpmeter to be created in the late 1930s, and whether that’s a positive or negative, the Stimpmeter measurements of green speeds are here to stay at many, many clubs. For this year’s Open, the United States Golf Association wants Oakmont’s greens rolling at 14 feet on a Stimpmeter, the same speed they measured in 2007.

The tree-removal program at Oakmont might well be this storied club’s finest contribution to the game of golf. It reversed a trend it had helped start in the 1950s, the “beautification” of inland American courses by a sanctioned program of constant and misguided planting of trees funded by green committees and membership drives.

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