Breakfast With Benz U.S. Open at Oakmont retrospective: 'The Duck' holds off the Tiger in 2007

Next week, Oakmont Country Club will host its 10th U.S. Open championship. This week at “Breakfast with Benz,” we are flashing back to memories of each of the last five U.S. Opens that have been held at the course in our podcast series with David Moore, a golf historian and the curator of collections at Oakmont.

Thursday’s entry for our series flashes back to the 2007 event won by Ángel Cabrera.

Oakmont’s collection curator, David Moore, spends his whole life around mementos and memories of U.S. Opens at Oakmont.

One of his favorite pieces of memorabilia is from the 2007 event and eventual champion Ángel Cabrera.

“The final round, it seemed like if Cabrera didn’t have a golf club in his hand, he had a cigarette in his mouth. He probably went through a carton of Marlboro cigarettes during that final round,” Moore said during Thursday’s “Breakfast With Benz” podcast. “My favorite artifacts that we have that are on display in the Oakmont clubhouse are a couple of those Marlboro cigarette butts of Ángel Cabrera’s. When he gave us his caddie bib to put in the display case, the front pocket was still full of those Marlboro butts. So the caddie bib lays in the display case with two or three of those butts on top of it.”

Cabrera captured the imagination of Pittsburgh golf fans during that event. The stocky, 6-foot-1, 210-pound Argentinian was nicknamed “El Pato” (the Duck) for his waddling stride. He hadn’t won a major — or even a single event — on the PGA Tour before claiming victory by holding off Jim Furyk and the legendary Tiger Woods.

“Everybody expected Tiger to close it out on Sunday. He was coming off a British Open championship. He had won the PGA the previous year,” Moore said. “His undoing really was No. 3 when he hit it in the church pews and then couldn’t get up and down. He makes a double bogey. That’s really what cost Tiger.”

Cabrera ended up outlasting the rest of the field with a less-than-stellar 5-over 285. That was one stroke better than Woods and Jim Furyk, whose father was head pro at Uniontown Country Club.

“His dad is from New Kensington. He’s a huge Steelers fan,” Moore said. “I remember being there on Monday, and all the spectators were asking him about the Steelers. He was so happy to be talking about that instead of golf.”

But Cabrera bookended the weekend with a pair of 69s to take the title — no small accomplishment on a weekend when Oakmont lived up to its brutal reputation.

“It was a perfect spring and early summer, not a lot of rain,” Moore recalled. “So the golf course was incredibly firm. It was pretty dried out. The rough was 5 or 6 inches thick. It put a premium on driving the ball in the fairway. If you were going to miss, you had to make sure you missed in the right spots, which is typical of any U.S. Open. But when all was said and done, there were only eight total rounds over the course of four days under par.”

Also, during the podcast, Moore discusses how some changes to the course made life even more difficult for the golfers in 2007, how Cabrera’s career went after the Open victory, and other players who flashed then fell off during the course of competition that weekend.

On Friday, we conclude our series with a trip back to 2016 to look at Dustin Johnson’s title in the most recent U.S. Open held at Oakmont.