2015 U.S. Open: Is Chambers Bay a Tinderbox Just Waiting to Explode?

The 2015 U.S. Open may still be six weeks away, but controversy has already begun swirling around the second major championship of the year.

The Masters is known for its longstanding traditions, annual Sunday drama and the familiarity that comes with the event being hosted at the same golf course (Augusta National) every year.

The Open Championship is known as the oldest major in golf and is held on a rotation of truly historic links courses.

The PGA Championship...well, this event lost its identity when it switched over to medal play back in 1958 and has yet to really gain a new identity since that time. Perhaps its identity is simply that it is the final major of the year...“glory’s last shot” if you want to go by the PGA of America’s former slogan for the event.

The U.S. Open has possessed a distinct identity since its inception back in 1895. Throughout the world, the U.S. Open is known as the toughest test in all of golf.

While presenting a tough test might have been a somewhat simple exercise between 1895 and the early 1990s, the USGA has been furiously attempting to maintain the U.S. Open’s identity in the face of continuous advancements in golf ball and equipment technology over the past 20 years.

Whether it is stretching golf courses out to more than 7,600 yards, introducing 270 yard par threes, keeping greens as firm as billiard tables or raking the rough back toward tee boxes to further penalize players that strike wayward tee shots, the USGA has tried everything under the sun to keep scores somewhere around par since the mid-1990s.

With the exception of the 2004 U.S. Open at Shinnecock Hills Golf Club (where the greens became so dried out that the USGA had to actually go out and water them in between groups) or the par three third hole at Merion (which played nearly 270 yards uphill and forced many players to hit drivers), the USGA has, for the most part, done a decent job of walking that very delicate line between challenging and unfair.

Much of this success can be attributed to USGA Executive Director Mike Davis.

Davis has been responsible for the U.S. Open course setups since 2005 and has increasingly become the center of attention at recent U.S. Opens due to his innovative ideas and the fact that he essentially has sole control over how the golf course will play each and every day of the tournament.

Aside from possibly that 270-yard uphill par three at Merion a couple of years ago, Davis has yet to really go overboard with either his course selections or setups over the past decade.

But that may very well change in six weeks at Chambers Bay Golf Course, which is located just south of Tacoma, Washington.

David Cannon/Getty Images

More than a few eyebrows were raised when Davis laid out some of his ideas for the 2015 event at a recent U.S. Open media day.

First and foremost, the USGA decided to essentially alter the true identity of Chambers Bay by growing out rough on what was initially designed as a links style golf course.

The defense of any links style golf course is the elements (wind, rain, etc.), uneven fairway lies and very large and undulating greens.

The elements, uneven fairways and undulating greens are what make links courses difficult despite containing little, if any, rough.

Adding thick rough to a style of golf course that was designed to be difficult without any rough in play is certainly a concept that one would describe as out of the ordinary.

As well as adding traditional rough to a links style golf course, Davis stated that players may be required to hit tee shots off sloped surfaces.

“In some cases we may end up putting tee markers on slight slopes as opposed to you think, well, you’re always going to have teeing markers on very flat areas,” Davis said (as reported by ASAP Sports). “But there may be some where we give the players a little downhill slope, a little uphill slope, a side slope. So that’s interesting.”

Most of us have played off of uneven slopes on neglected tee boxes at $25-per-round municipal courses...but the U.S. Open?

That ought to be quite interesting, indeed.

And the quirkiness of Davis’ potential course setup strategy doesn’t stop there.

Davis explained that the pars for holes one and 18 may be flipped on certain days. The first hole could play as a par four one day, while the 18th would play as a par five, and then they may be reversed the next day (one will play as a par five, and 18 will play as a par four).

Davis explained this strategy as follows:

"

We are playing this as a par 70. But we’re going to take the first and 18th holes and actually flip the pars on certain days.

So some days the first hole will play as a par‑4 while the 18th hole plays as a par‑5. And you can actually see them out there to your right is the 18th hole, to your left is the first hole.
And then other days we’ll play the first hole as a par‑5 and the closing hole as a par‑4.

