9 minute read
University Place’s Permanent Sandcastle
‘Sound’ dream built on a sand and gravel mine, the Chambers Bay story and legacy endures
BY TONY DEAR • CG EDITOR
This June, it will be 10 years since the Pacific Northwest hosted its first ever U.S. Open, when the National Championship was played at an eight-year-old Chambers Bay in University Place.
For many, that milestone will seem absurd — can it really be a decade since Jordan Spieth shot a four-round total of five-under-par 275 to beat Dustin Johnson and Louis Oosthuizen by a shot and claim his second straight major title (he had won the Masters just 10 weeks prior).
The USGA knew it was taking a risk bringing its flagship event to a part of the country it had never been to before, not to mention so young a course. And though it saw its share of controversy, the 110,000 people who attended during a week of warm temperatures and near-constant sunshine had a great time watching world-class golf. Local business-owners and tax collectors certainly enjoyed it, too, with an economic impact in the region totaling over $130 million.
Over the next few pages, we look back on what was a momentous and historic week, remembering the USGA’s groundbreaking decision to play its largest championship in our neck of the woods.
We will relive how the course was set up, how players (and others) reacted to it, and how the galleries and a new TV broadcast partner in FOX fared. And we’ll remember how the champion, a then 21-year-old Texan in the midst of an exceptional season, overcame a packed leaderboard featuring Johnson and Oosthuizen, Rory McIlroy, Jason Day, Shane Lowry, Cameron Smith, Adam Scott, Charl Schwartzel, Branden Grace, and Brandt Snedeker — all of whom finished in the top 10.
In 1992, Pierce County purchased a sizeable chunk of land bordering Puget Sound in University Place from the Glacier Sand and Gravel Company — approximately 610 acres in all that were known as the Chambers Creek Properties.
Nine years later, then County Executive, John Ladenburg, visited for the first time to discuss the positioning of a barbed wire fence, separating Grandview Drive and the now-disused gravel mine, with the University Place City Manager. Ladenburg wasn’t sold on golf courses at first but, after hearing of previous ideas (1993 and 1997) to build one on the site — ideas that were voted down — he hatched a plan for a high-end, public, links-style course.
In September 2003, the County sent out an RFP (Request for Proposal) inviting golf course architecture firms to submit their proposals for the design of the course. Fifty-six of them did, including that belonging to Palo Alto-based Robert Trent Jones Jr.
The California Jones team gave an impressive PowerPoint presentation to the County in March 2004 at the end of which, Jay Blasi, a 26-year-old design associate in the company handed out bag tags on which “Chambers Creek, 2030 U.S. Open” had been inscribed (the project was then known as Chambers Creek and the 2030 part was a cheeky, but effective, marketing ploy).
In May, Jones got the job, the County voting 5-2 in favor of allocating $1.3 million of sewer utility funds to hiring him.
In September 2005, the County held a public meeting in the council chambers in Tacoma to present its funding plan for the now-named Chambers Bay Golf Course and on October 6, the County passed an ordinance reaffirming that the principal funding source for its financing, construction, operation, and maintenance would be the revenues it generated.
Having been given the green light, the County broke ground in the Fall of 2005. The cost of the course mushroomed from $13 million to $21 million during the building process. But, in February 2008, just eight months after his course had opened, the bold vision and budget pressures were vindicated when the USGA announced the 2010 U.S. Amateur Championship, and 2015 U.S. Open would be played there.
“It was a dream come true,” says Blasi, who left Jones’s employ and formed his own design company in 2012. “I had begun doodling golf holes on restaurant placemats at the age of four and, in high school, told a local newspaper in Wisconsin that I wanted to design a U.S. Open course.”
Many readers will remember that conditions in the run-up to the championship, which began on June 18, 2015, were hot and dry with the last rain the course saw before the event began falling on June 2. Temperatures between then and the first round were between 75-85 degrees and, with the USGA deciding not to water the course much, it meant the ground was baked brown and hard as a rock.
“The winter was relatively mild in comparison to prior years,” remembers Josh Lewis, who had been the Golf Course Superintendent for three and a half years and was second-in-command to Chambers Bay’s Director of Agronomy, Eric Johnson. “That allowed us to keep things pretty healthy and get a lot of work done. The last half of April and most of the month of May were uncharacteristically warm, however. I remember May specifically being downright hot at times with several days over 90 degrees, which just doesn’t happen in western Washington outside a few days of the year, and typically not until much later in the season.”
Bruce Charlton, President and Chief Design Officer at Robert Trent Jones II LLC, says the firmness of the surfaces definitely altered how some of the holes were meant to play. “We designed the course for firm and fast conditions,” he adds, “but Mother Nature gave us one of the driest, hottest periods in May and June ever. With the soils being all sand, the amount of roll that players were able to achieve was probably more than we had anticipated.”
Because of the firmness of the ground, Charlton adds, players weren’t really able to use the kicker slopes the design team had built into the green surrounds at several holes (3, 4, 7, 9, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15 and 18).
“The ball was ricocheting off these slopes in a way that prevented players from controlling the ball’s speed when hitting them.”
Blasi, who was on-site a week before the event started, had seen how the firmness in the ground was going to have a big effect on players’ strategies and scoring.
“During the practice rounds, I helped guide a bunch of players round,” he remembers. “It was fun watching them trying to figure out the course considering how different it was to most PGA Tour stops. I had Jake Knapp (who was at UCLA) and 15-year-old Cole Hammer for one round. Jake is Dustin Johnson-long, and Cole was pretty short so, because of the distances they each hit the ball together with the course conditions, the lines I was giving them were sometimes 70 yards apart.”
It was exciting and competitive. dramatic end to an amazing four days an Academy Award winner for the community and Pierce County. Robert Trent Jones Jr.
Charlton likewise spent a lot of time on the course during the practice rounds. “On the Sunday morning before the tournament, I walked all 18 holes with Rickie Fowler and Jordan Speith,” he says. “In the afternoon I walked another 18 with fellow Iowan Zach Johnson. It was fascinating to hear these players develop their detailed plans of attack and strategize with their caddies.”
Blasi hosted family, friends, and clients during the championship while Charlton was determined to see as much of the golf as possible. Jones, too, tried to watch the play between Golf Channel/FOX interviews saying it was “exciting” to observe the players trying to meet the demands of a fiery Chambers Bay. “There were strategies and nuances for how the players needed to play the holes,” Jones says. “Extreme accuracy was required between intentions and execution.”
For all the controversies — should the USGA have watered the course more than it did; were the fescue greens U.S. Open-worthy; why did so many spectator bottlenecks form when the USGA had had several years to prepare, etc.? We did see a great finish with six players within one shot of the lead on the back-nine on Sunday and the lead changing hands several times.
“It was exciting and competitive,” says Jones. “A dramatic end to an amazing four days — an Academy Award winner for the community and Pierce County.”
The questions still come up occasionally at the water cooler and in 19th holes. But as time marches on, the memories that seem to endure are more about amazing golf and less about the course’s set up and conditions.
Two years after the U.S. Open, Chambers Bay began the process of changing its fine fescue greens to poa annua, a turf variety more suitable for the Pacific Northwest. At first, the 7th, 10th, and 13th, which had performed poorly during the championship, were resodded. Encouraged by the positive results, the County decided to re-turf all 18 greens. It closed the course in October 2018 and reopened it on April 3, 2019, since then, the poa greens have thrived and Chambers Bay has become a bucket list course, if it wasn’t already.
______________________
