The four major championships have distinct characteristics.
The Masters is played on the same course every year (Augusta National) which is not only long with fiendish greens – that familiarity also gives it a unique place in the sport’s elite quartet.
The Open is always played on links courses which are fast-running, usually windy, featuring contoured fairways and greens.
The PGA Championship tends to be a typical PGA Tour event that has been to the gym.
And the US Open is just hard.
Very hard.
Very, very hard.
The courses are usually traditional, built in the golden age of golf in the US in the early years of the 20th century.
The set-up is stretched to the limit to produce a long challenge.
The fairways are narrow and the rough is deep.
The greens are rapid and the rough around them as deep as the rough further back down the hole.
It is never, ever easy.
The difficulty bar is always high.
But sometimes, as this week at Oakmont, it is really high.
Let’s look, in reverse order, at the five toughest US Open set-ups in the previous 124 editions of the championship.
5. Winged Foot, 2006
Which perhaps ought to be known as ‘The set-up that broke Monty and Mickelson’.
Put together that pair sound like the stars of a 1970s kid’s show, like Mork and Mindy, and the pair played the 72nd hole like they’d starred in it.
Aussie Geoff Ogilvy set a 5-over clubhouse target on Sunday and both the Ms looked set to better it.
Colin Montgomerie had famously never won in America or in a major. This was his golden chance. He drained a 75-foot birdie putt at 17 and was in the middle of the 18th fairway from where he made double bogey to fall one short of Ogilvy.
Mickelson desperately wanted to win his home Open and he needed to par 18 to do so. But he also made double bogey – yet another runner-up finish in the US Open (he would ultimately finish second six times).
4. The Country Club, 1963
Simple numbers gets The Country Club in Brookline into the top six.
Julius Boros won with a 9-over-par total and that is the biggest winning figure over-par in the US Open since the Second World War.
The reason for the difficulty was more down to the wind at the weekend, however.
Arnold Palmer was tied for the halfway lead, carded a third round 77, and was still only one back after 54 holes.
He closed with a 74 to tie Jacky Cupit and Boros before the latter took the honours in an 18-hole play-off that saw Palmer card 76.
3. Oakmont, 2007
The USGA was feeling brutal after the carnage at Winged Foot in 2006 so they repeated the dose at Oakmont 12 months later.
Angel Cabrera won with another 5-over total and said: “Definitely the hardest course I’ve played.”
There were only eight sub-par scores in the entire week – and Cabrera was the only man to own two of them.
2. Shinnecock Hills, 2004
Another brute from the 2000s which might well go down as the US Open’s most terrifying decade.
Retief Goosen won with a 4-under total and only Phil Mickelson (-2) also ended the week below par.
What was striking about this championship, however, was the sense that the USGA lost control of the conditions.
In the final round players could not keep the ball on the seventh green so a number of the putting surfaces were watered to avoid this chaos spreading further.
The final five groups averaged 75.9 for the round – everyone before them averaged 78.7.
1. Winged Foot, 1974
Many rumours swirl around about Winged Foot in 1974.
Was the USGA furious that Johnny Miller won with a final round 63 the year before?
Did the course superintendent mess up? Was there an accident?
In point of fact the superintendent explained that it was the first year front deck rotary mowers were used which permitted denser and more uniform rough than ever before.
The trouble was they kept the rough at 6 inches in height and realised afterwards that, with the new density, 3 inches would do.
Some called it the ‘Massacre at Winged Foot’.
Hale Irwin prevailed on 7-over. Forrest Fezler was 9-over. Everyone else was double digits over-par.
READ MORE: US Open 2025: 10 reasons why Oakmont Country Club is the most feared golf course in the world
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