Everything a classic U.S. Open asks, Oakmont delivered to perfection
Rex Hoggard and Ryan Lavner join Golf Today to recap J.J. Spaun's Father's Day win at Oakmont Country Club, sharing how he reset after a long rain delay and why his finish was "arguably the best in U.S. Open history."
OAKMONT, Pa. – The other three majors occupy their own lanes.
The Masters is built on pageantry and drama.
The PGA is renowned for its deep field and no-frills setup.
The Open is unique in its variability and shot-making.
But the U.S. Open, in its best and purest form, has always been about savagery. A steady diet of fairways and greens and must-make 6-footers. A test of patience and grit and poise. Setup and conditions designed to push players to the brink.
J.J. Spaun's 64-footer on the 72nd hole Sunday will be looped on highlight reels for ages, but his was the rare flourish on a day that devolved into a war of attrition – like any classic U.S. Open.
It was beautifully chaotic, challenging, maddening.
It was U.S. Open perfection.
'It's one of the hardest courses in the world, and you're going to face adversity, you're going to get bad breaks, you're going to get screwed, you're going to have some things go wrong,' said Spaun's performance coach, Josh Gregory. 'So are you going to react, or are you going to respond? Let's go forward and find out.'
Along the way, a few of the dozen Open contenders irrevocably lost because of the conditions.
Sunday at Oakmont featured the strongest winds of the week, 'only' 15 mph, that turned an already ferocious test into an exacting examination of precision and pace. Then came the late-afternoon downpours, sudden and strong, that created indecision with the strike in the saturated fairways and guesswork through the rapidly forming puddles on the greens.
Some griped at that added variable. Cameron Young's even-par 70 was the second-best score among the last 17 pairings – and yet he was understandably grumpy afterward, pointing to his three bogeys in a four-hole span on the front nine during the worst of the weather.
'It's not fun waiting for squeegeeing,' Young said, 'and there's really not much rhythm to be had out there.'
Two shots behind at the time, Adam Scott figured he was in a rare position to attack, just 130 yards away in the 11th fairway. But too much water between the ball and clubface created a flyer effect and caused the shot to sail the green by a whopping 24 yards. From deep fescue behind the green, he did well just to escape with bogey. It was the most head-scratching moment during his back-nine 41.
'It was borderline unplayable,' Scott said after his Sunday 79. 'The water was so close to the surface.'
But soldier on they did, much to the dismay of 54-hole leader Sam Burns, who, when he didn't miss fairways, received cruel breaks by twice rolling into a divot in the fairway and twice being denied relief for casual water. His major bid was officially doomed once he was told by two officials to play on from the waterlogged right edge of the 15th fairway. After disagreeing with their interpretation of the rule – and suggesting that it likely needed to be amended in the future – he splashed a double-crossed iron left of the green, taking a few angry swipes at the turf as he trudged through the puddles toward the green. Afterward, Burns didn't make excuses for his final-round 78. 'The conditions were extremely difficult,' he said, 'and I clearly didn't have my best stuff today.'
Others were undone by the course itself.
Oakmont is often too much to handle on a benign day, during member play, and the USGA only ratcheted up the difficulty for the game's best players by growing the rough to a uniform five inches in length. Because of the unique thatch of Kentucky bluegrass mixed with ryegrass, even the strongest players with the steepest angles of descent couldn't routinely advance their shots onto the green, often opting for the 60-degree wedge, a pitch-out and a longer third shot.
That severe punishment was a stark departure from most weeks on Tour, when distance is rewarded while accuracy is often disregarded. There's a reason why golf's governing bodies are set to roll back the ball for the professionals in 2028, with an increased focus on driver heads next; off-center hits aren't properly punished and some of the game's inherent skill has been reduced. But this Open's binary outcome off the tee – hit the fairway, or miss and hack out – was a throwback to a bygone era and enough to vex even the game's best driver.
For the week, world No. 1 Scottie Scheffler hit just 52% of the fairways – well down from his season average of 63% – and lost strokes off the tee for the first time in four months. And yet, because of all the carnage unfolding around him, Scheffler still had a chance to post the clubhouse lead when he stepped onto the 18th tee – all he had to do was find the fairway. With his tournament hanging in the balance, the Tour's driving leader fanned his shot into the right rough and found, what he said later, was his gnarliest lie of the week. The hero shot from 211 yards out wasn't even an option; he angled himself 45 degrees away from the flag and slashed it 60 yards across the width of the fairway.
'That's why you hit the ball in the fairway, so you don't have to deal with that stuff,' Scheffler said. 'Typically, I'm good at it. This week I wasn't as good as normal, and I paid the price for it.'
Added Ryan Fox, whose best score of the week (69) came on a day when he found four more fairways: 'You feel under pressure on the tee the whole time, because if you don't drive it on the fairway, you're dead, basically.'
Tyrrell Hatton found that out the hard way. Chasing Bob MacIntyre's 1-over 281 total, the fiery Englishman was stalking a final birdie on the 17th that would have put him in prime position. When he pushed his tee shot slightly on the drivable par 4, Hatton assumed his ball had settled in an ideal position, at the bottom of the deep greenside bunker (nicknamed 'Big Mouth'), leaving him a straightforward sand shot for an up-and-down birdie. Imagine his surprise, then, to see his ball not in the sand but rather in the thick rough on a severe downslope leading into the bunker. With no way to put enough height and spin on his pitch shot, he flubbed it into the steep bank in front of him, stubbed it again on the other side, and walked off with a momentum-killing bogey.
