The 125th U.S. Open sets up shop June 12-15 at famed Oakmont Country Club, just outside of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. Here are nine things to know about the championship.

1. Incredible championship history

Oakmont has hosted 17 USGA championships, second only to Merion Golf Club’s 19. The 2025 U.S. Open will be the 10th for the club, following those in 1927 (won by Tommy Armour), 1935 (Sam Parks Jr.), 1953 (Ben Hogan), 1962 (Jack Nicklaus), 1973 (Johnny Miller), 1983 (Larry Nelson), 1994 (Ernie Els), 2007 (Àngel Cabrera) and 2016 (Dustin Johnson).

Previous majors include two U.S. Women’s Opens, in 1992 (Patty Sheehan) and 2010 (Paula Creamer). Toss in six U.S. Amateurs (1919, ’25, ’38, ’69, 2002 and 2021) and you have a club that’s bred for majors.

Oakmont has also been the scene of three PGA Championships, in 1922 (won by Gene Sarazen), 1951 (Sam Snead) and 1978 (John Mahaffey).

Future plans for Oakmont call for U.S. Opens in 2033, 2042 and 2049, the U.S. Women’s Open in 2028 and 2038, a Walker Cup in 2032, and a U.S. Women’s Amateur in 2046.

2. A Fownes family torture chamber

Oakmont owes its legendary diabolical character to the intent of its founder, Pittsburgh steel magnate Henry Fownes (1856-1935). A mid-life convert to golf whose enthusiasm was stoked by turn-of-the-century trips to St. Andrews, he set out in 1903-04 to build the most difficult golf course in Pittsburgh. He found 191 acres of ideally rolling farmland 14 miles northeast of downtown. There, Fownes employed 150 laborers to dig vast pits for bunkers and to drain the land with lateral trenches that served double duty as hazards. A fine golfer who played in five U.S. Amateurs, he would serve Oakmont dutifully as club president until his death in 1935.

Oakmont was Fownes’ “one-hit wonder,” the only course he ever designed – and certainly one of the greatest in the American golf landscape.

The Fownes family’s oversight of Oakmont continued in the hands of the founder’s son, William Clark Fownes Jr. (1877-1950). He was one of the state’s finest amateur golfers, having won eight Western Pennsylvania Amateur Championships, two Western Pennsylvania Opens, four Pennsylvania Amateur title and competed in 19 U.S. Amateurs. In 1922, he was the winning U.S. player captain of the first U.S. Walker Cup and served as USGA president from 1926-27. After serving 24 years as Oakmont’s green chairman, he became club president, holding the post from 1935-1946.

Truly, Oakmont in its foundational years was a Fownes family affair.

3. Great U.S. Open moments

1962: Nine U.S. Opens produce a lot of memorable moments. Among the most symbolic for the game overall was the virtual “changing of the guard” in 1962. That’s when a 31-year-old Arnold Palmer (with five majors to his credit and status as the reigning king of golf) faced off against 22-year-old PGA TOUR rookie Jack Nicklaus. Nicklaus shot a 71 and won by four strokes to claim the first of what would become a record setting 18 professional majors.

1973: Johnny Miller was still relatively new to the golf world when he teed off in the fourth round, two hours ahead and six shots back of co-leaders Arnold Palmer and Julius Boros. Neither of his two previous PGA TOUR wins prepared anyone for what was about to happen that afternoon. A driving range swing adjustment that saw him open his stance slightly produced, in his mind, much better ball-striking. Birdies on the first four holes set the tone, and despite a three-putt bogie on the long par-3 eighth hole, four more birdies on the back led to a U.S. Open-record-closing 63 and a two-shot win. The panache by which Miller pulled off the win launched him into the upper reaches of the PGA TOUR stardom, with a reputation as someone who could go theatrically low.

2016: Dustin Johnson’s breakthrough major win came after two previous disappointments. At the 2010 U.S. Open at Pebble Beach, he squandered a third-round lead with a very messy second hole; and later that year he was assessed a two-stroke penalty for grounding his club in a bunker at the 72nd hole, dropping him out of a playoff. But at Oakmont in 2016, he finally fulfilled his major promise by overcoming a four-shot deficit with a closing round 69 that saw him defeat Jim Furyk, Shane Lowry and Scott Piercy. The drama of his win was enhanced by the lingering tension of a one-shot penalty hanging over his head from his golf ball having moved on the fifth green just before he putted out – a penalty that was finally assessed after the round, before he signed his scorecard. In part because of that incident, the USGA ultimately changed the rule so that it would no longer be an infraction.

