If art is a delayed echo, as a writer once suggested, Oakland
Hills Country Club is a symphony. Today, the sounds that make sweet music are
computer generated, like golf course designs and unerringly correct golf swings.
But computers have no heart, no soul, no history. Try as they might, the loud,
crashing sounds of synthesizers cannot obliterate the sweet echoes of
history.
Likewise, the influence of Donald Ross cannot be erased at Oakland
Hills, not by a thousand redesigns. And Ben Hogan’s historic “taming of the
monster” round in the 1951 U.S. Open can never be replicated, not by a thousand
robo-golfers.
This is Oakland Hills. An echo. A place that produces compelling
stories and legends easily and regularly, a place that links golfers through
fact and fate.
The course was commissioned in October 1916 at a meeting at the
Detroit Athletic Club. There was no debate as to who would design and build the
new course, which formally opened July 13, 1918. The North course, also designed
by Ross, opened at the beginning of the 1924 season.
Oakland Hills, host of the 1922 Western Open, saw the best players
in the world return in 1924 for the club’s first U.S. Open, won by Cyril Walker.
Ben Hogan’s triumph in 1951 marks the defining moment in the history of Oakland
Hills South. Guldahl’s record 281 total in winning the ’37 Open left members
wary of the South Course’s susceptibility to low scores, so it was decided to
hire Robert Trent Jones Sr. to “modernize” the course for the 1951 Open.
Trent Jones removed 80 original Ross bunkers, replacing them with
60 of his own design, and pinched in the fairway landing areas. For three
rounds, and parts of the final one, the discussion of the Open revolved not
around the players but around the renovations by Jones. And understandably so,
because only two sub-par rounds were shot during the entire 72-hole tournament.
Hogan, showing the wear and tear of a prizefighter, fired a final
round 67, then uttered those classic words, “I am glad I brought this course,
this monster, to its knees.”
