Chambers Bay golf course sings an alluring song

By Jeff Wallach

Editor's note: This article was originally published in Estates West Golf Living. Visit the magazine website here.

Much like great music, the best golf courses can ratchet up your emotions directly and immediately. They can also generate a rich nostalgia by stirring memories and feelings associated with other masterpiece designs you're already familiar with.

Chambers Bay, a new public course outside Tacoma, Wash., designed by Robert Trent Jones II Golf Course Architects, immediately elicits intense musical tinglings. At different moments the course resonates like a Mozart aria, a Hendrix guitar riff, a Wagner orchestral and a crooning Hank Williams ballad. It moves you with the sheer beauty of its rolling grasslands that pour between wild mounds and empty down toward the shores of Puget Sound. It bolsters you for heroic golf shots that demand you pull out all the stops and swing out of your shoes. And it calms you by keening mournfully like the melodic climbing and plunging of an Irish jig.

All the while, Chambers Bay arouses a toasty longing for other great courses you've played or seen. Holes are not derivative, but simply evocative -- in the same way a purely struck Santana chord is evocative of a violin melody played by Isaac Stern. Citing how this works in another artistic genre, poet and golf course architect Robert Trent Jones Jr. compares it to French author Marcel Proust's "Remembrance of Things Past," when the author is flooded with childhood memories by the presence of a piece of madeleine cake.

Whether you've been to Bandon, Ore., or not, you almost can't help but compare Chambers Bay to the idyllic linkslands six hours down the coast at Bandon Dunes Golf Resort. Certain aspects also echo Jack Nicklaus's brilliant efforts at Old Works, in Montana, which is also a reclamation site. And yet other views conjure Pete Dye's artistry at Whistling Straits.

Yet, the overall character here is Irish, connoting Ballybunion, with holes tunneling between massive sandy ridges. And amusing quirks -- not the least of which is an occasional train rolling past -- speak with the Scottish lilt of Prestwick or North Berwick. These tiny revelations alight fleetingly, without warning, and lend a component of happy reminiscence or surprise to playing the course.

Chambers Bay golf course opened June 23, 2007.

For most of the past century, the Chambers Bay site was home to both a gristmill and a gravel and sand quarry. When the property was abandoned some years ago it appeared as an unsightly gouge in the surrounding Northwestern landscape of forested islands with distant views of the snow-capped Olympic Mountains.

Not only does the Chambers Bay Golf Course tell a triumphant reclamation story about turning a wasteland into a gorgeous asset; it also illustrates how government can actually act in the best interests of its constituents. The visionaries behind the larger Chambers Creek Project -- which includes the golf course, parks and other amenities spread across 930 acres -- are not real estate developers or corporate CEOs. County executives and other public servants concepted this brilliant, walking-only public golf course that locals can play at a great discount.

And in case you thought Chambers Bay might be missing any crucial angle of perfection, throw in that romance of the passing trains (which may at some future point stop at the property), boats plying the blue waters of Puget Sound (one day golfers may also be able to arrive by boat) and even 'ancient' ruins adjacent to the playing surfaces -- in this case, the castle-like ramparts of huge sorting bins left from the land's industrial past.

Lastly, the course was envisioned to host tournaments -- and not just for local sticks but featuring the big boys, playing from nearly 7,600 tough, windy yards, in front of 40,000 fans. If the USGA has truly been hoping to host the U.S. Open in this far flung corner of the country, it needn't waste another minute debating locales.

Upon arrival, you'll drive toward a clubhouse that seems perched on the very precipice of the continent. Just beyond it, 200 vertical feet of earth have been clawed away over the past century, creating a concave topography recently crafted into massive dunes and turbulent runlets of turf, edged with acres of wild waste areas and hectic fescues.

Then you descend, confusing your notion that heaven is a place above us. Below, the overall mood is ripe with mystery as you appreciate the scale and intimacies of a site full of mounds and humps and hummocks, sideslopes and sheer drops, all drifting and tilting westward toward the gleaming waters of Puget Sound. And at the very edge, a lone fir -- the only tree on the property -- marks the transition where sand dunes drop down to the sea.

The golf holes themselves are sublime, each proffering choices and intricacies. Waste areas are as large as some Northeastern states, but the huge fairways compensate and allow players to swing with abandon. The common winds may suggest adoption of a ground game, but you can punch run-ups, attack aerially or invent a hundred other creative ways to play these holes, which may seem different each time you confront them. As Jones Jr. says, "You can play more options at Chambers Bay than at the Chicago Futures market."