4. Bunkers, rakes and rollers

Part of what made Oakmont such a notoriously difficult course were two techniques deployed by the club’s famed greenkeeper, Emil Loeffler Jr., who presided at Oakmont from 1916-48. Among his devilish devices was a special water-filled, 750-pound greens roller used to smooth out the putting surfaces; they were forerunners of the modern hydraulic rollers now widely used on golf courses. Perhaps more diabolical was deployment of a heavy-tined bunker rake that created 2- to 3-inch-deep sand furrows in the bunkers – considerably complicating recovery and not abandoned as a standard tool of championship set up at Oakmont until the 1953 U.S. Open (when they were eliminated for fairway bunkers) and finally for the 1962 U.S. Open altogether.

The bunkers are still hazardous. Befitting Oakmont’s reputation as a “survival of the fittest” torture chamber, there were bunkers everywhere, allegedly as many as 350 of them at one point, though the oblique angle of historic aerial photography does not allow for visual confirmation of quite that many. In any case, there are wild bunkers everywhere, including a 13-row "Church Pew" hazard straddling the third and fourth holes, and a smaller seating of nine rows for the Church Pew bunker on the 15th hole.

5. Trees up and down

Oakmont was initially planned as an “inland links.” Trees were not an issue during its first half century. But that changed following stinging criticism of the course in 1953 by respected golf writer Herbert Warren Wind. He termed Oakmont an “ugly old brute of a course.” The judgment resonated with the members, who then embarked on an aggressive tree planting program for the next three decades, to the point where, by the 1994 U.S. Open, Oakmont was densely tree-lined, with each hole encased in its narrow corridor of leafy canopies.

That started to change in the late 1990s, with the maintenance crew selectively peeling back trees in the earliest of morning, before anyone would notice. A decade and a half later the process accelerated so that by the 2016 U.S. Open, Oakmont was back to its original look: nearly treeless, except for one specimen American Elm on the far side of the golf course.

6. Gil Hanse’s recent restoration

In 2023, Oakmont partially shut down in the spring and fall (while allowing play to proceed all summer under some restrictions) as it was treated to a complete, head-to-toe restoration by Gil Hanse and his partner Jim Wagner. Every green was expanded back out to its earlier shape.

The bunkers were all rebuilt, with the new arrangement of hazards conforming to what Hanse and Wagner could identify as the most characteristic of the Fownes era, 1903-47. Sometimes that meant conforming to 1938 imagery, other times to 1925 or even earlier. The total number of bunkers actually decreased slightly, to “only” 168 – which is still over nine per hole. But their size, position and variety were altered totally, with the average bunker having grown by one-third, from 1,474 sq. ft. to 1,964 sq. ft. That’s a lot of sand: 330,000 sq. ft. in total, or 7.6 acres worth. In some cases, strategic bunkers were moved downfield; in most cases the original strategic complexity of the multiple paths from tee to green were restored.

The course also got about 125 yards longer. And crucial for a course of Oakmont’s pedigree, the greens were restored to their original expanse, 8,100 square feet on average, about 20-percent larger than they had been before the restoration.

Oakmont once again sports its network of drainage ditches that the Fownes’ originally built into the course. They stretch alongside half the holes, totaling 1.1 miles in length, and pose a looming threat as lateral hazards immediately adjacent to fairway landing areas – mainly on drives, but also on the occasional approach shot or bail out from rough.

7. Greens and approaches

The additional greens surface area that Oakmont will present for the 2025 U.S. Open creates the potential for some precipitous hole locations that are closer to the edge of doom than ever before.

The slick putting surfaces here have always been a central element of Oakmont’s ferocity. Measurements from 1977 show that even then, the course measured 2 feet faster on average in terms of Stimpmeter speed than any tournament course in the country. At 9.8 then it outranked Augusta National by 2 feet. The measured mowing height of the Perennial poa annua greens surface is less than one-tenth of an inch – 0.84-inch, to be precise. To steel a quotation from legendary L.A. Dodgers announcer Vin Scully in describing a close play at first: “If you sliced beef that thin, you’d starve to death.”

Oakmont members and officials like their greens running very fast – allegedly, 14 to 15 on the Stimpmeter. The story goes that this is one of those clubs where USGA set-up officials slow down the course from normal play for a national championship.

Compounding the complexity of these putting surfaces is that a number of them fall away from the line of play, making it very hard to get approach shots to stop on the surface – unless they have been landed short and run in. Players will notice right away at the long par-4 first and 10th holes this feature of a front to back slope. It is also the case on the long par-5 12th hole and the long par-4 15th.

