Research Paper on "Oakmont Country Club"

Research Paper 5 pages (1799 words) Sources: 4 Style: APA

[EXCERPT] . . . .

Oakmont Country Club

The background to our case study is Olympia Fields Country Club is located in a suburb of Chicago, Illinois. It is a golf club with two eighteen-hold courses, with the North Course considered one of the top courses in Chicago, and among the top 50 courses nationwide. Founded in 1915, the North Course was designed by a famous British Open Champion, Willie Park, but was lengthened to meet the more modern requirements when the club hosted the 2003 U.S. Open. The club is also famous for its giant clubhouse, finished in 1925 at a then unheard of cost of $1.3 million, and designed as an English Tudor 80 feet high and the trademark four-faced clock tower. In 2005, the club began a $9.5 million renovation project designed to improve its practice fields, revamp some of the areas that needed attention, and to modernize. This was done with the focus on the original design, since the club is on the National Register of Historic Places (Olympia Fields Country Club, 2013).

Potential Club - I would enjoy working at the Oakmont Country Club, which is located in the Pittsburg, PA suburbs. It is an elegant, year round club with fine dining, and during Spring and Fall (and sometimes more) one of the oldest top-ranked golf courses in the United States. It is considered to be one of the most difficult courses in the world, and because of that has hosted over 20 major national championships. The club is listed in the Register of Historic Places, and one of the attractions to working at this club is their continual restoration of the course back to its original design, which allows for a great marketing story and would appeal to many individuals even outside of the sport of golf (Oakmont Country Club, 2010).

Oakmont was founded in 1903 as a private dining and golf club. It has one course, 18 holes, and as noted, is a historic landmark in both the area and the nation. The course is the only one ever to be designed by Henry Fownes, a wealthy Pittsburg industrialist and golf addict. His goal, it seems, was to take the partial earnings from the sale of his company, the Carrie Furnace Corporation, purchased by Carnegie Steel in 1896, and build a golf course on the plateau overlooking the Allegheny River. It took a year and over 150 people to build the basic structure of the club, and with picks and shovels the team transformed a relative wilderness into the epitome of the modern golf course, difficult, challenging, but enjoyable. His genius was in looking towards the future as he built the course to accommodate the modern ball and strokes, needing more length per hole than most courses of his day. This was prior to the advent of earth moving equipment at his range, and the original course was designed to use natural landforms to challenge players. Henry died in 1935, and his son W.C. then oversaw much of the course's continued renovation, opting to try to make one 18 hole course as perfect as possible rather than constructing more, but smaller, courses. Over the years, small changes have been made, and the current management wishes to keep the course as true to that of the 1920s and 1930s as possible. For golfers, the difficulty of the course is:

Compared to modern courses, Oakmont's greens are diabolical in their pitch. Some are pitched from back to front, the most universally used form, but others are titled from front to back, which in the view of some, makes Oakmont more interesting. W.C. was also the major proponent of making the greens lightning fast and, thanks to his vision, a downhill putt on a Oakmont green is like riding a runaway train (Glenn, 2012).

The course has evolved over the years. In the 1950s and 1960s many trees were added, but then removed fter the 1994 U.S. Open, and another 5,000 removed during the 2007 renovation. The original conception of the course was to use the natural feel of the land to challenge the golfer, not to have a course full of trees that marred line of sight. The conception of Fownes was of the windy and clear links-style landscape in Scotland, where golfing originated. Removal of the trees contribues to the restoration of the course, as well as more grandstand space, however, "the decision to remove trees, sometimes without the consent of the membership, led to one of the most contentious periods in club history…" pitting members against members. The trees, however, have been replaced with high fescue grasses that are more similar to the Scottish look (Dulac, 2007).

Marketing and Video- the course and club represent a unique idea for both marketing and documenting several historical, sports related, ecological, and sustainable issues. A short video would be ideal in capturing the various issues that allowed the club to be built, the vision of the club, the evolution of the club seen through different eyes, and then finally, the restoration of the club to a more original stance. The evolution of both an ecological and sustainable approach to the club, while still retaining its difficulty and historic tradition, makes the theme timely as well. Depending on the length of the film, several sub-themes could be introduced: the way the giant industrialists took over the American economy in the late 19th century, making millionaries out of a number of industrialists; how leisure time in America developed and how golf became the passtime of a certain class of players; and how the conflict between aesthetic beauty and functionality remains strong, as well as the unique difficulty of the course. Indeed, depending on the slant of the video, the story of Oakmont could be an iconic study of modernization and American leisure time just as easily as a foray into the science and physics of a difficult golf course.

Overview of Video -- the MOST DIFFICULT GOLF COURSE in the WORLD

Issue and approximate viewing time

Major points discussed

Who or what might be shown to make effective?

Introduction to Golf

2-3 minutes

Brief History of Golf, the sport of Scotland, and its adoption in America.

Views of Scottish golfers in traditional garb and showing traditional courses.

Golf comes to America

2 minutes.

How the passion for golf developed to the point that the people who now play golf in the United States has risen and fallen depending on economic times and other interests.

Show archival footage of old golf tournaments from the 1920s and 1930s. Introduce the idea of the private golf club; show the ebb and flow of golf's popularity in the U.S. By interviewing professionals from the National Golf Foundation.

The Man Who Made Oakmont

3 minutes

Brief biography of industrialist William C. Fownes, his passion for golf, and what allowed him to follow this passion.

Show footage of the Carrie Furnace Company, Carnegie steel, and then footage of Fownes and his crew working on the land.

Course design

1-2 minutes

Explaination of how golf courses are designed; the difference between traditional and other courses, what impact trees and other natural landscaping has.

Snippets from experts in the field talking about course design and how it affects both players and spectators.

Course Design at Oakmont

3-5 minutes

What makes Oakmont so difficult? Focus on 4-5 reasons that the course is considered the most difficult in the world.

Provide juxtaposition between golf pros who have played Oakmont and physics professors who can explain (through animation) why certain issues make it more difficult in golf (angles, wind, etc.)

Oakmont as professional golf course

3-4 minutes

Overview the major championships held at oakmont, focusing on the 1992, 1994, 2003, 2007, 2010 and then 2016.

Interview winners of the earlier tournaments, specific to comments on Oakmont and their view of the course.

Restoration

3-4 minutes.

Overview the history of the course landscaping, adding, then removing trees; talk about sustainability, line-of-sight, and adherance to the original course.

Interviews and graphics -- Interviews with both sides of the tree issue; graphics showing the evolution of the course from a bird's eye view.

Conclusions

2-3 minutes

Listed in the National Registry of Historic Places; why it is important to American Golf, future trends.

Future plans, other services (fine fining, logdging, etc.) offered by the club.

Thus, in a 26-30 minute video, we have captured the essence of an iconic American golf course, how history and economics allowed the course to be built and prosper, the difficulties in managing a golf course, some initial science of why a course is difficult, and the promotion of the course through individuals who have played and/or won tournaments.

Some quotes that can be used throughout the video:

"There's only one course in the country where you could step out right now -- right now -- and play the U.S. Open, and that's Oakmont." Lee Trevino, famous golfer and commentator (Parascenzo, 2007)

"It's probably the best course in the world… This is… READ MORE

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