What is Oakmont's church pew bunker? History behind distinctive U.S. Open course feature

New York Times

2 days ago

OAKMONT, Pa. — He didn't even want to set foot in it.
The year was 2007. Tiger Woods was scouting Oakmont Country Club, seeing the property for the first time outside of TV highlights and photographs. A group of 82 American Express cardholders walked along, watching Woods, jaws open.
A 'small' fee of $900 got those AmEx customers onto Oakmont for the day, but little did they know they'd get to spend it with the then 13-time major champion. Woods helped execute the surprise as a cardholder perk, inviting them for a stroll around that year's U.S. Open venue as he strategized for the tournament ahead.
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When they arrived at No. 3, Woods striped a 3-iron off the tee, splitting the fairway with ease. When the group approached his ball, one onlooker curiously asked, 'Can you hit one from the church pews?'
'No,' Woods replied, according to the AP.
Woods eventually agreed to stand in the infamous 108-yard-long bunker, smiling momentarily only for a photo-op, before climbing out again: 'I only practice from where I expect to play.'
The monstrosity sits between the third and fourth fairways. It now occupies more than 28,000 square feet of Oakmont real estate. And it lives rent-free in the psyche of any golfer who steps up on that tee box. The bunker creeps into your peripheral vision, even if you don't anticipate playing from it.
Oakmont's church pew bunker, one of the most recognizable golf course features in the world, is just as beautiful as it is maddening. So is its history.
'Where Augusta National has Amen Corner, and TPC Sawgrass has the 17th, and Pebble Beach has No. 7, the church pews, that's us. That's our signature feature,' says David Moore, Curator of Collections at Oakmont.
The church pews, as they are configured today — 13 long, grassy tufts that act as islands within a seemingly endless pit of sand — were never part of the original Oakmont design.
Henry Fownes, a big-time steel mogul, built Oakmont in 1903 when his obsession with golf reached the point of setting out to design his own course. 'A poor shot should be a shot irrevocably lost,' Fownes famously said of his design philosophy. Oakmont was soon constructed by a team of 150 people and a dozen horses. It's the only course Fownes ever designed.
There were more than 350 bunkers marked in the original Oakmont layout. The church pew bunker was not one of them. But a peculiar detail emerged in aerial photographs of the club taken in 1927, the year it hosted the U.S. Open for the first time.
Six separate bunkers, each long and skinny and not particularly deep, lined the left side of the third hole. Check back on those aerial photos about eight years later, for the next U.S. Open hosted here, and you'll find the point of evolution that made the pews what they are today: Those six individual bunkers had morphed into one, with six floating berms. Whether you were stuck between the berms or your ball somehow managed to get caught up in one of them, the gigantic sand trap acted as a true avoid-at-all-costs hazard from there on out.
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The concept of the church pews, however, was not born until a few decades later. After the debut of the grass berms, the bunker configuration came to be known as the 'snake mounds.' The sections of grass weren't built with straight edges. Their sizing was rather irregular.
'If you looked at them from above, they kind of looked like slithering snakes,' Moore says. The term 'church pew' was first associated with the giant bunker ahead of the 1962 U.S. Open in the Pittsburgh Press's tournament preview.
The bunker, now stuck with a permanent name, was tweaked and fiddled with over time. Pews were added, straightened, trimmed and tucked. Ahead of this year's championship, renowned golf course architect Gil Hanse helped put the snake back into the snake mounds, bending the pews to match original photographs. His team also added a 13th pew.
'We deconstructed all of them and used the dirt to build the new pews to more accurately reflect the old style, in an expanded configuration,' Hanse says.
For an on-course obstacle so widely recognized in the sport, it is surprising that one simple question proves unanswerable: Who came up with the idea?
No one wrote it down. No one thought to document it. No one expected that, almost 100 years later, the club would be hosting its record 10th U.S. Open.
With the pews tracing back to the years between the 1927 and 1935 U.S. Opens, there is a working theory that they were not a creation of Henry Fownes himself, but rather his son, William C. Fownes. At the time, W.C. was one of the best amateurs in Western Pennsylvania, competing frequently. Every year, he teed it up in one particular tournament in Atlantic City, New Jersey. And en route to that event, either traveling via the turnpike or the train, he would stop in Philadelphia and stay with his sister, Amelia.
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The murkiness of the story begins about 20 miles outside of Philadelphia. It is loosely believed that W.C. played a course called The Springhaven Club during his visits with his sister. The club was first founded in 1896 by three women who were exposed to golf after trips abroad, much like Henry Fownes.
Aerial photographs of Springhaven from 1924 feature a very familiar sight: a series of grass mounds, lined up in a row, along the first hole. It's not a bunker, but the resemblance is striking. At Springhaven, the configuration is referred to as a steeplechase.
There are several loose connections between Springhaven and Oakmont. According to Michael Hodges, Springhaven's de facto historian, Springhaven members also participated in the same tournament in Atlantic City, and perhaps even played with or against W.C. in matches.
The credit for the design of The Springhaven Club has long been associated with Ida Dixon. Ron Whitten and Geoffrey S. Cornish assert in their book, The Architects of Golf, that Dixon may have been the first female golf architect in the world. She went on to serve as the president of the Women's Golf Association of Philadelphia from 1911 to 1916, and Springhaven was her only design.
Mysteriously, Springhaven's pews did not survive longer than a few years. Hodges uncovered photographs documenting the evolution of the club over the years in the Hagley Museum, a small museum in Wilmington, Delaware, and the pews were nowhere to be found by 1927.
There is very little evidence that proves Dixon was responsible for the construction of such a unique design, and why they were eventually removed. Multiple golf architects were brought in by Springhaven pre-Great Depression to consult on its routing. Around the time of Englishman Herb Barker's hire, Springhaven also featured several long, skinny bunkers resembling the early stages of the six individual pew bunkers. William Flynn, perhaps best known for his design of Shinnecock Hills, was hired to correct bunker drainage around the course in 1923, which may have contributed to the pews' demise.
'The committee is determined to improve the course as much as possible during the winter and spring. They have consulted with H.H. Barker, the Garden City pro., who staked out fifty pits which will be placed as rapidly as the weather will permit. Most of the new hazards guard the approaches to the greens,' reads an article from the January edition of the 1910 American Golfer Magazine, one of the few pieces of concrete evidence available about the early stages of Springhaven.
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The devilish pew design eventually re-emerged at Oakmont, and they've been reinstated at Springhaven too, as part of a recent renovation. The iconic feature has since been replicated around the world, including at TPC Scottsdale, Bucknell Golf Club and Lonsdale Links in Australia.
The pews are alive and well. The Springhaven Club has never claimed to be the original inspiration for the pews. But a series of coincidences and likelihoods make Moore, for one, virtually certain of it.
There isn't really another explanation. The church pews were a product of the sincerest form of flattery: Imitation.
Whether it was Fownes, Dixon, Barker or Flynn, whoever thought of the church pews knew how to torture a golfer. One hundred years later, as the best players in the world descend upon Oakmont yet again, they're still doing their job.