Darrell Sapp, Post-Gazette photos
	Oakmont's course superintendent John Zimmers stops to think on the 9th green, the back of which is big enough to serve as the practice green. His day and that of his 40-member crew begins at 5:25 a.m.

By Chico Harlan
Pittsburgh Post-Gazette

The sun broke the horizon just before 5:45 a.m., and the rays of orange light allowed John Zimmers the first look at his 300 acres, where grass is never just grass. Mr. Zimmers wore Gore-Tex shoes, sealing his feet from the dew. He walked from hole to hole, from green to green, inspecting the golf course at Oakmont Country Club with such myopic fascination that he forsook both the forest and the trees; he wanted to know, on this Thursday morning, how the grass was feeling.

	Ryan Ifft, of Plum, turns his cutter on thin plywood during sunrise as he triple cuts the #18 Green. The plywood protects the edge of the green, next to the intermediate ruff, at the Oakmont Country Club. Mr. Ifft is one of about 40 groundskeepers charged with prepping the Oakmont Course for the 2007 U.S. Open. Click photo for larger image.
	MORE U.S. OPEN COVERAGE Tomorrow: One giant step for Open hopefuls A look at the 13, 36-hole sectional qualifiers for the U.S. Open Video, interactive course guide, player audio comments and more U.S. Open resources
	Patric Choncek uses an icepick to aerate the soil and turf after moving a cup from one part of a green to another. The greens at Oakmont are notoriously tough. Click photo for larger image.

As he moved across the fairways and toward the greens -- from the ninth hole to the 18th hole to the first -- he tossed and retrieved a golf ball, sometimes rolling it, sometimes bouncing it, sometimes lobbing it, his method of probing every contour. On a firm fairway, a ball thrown to the ground should bounce back to him, belt-high. On a diabolical green, a trademark at Oakmont, a ball rolled along a ridge should nose-dive down the slope if it goes off line, replicating the perils putters will face less than two weeks from now, when the club hosts the U.S. Open. So far on this morning, Mr. Zimmers liked the results.

The success of the Open for Mr. Zimmers, the course superintendent, will reflect the sum condition of his terrain. Some 40,000 fans daily and 156 of the world's most demanding golfers will stampede an area that, even without the foot traffic, requires the attention of 40 groundskeeper staffers and $35,000 mowing machines with blades engineered to thousandths-of-an-inch precision. Perhaps when a man oversees a course with such invested attention -- Mr. Zimmers last took a day off in mid-March and works more than 100 hours every week -- he begins to view the land itself as a fellow character, relentless and stubborn and volatile, particular like a great-grandfather, obstinate like a teenager, needy like a newborn, beautiful and breathing.

During this particular Thursday morning tour, Mr. Zimmers concerned himself most with the greens, the jewels in a golf course's crown. He could judge the grass's length to a millimeter. He could talk about its fertility and its vitality. He noticed splotches of discoloration, evidence of the previous day's heat. He predicted, too, that the greens would look "totally different in an hour," once the sun rejuvenated the fresh-mowed blades.

"It's like having kids," he said. "You know how a parent can look at them and understand what they're feeling? Same thing here."

On the 18th hole, three of Mr. Zimmers' workers pushed red mowers, eliminating the previous day's growth. They moved in up-down patterns, creating the lines of alternating light and dark. The mowers trimmed the greens to 30/320ths of an inch, almost bald. The organic detritus collecting inside the mowers looked less like grass clippings than green fairy dust. Within hours -- club members' tee times began at 7:45 a.m. -- Oakmont would resume its city-state feel, swelling with contract workers and USGA officials and laborers building grandstands. But here, no distractions endangered Mr. Zimmers' focus.

"Besides," he said, grinning, "those other people don't get here as early as we do."

After waking at 4:30 a.m., Mr. Zimmers, 36, married and without children, left his house down the road, drove to the golf course and followed the dark road to its end, where a barn -- groundskeeper headquarters -- already hummed with activity. Staffers were required to check in by 5:25, but many beat that deadline by 30 minutes. He helped five assistants plan the day, and then headed across the barn to the employees' lounge, where, with all the requisite coach-speak, he explained the day's tasks.

"We're going to triple-cut the greens and roll them this morning," he told the room. He held, in his right hand, a Styrofoam cup of coffee, half his daily allotment. "We're less than two weeks out, fellas. Let's get off to a good start and move quick."

