The ugly, old brute is back, though it's not so ugly anymore. Brazen, perhaps. Stark, indeed. But it's beautiful in an awesome, breathtaking way, like seeing Niagara Falls for the first time.

Oakmont Country Club is back where it belongs, the site of a record eighth U.S. Open Championship after a 13-year absence, and on the precipice of becoming perhaps the greatest course in the world, at least in the opinion of Johnny Miller. It is already ranked No. 5 among Golf Digest's 100 greatest golf courses and has never been out of the Top 10 since the magazine began compiling its prestigious list.

However, as it prepares to step front and center on golf's grandest stage in the 107th U.S. Open, Oakmont is ready to make an even bolder statement with a golf course that has been restored and revitalized with a tree-less look that was the intent of the course founder, Henry C. Fownes, more than 100 years ago.

"It's really a neat, special place," Phil Mickelson said.

"It's probably the best course in the world," said Miller, the 1973 U.S. Open champion who will return to Oakmont as golf analyst for NBC Sports, which will broadcast the event. "If the USGA doesn't get crazy, if they don't get the greens too fast and too hard, the players will say, 'This is the greatest course I've ever played.' "

Fownes, a Pittsburgh industrialist who built Oakmont on barren farmland that reminded him of the windswept landscape of Scotland, never built another golf course after the one he designed along Hulton Road near the Pennsylvania Turnpike. That, though, is not the sole reason his creation, founded in 1903, is one of a kind.

Oakmont stands alone because it oozes character, from the green-and-white clubhouse to the Church Pews bunker to the fastest and smoothest greens in the world that tilt in every direction on the compass, usually to the torment of the player.

Once home to more than 300 maddening sand bunkers -- William Fownes, the son of the founder, would watch members play and add sand hazards wherever a ball landed unharmed -- Oakmont now has a more manageable 210 bunkers, some with names such as Bigmouth, the 10-feet-deep bunker that fronts the 17th green.

There are even such quirky architectural designs as the grass ditches that define 12 of the 18 holes at Oakmont, some, such as at No. 15, snaking through the rough and running right up to the edge of the fairway. They have been cleaned out and restored to dare players to attempt shots from their grassy depths, even though they are marked as red-staked hazards.

"They used to be drainage ditches, but those ditches come into play," said Rees Jones, one of America's leading architect whose father, Robert Trent Jones Sr., a legendary course designer, was one of the people responsible for changing the look of Oakmont in the 1960s. "When you're in there, you're going to have to drop. They have become an important part of the penal aspect, and it's a very penal golf course."

For a course that has no water and no trees, Oakmont might be the most difficult layout in the world, especially if it plays firm and fast.

At least, that appears to be the opinion of some of the top course architects in the country who were asked to illuminate Oakmont's special qualities, everything from tee expansion that added 250 yards to the layout to the deepened sand bunkers that have dramatically enhanced many of the holes.

"If you think about it, from the day they designed it, Fownes kind of expressed his desire to have a links golf course in an inland facility, and that's what they designed," said Arnold Palmer, who has played in the past five U.S. Opens at Oakmont, beginning in 1953. "There's no question he was influenced by the Scottish ... particularly before all of us did redesign."

Palmer is one of the architects who did some type of redesign work in the past 45 years at Oakmont, along with Jones, Arthur Hills and Tom Fazio. But no matter how much the course has changed -- and it has, dramatically, since the 1994 U.S. Open because of the removal of more than 5,000 trees -- Palmer unflinchingly understands the key component to handling the Oakmont beast.

"You can say whatever you want about the rest of the golf course, it still all boils down to the shots into the greens and what happens when you're making those shots and what thoughts are in your mind when making those shots," he said.

"The guy who wins the Open is a guy who did his homework, who knows where to put the ball on those greens, and that is absolutely vital to the success of the Open. You can hit 72 greens [in regulation] in the Open at Oakmont and not come close to winning.

"They talk about the rough and what the rough is going to mean. Well, it's going to mean a lot if you're in it. But if you never hit it, you can't say that guy's going to win, not necessarily. Where he hits that shot into the green is what's going to determine how he does in the Open."

The greens have become even more vital to the Oakmont mystique since the trees were removed, an aggressive program that actually began in 1990 but took full flight when Hills, a Toledo-based architect, was brought in to oversee some course restoration shortly before the 1994 U.S. Open.

Before Hills arrived, Oakmont had already begun removing trees from the interior of the golf course, doing so surreptitiously under the command of Banks Smith, the club's former grounds chairman. Smith had Mark Kuhns, the club's former superintendent, take a crew of 12 workers and remove trees by the light of a maintenance cart at 4:30 a.m., a clandestine operation in which Kuhns would have the trees cut and ground and the turf resodded and fluffed before the members ever arrived. The logs were piled in a remote location of the property, away from the suspicious eyes of the membership.

No record of tree removal was kept during the subterfuge, which is why there is no exact count of the number taken out. Kuhns, though, has estimated the number to be closer to 8,000 than 5,000.

"I was kind of a catalyst for taking the trees out," Hills said. "I thought there were a lot of trees they could take out. They took out more than I anticipated, like all the trees in the middle of the course. It was pretty daring. But it looks incredible.".....

When the U.S. Open begins this week, only seven trees remain on the interior of the course -- five in the area behind the 18th green and 10th tee, known as the Oak Grove; and two elms, one near the third tee and the other between the fourth and fifth fairways.

Many of the trees removed were not historic trees indigenous to the site. In fact, approximately 3,500 -- pin oak, crab apple, flowering cherry, blue spruce -- were planted in the 1960s by Jones, at the behest of the late club president Fred Brand Jr., who wanted Oakmont to resemble another course at which he was a member -- Augusta National.

Eventually, though, those trees grew tall and wide, transforming Oakmont from the inland links-style course Fownes intended to a parkland-style layout that looked like a bunch of other tree-lined courses in Western Pennsylvania. Oakmont had lost its uniqueness.

"There's a trend in golf to, 'Let's get back to what the golf course looked like.' " said Fazio, who was retained in 2001 to lengthen the course by 250 yards and help bring the layout back to its original design. But mainly it's because trees were planted by committees or by people who didn't do it for golf playability reasons. They did it for aesthetics. And the ones that were done did change the playability."

Not anymore. Oakmont is right back to where it started, barren and beastly, its jagged profile framing a layout that features deep, squared-off bunkers with shadowed faces and fescue grasses that wave in the breeze. Eighty years after hosting its first U.S. Open in 1927, Oakmont has again become one of a kind, just as Fownes intended.

"They've added a lot of character to that golf course," Hills said. "Oakmont is one of the three or four best courses in the country, if not the world."

Not bad for an ugly, old brute.