Afterward, Hatton wanted to pin the mistake on lousy luck: 'I feel I've missed it in the right spot and got punished, which, ultimately, I don't think ends up being fair.' But what he had said just seconds before was more accurate: 'I've hit a decent – well, obviously not a decent tee shot, or that would have been on the green.'
Indeed.
The first of two full shots that won Spaun this U.S. Open wasn't 'decent'. It was, in a word, perfect: His drive on 17 – 309 yards in length, 104 feet high through a steady rain, and with 16 yards of left-to-right slide – landed in the narrow throat to the green and ran 15 feet past the cup to set up a stress-free birdie, a stunning strike from a player who, hours earlier, had appeared to squander his opportunity – again.
A 34-year-old everyman, Spaun had never finished inside the top 20 in a major and was on the verge of losing his card altogether last summer. And at the time, he was OK with it. He had played eight years on Tour, banked $12 million, made plenty of lifelong friends. It was time for the next chapter, with a young, growing family he hadn't much seen while he toiled on the road. For years he'd been playing tentatively, afraid of the big moment, scarred from previous experiences when he'd had a chance to win and failed, spectacularly. Figuring his playing days were numbered, he vowed to change his attitude for the final few weeks.
'If this is how I go out,' he said, 'then I might as well go down swinging.'
Spaun rallied to save his card last summer and now is playing the best golf of his life. He didn't back down during close calls earlier this year in Hawaii and Palm Beach. And he didn't quake under the final-round pressure at The Players either, nor in the head-to-head playoff with Rory McIlroy; he went right at the flag on the island 17th, undone by an unexpected gust of wind.
Now, all of those prior experiences seemed to fortify him heading into golf's toughest test.
'He just believes now that he's one of the best players,' said his caddie, Mark Carens.
Spaun appeared intent to show it at Oakmont, where in the opening round he carded just the second bogey-free score in the past two U.S. Opens there. He hung around amid changing conditions the next two days, relying on sublime scrambling and lights-out putting after recently linking up with Gregory, a short-game and performance coach. (The U.S. Open was their first full week working together; Gregory asked Spaun with a laugh on Friday: 'So, how do you like to warm up?') Because of the Open's unique demands, Spaun realized he needed some outside help. Gregory gave Spaun tips how to read the lies in the rough and then the proper technique to save himself when he was out of position.
'He's not afraid to have the best year of his career and to reach out and say, 'I want to be elite, and I need some help,'' Gregory said. 'He said, 'I want the ball; I just need the tools.' That shows the kind of person he is. He didn't want to settle for just being great.'
But in the penultimate group on Sunday, Spaun's chances appeared to be dwindling. He chopped his way up the opening hole and made bogey. He dropped shots on four of the next five holes, too, with bad breaks (caroms off the flagstick and rake) and poor club selection, his win probability plunging to just 1%, according to Data Golf.
When the horn sounded to suspend play, Spaun was seething – and also grateful. Granted an opportunity to decompress and start anew, he headed to the clubhouse, where he swapped out his solid navy polo in favor of a patterned one, and regrouped with his team.
'He was pissed off – and he should have been,' Gregory said. 'And that's a great thing, because anger can lead to motivation. He was like, 'This is bulls---, I can go win this thing, and I just need one thing to go my way.''
That happened on the 12th hole, when Spaun's second shot in the heavy rain dove into the native area down the right side. Except, for once, he was relieved to see it somewhat sitting up in the hay, allowing him to put a wedge on the back of the ball and trundle it onto the green, 40 feet away. He canned that putt for an unlikely birdie – and then he was off, hardly missing a shot down the stretch and saving his best stuff for the final 30 minutes of the longest day of his life.
The tee shot on 17 set up the go-ahead birdie, and all that was left was to pass the U.S. Open's final test:
No. 18 ... 509 yards ... bunkers and rough left ... hack-out rough right ... and a hard-sloping, sopping-wet fairway ...
And Spaun hit a 308-yard seed that split the fairway. He scooped up his tee before his ball had even begun its descent.
'It's just do-or-die, right?' Carens said. 'You've got to sack up and hit the shot. And he did.'
And it was the perfect encapsulation of a championship that, after a few wayward years, finally returned to its roots. Challenging conditions that emphasized the importance of clean, crisp, center-face contact. A setup so demanding that it prompted a former champion to trash his locker. And a steely competitor, coming into his own after years of perseverance, who met the challenge with perhaps the most clutch final two holes in the tournament's 125-year history. Six macho shots, for glory.
'It's the hardest course I've ever seen, the ultimate test,' Gregory said, 'and J.J. wasn't afraid.'
The quintessential U.S. Open venue – and an archetypal champ.
Watch the 71st hole which flipped the U.S. Open on its head for eventual winner J.J. Spaun, starting with the drive of a lifetime that set up a two-putt birdie to take the outright lead at Oakmont Country Club.
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