On all these holes, the green surface follows the natural contour of land, which is itself a continuation of the long slope forming the fairway. And the issue here is that when you play a middle- or short-iron approach to a fallaway green, your stance on approach is itself downhill, which leads to a de-lofting of the iron, which in turn makes the shot fly at a lower-than normal trajectory – and thus harder to stop because it’s flighted lower (and stronger) than your standard shot with that club. Practice rounds will be important in mastering this part of Oakmont. To steal a quotation from 2006 U.S. Open champion Geoff Ogilvy, who is an unusually astute observer of golf architecture: “Gravity is the real enemy at Oakmont.”

8. Playing character

Oakmont is unusual among top-ranked courses in the world in that its property is bisected by a major road – the multi-lane Pennsylvania Turnpike. The sunken roadbed, which isolates hole Nos. 2-8 from the rest of the property, requires access via two considerable pedestrian bridges of some 300-feet in span to carry golfers and spectators across.

The property offers ideal rolling land, with 70 feet of elevation change – all of it in play from tee to fallaway green on the long par-5 12th hole.

The fairways at Oakmont are not wide – 28-yards across on average, though the PGA TOUR-distance landing zones tend to get pinched and protected (or pocketed) by those gnarly bunkers. Miss the fairway and the rough is unforgiving – a 4- to 5-inch long thick mishmash of Kentucky bluegrass, ryegrass and poa annua. This is not a course for “bomb and gouge,” because there is no way to control an approach shot muscled out of such thick rough onto greens like these that roll every which way down and out.

Also to be noted is the dual character of the par 4s. The five shortest holes (Nos. 2, 5, 11, 14 and 17) average only 369 yards long and have greens on the smaller side. By contrast, the seven longer par 4s (Nos. 1, 3, 7, 9, 10, 15, 18) average 482 yards and have larger greens that tend to run away from the line of play. There’s no letup either way, but the shorter par 4s certainly are no picnic, though it will help players considerably here if they lay up off the tee for position with a wedge in to the greens.

In fact, there’s not a moment here at Oakmont where players can consider taking a breather. Not with only two par 5s, an average length 622 yards and tightly bunkered all the way. And certainly not with four par 3s that average 227 yards long.

9. Three key holes

No. 1, 488 yards, par 4: The alarm bells start ringing right away. The opening hole calls for a semi-blind drive to a fallaway fairway that provides no wiggle room for tee shots to land between nine looming bunkers. The hole tumbles 60 feet from tee to green, more than half of it on the approach shot alone – and to a green that further falls away another 4 feet from front to back. For the 1983 U.S. Open, this approach – and all the others – were heavily watered by a set-up team determined to make things impossible for players. (I know, because I caddied in that U.S. Open and watched the morning watering). The new USGA approach is more enlightened. They let a firm, tight surface (fairways cut at one-third of an inch, approaches cut at one-fifth of an inch) do the devil’s work.

No. 8, 289 yards, par 3: You think 289 is long for a par 3? For the 1953 U.S., the hole played 253 yards, which was longer than the average drive on TOUR that year. There’s an approach fairway here to land fairway woods on for run-up purposes, though this year Hanse has added a reef bunker spotted on a 1925 aerial that modestly reduced the landing zone. Expect at least once during the week that the hole will actually play over 300 yards – from to a back tee placement to wayback hole location. Somewhat facetiously, Paul Goydos once called this a hole where you could simultaneously hold a long-drive contest and play closest-to-the hole.

No. 17, 312 yards, par 4: Don’t be surprised if this hole is set up to play shorter than the eighth hole, at least in terms of yardage. The shortest par 4 at Oakmont, it is also the most exciting in terms of potential gain or loss. From the tee to green, the hole climbs 48 feet – the steepest on the course. But with sharp dogleg left, it can also be cut short – enough so that some players will drive it, only 305 guards from tee to green. The problem isn’t reaching the green; it’s staying on it. The putting surface is the smallest on the course, only 5,371 sq. ft. It is also convex (like an upside-down soup bowl) and vice-gripped by five very deep bunkers, the most conspicuous of which, front right, is known as “Big Mouth.” Hanse’s restoration opened up the front left approach area, thereby making it more tempting to play driver off the tee; as for a safe layup with an iron to the right. It then calls for a delicate shot over “Big Mouth” to a green that offers little depth or support for a wedge approach. This modest-looking hole will bring a wide variety of scores into play, from 2s to 7s.