Why did we do that? We weren’t trying to be innovative, we weren’t trying to be cute. It all got down to the architecture of the course. That it gives so much wonderful flexibility that, if you can see up there and I don’t have a pointer, that the drive zones as a par‑4 and par‑5 are for both those holes are completely different. And they play different. There's a risk reward element to both holes.

The putting greens are very bold designs in both cases. We just felt some of the holes were better fit for a risk reward par‑5 and others as a long par‑4.

"

If the USGA were not trying to be “innovative” or “cute” why wouldn’t it simply keep par for the holes unchanged and use different tee boxes on different days to set up more of a risk/reward element?

Isn’t that why these championship courses have numerous tee box options where any hole can be shortened or lengthened by, in some cases, up to 100 yards?

Reversing pars for the same holes on different days?

That is certainly a new one for any golf tournament, let alone the U.S. Open.

Oh, and just in case any of you had aspirations of qualifying for the Open and somehow conquering the USGA’s out-of-the-box course setup at Chambers Bay, think again.

Davis made it clear that a player will have no chance of winning unless they spend a great deal of time studying the course.

“I would contend that there is no way, no way, a player would have success here at Chambers Bay unless he really studies the golf course and learns it,” Davis said.

“The idea of coming in and playing two practice rounds and having your caddie just walk it and using your yardage book, that person’s done. Will not win the U.S. Open.”

So good luck to the nearly 50 percent of the field that will finish up U.S. Open qualifying just 11 days prior to the event and may already have previous tournament commitments the week before the Open...according to Davis, you might as well just stay home and watch the carnage unfold in front of your television set.

“I’ve already gotten a question a fair amount of times is, how are the players going to like Chambers Bay? What are they going to think?” Davis said. “I think the answer would be exactly the same as we would say every year in that is that some of the players will absolutely embrace the architecture and embrace the golf course setup. They will focus really on learning it. Others will chirp.”

While it is too early to tell whether Davis’ bizarre course setup ideas for Chambers Bay will be successful, or whether he even decides to pursue these ideas at all in six weeks, the players have certainly begun to “chirp.”

Ian Poulter posted the following tweet not long after Davis’ press conference:

“As far as the greens are concerned, it’s not a championship golf course,” PGA Tour veteran Ryan Palmer (who played Chambers Bay last Monday) said, as reported by Steve DiMeglio of USA Today. “Not with the way some of the greens are and the pin placements they can put out there.”

Palmer continued by stating the following:

"

The green complexes are something else. With some of the pin placements, you will see some guys play it 30 yards left, 30 yards right or 30 yards long, and next thing you know you’ll have a 2 footer. Or you’ll be 75 feet from the pin. … You have to spend so much time on the greens, practice rounds are going to take eight hours. Every green has like five or six greens on it.

"

And Palmer’s thoughts on Davis’ plan for placing tee boxes on uneven surfaces?

"

(Davis’) idea of tee boxes on down hills, up hills and side hills is ridiculous. That’s not golf. I don’t care what anybody says. It will get a lot of bad press from the players. It is a joke. I don’t understand it. I just don’t know why they would do it.

"

PGA Tour pro Bob Estes posted the following tweet in response to some of Davis’ plans for the 2015 U.S. Open.

Between Keegan Bradley and Miguel Angel Jimenez producing a confrontation far more interesting than the Mayweather vs. Pacquiao fight and Rory McIlroy asserting his dominance over the field at the WGC-Cadillac Match Play Championship, some of the news surrounding the 2015 U.S. Open seemed to become lost in the shuffle last week.

But it is clear that a fire has already begun forming around Chambers Bay and the 2015 U.S. Open.

Between the questionable selection of a very new links style golf course to host the U.S. Open and Davis’ unusual course setup ideas, Chambers Bay could very well be a tinderbox just waiting to explode in six weeks’ time.