Eight years ago Mr. Zimmers accepted the head superintendent job at Oakmont, one of most esteemed positions in a small-circuit industry. His job description retained an element of agronomics, but it also required more: creating budgets and speaking to board members and bidding on equipment. He'd landed here, in a roundabout way, because of a classified ad, one he'd spotted as a 19-year-old working a landscape job near Altoona for $3.35 per hour.

Paul Latshaw, the guru of golf course superintendents, was looking for somebody to join him at a club in Wilmington, Del. Mr. Zimmers expressed interest, figuring his love for working outdoors might feel more like a blessing if he could actually earn a decent salary. Mr. Zimmers impressed his boss, who later brought the youngster to his next job, at Congressional Country Club, in Washington, D.C., then recommended him for his first superintendent position, at a club near Cleveland. By then, he'd squeezed in a turf management degree from Rutgers University.

"He probably went through the ranks faster than 99.9 percent of people do," Mr. Latshaw said.

He arrived at Oakmont just around the time the club planned to make a run to host another Open, and that possibility -- grafting a mega-event atop his micro-managed world -- represented a challenge. The course that Mr. Zimmers walked across on Thursday morning, part of his daily effort to check out every hole, had grown into a hybrid of renovation and restoration. The course's interior featured only two trees, both elm trees, maybe 80 years old; another 5,000 trees had been removed. The course had no water hazards, instead earning its growl from some 210 bunkers, including a signature pattern of "church pews" -- alternating lines of sand and high grass -- that stretched between the third and fourth fairways.

Below the surface
The course was designed in 1903 by Henry Fownes, somebody Mr. Zimmers now describes as a genius. In 104 years, Oakmont, built atop a durable heavy clay soil, has never been rebuilt. Course workers have discovered, lying just under the course, railroad ties and horseshoes and rocks the size of basketballs.

"But this place," Mr. Zimmers said while walking the course, "is about to hold its eighth U.S. Open. Just think about that. It's stood the test of time! All from this guy, he really only designed one golf course in his lifetime."

Oakmont's personality, unaltered by a century, now faces the short-term threat of a major golf tournament's infrastructure. Such a possibility means guarding every millimeter. It means taking soil samples from roughly 20 spots on every hole, gauging the grass's health and treating it with the proper blend of potash and phosphorus. It means demanding staffers use 100-yard hoses, manually watering the land, rather than risking the uneven coverage of a sprinklers-only method. It means selecting several trusted assistants to "syringe" every green, treating it with just a splash of water to heal the individual blades, which can burn like a just-shaved face.

It means, for Mr. Zimmers, that what he does every morning he'll have to live with "for the next 10 hours," which he says as if unable to imagine higher stakes.

Several hours after sunrise, Mr. Zimmers ascended a grandstand hugging the third green. From this point -- one of the highest on the course -- he scanned for more details, more problems. He noticed a bunker that required raking, and a perimeter tree whose trunk appeared overgrown. Mr. Zimmers' assistants handled more subterranean problems. On this day, officials began construction of the giant leaderboard, yet another edifice in an area now flush with them. But before a single stake could be driven into the ground, the construction area required approval from assistant superintendent Brett Bentley, who carried with him a laminated book of Oakmont's underground wiring.

The club, below its surface, had light post wiring, a city main line, gas valves, irrigation pipes and 900 phone lines. "And you're building on top of all that," Mr. Bentley said.

Help on the way
By next Sunday, Mr. Zimmers' staff will swell to 125, including volunteers, many of them former assistant superintendents who have moved on to head positions at other courses. Even last Thursday, one such Zimmers protege -- Fox Chapel superintendent Jason Hurwitz -- had already returned to Oakmont, ready to help prepare the course and judge its condition.

While Mr. Hurwitz and Mr. Zimmers stood together on the 14th fairway, still bouncing and rolling a Titleist, Mr. Bentley approached.

"What do you say, Brett?" Mr. Zimmers asked.

"Yeah, grass looks good on 18," Mr. Bentley said. "Fairways are a bit drier on this side."

"Looks good. Looks really good," Mr. Hurwitz said.

Mr. Zimmers' view, at that moment, begged for attention, the panorama postcard-perfect. A single mower traced the perimeter of the fairway, etching a dark border line. The sand, unblemished by footsteps or errant streaks, basked in its morning virtue. The fairway, all divots fixed, rose toward the clubhouse, its alternating light green-dark green lines curling, rainbow-like. Sometimes, Mr. Zimmers reminded himself and his staffers to stand back and appreciate the view. To just reflect. But not here.

Here, Mr. Zimmers, nodding, ended the conversation by saying only that "Yeah, I think right now, this is where we want to be," and he felt that way not because of where he stood, but because of how the grass stood.