Who knew the blue-blazer bunch had a rebellious streak?
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After years of mostly predictable behavior with regard to its national championships, the staid and conservative U.S. Golf Association has broken from its blind devotion to pedigree, reputation, history and tradition.
Eschewing its traditional course rotation for an infusion of new terrain, the USGA announced Friday at its annual meeting that the 2015 U.S. Open has been awarded to Chambers Bay, a new public course in University Place, Wash.
For a tradition-steeped organization, the decision is tantamount to knee-jerk, green-grass heresy, really. Ready for the punch line?
Chambers Bay opened last ... June.
By any golfing standard, but particularly for a site that will host the game's toughest annual test, that's truly virgin soil. But USGA officials loved the municipal layout so much, they saw no reason to wait and wanted to be first in line. When Mike Davis, the USGA official who handles the Open setup, made his first visit to site five years ago, he wasn't remotely prepared.
"We get calls all the time about places that think they might be a potential U.S. Open site," Davis said Friday. "When I got there, it was, like, 'Holy cow.' My jaw dropped. It was beyond spectacular."
Perched on land situated beside the panoramic Puget Sound an hour outside Seattle, the Robert Trent Jones II layout is as minimalist and windswept as the best Scottish linksland course and is visually reminiscent of another American links, Wisconsin's Whistling Straits. A county-owned facility, Chambers Bay is such a throwback, no electric carts are allowed.
Courses added to the Open lineup have sometimes been asked to first host a U.S. Amateur, which serves as a veritable audition for the bigger show to follow. The USGA shot down that model, too, selecting Chambers Bay to host the Amateur in 2010, all in one fell swoop.
"I think we were just absolutely convinced it would work," said Davis, the USGA's senior director of rules and competitions.
Continuing a trend that has been embraced by many, Chambers Bay will represent the third municipal course to host an Open this century, joining San Diego's Torrey Pines (2008) and Long Island's Bethpage Black (2002, 2009). With the Open set for the public-access Pebble Beach Golf Links in 2010, the Open courses available to the Regular Joes -- public players make up 80 percent of the golfing public in the United States -- are suddenly in high fashion.
It's quite a double-booked whammy for a state that has never before hosted the Open, not to mention a golf course that has never staged a meaningful tournament of any kind. But based on the gushing response the course has generated, there was little sense in waiting for the course to shed its training wheels.
"Yeah, it's a gamble in that it's never hosted a real test," said Golf Digest architecture expert Ron Whitten. "But Torrey Pines is a gamble, with the turf and fog conditions they might see this summer. They are always talking a gamble on these things."
