Nirvana Meets Destiny's Child at Chambers Bay - Part 1. A Golf Mecca of Predestination

By: Zachary Michael Jack

After heckling the fishmongers at Pike Place Market as they tossed their sockeye salmon with what I'd judged to be a decent if not flippy release; after notching more Intelligentsia and Starbucks coffee shops per square block than slots in Vegas; after doing, in fact, what any shameless Middle American rubbernecker would do when struck by Space Needle-Grunge Metal-Destination Golf Fever, I arrive, at long last, at the first course in my search for a golf Mecca to have me giddy as a school boy seeking Paula Creamer's autographed photograph.

In Seattle-Tacoma, a.k.a. SeaTac, even the views from scurrilous hotels like my Motel 6 leave you verklempt, my balcony view revealing the divine sight of both a deliciously proximate Dairy Queen in the foreground thrusting its curvaceous signage into a sky the impossible blue of a raspberry slush and, beyond, the larger inverted snow cone that is Mt. Rainier. Duly inspired, I pull out all the stops pre-round, dunking my sticks in an improvised dip consisting of a spa-line hotel shower gel (lemongrass flavor) purloined en route and some dishwater-hued Tacoma tap water.

While I wait for the clubs to stew in the bathroom sink I cue up a five-minute video on my laptop narrated by the mad architect of Chambers Bay golf course, Robert Trent Jones II, who appears resplendent in pink to gush about his own fated, feted creation. "I love all the golf holes," he enthuses. "They're eighteen little puzzles, eighteen holes to embrace and have a dance with."

The last new course given the honor of hosting the U.S. Open was designed by his father, Jones reminds, Hazeltine National in 1970, the Twin Cities-area track drawn up by Robert Trent Jones Sr. and famously likened to a cow pasture by the disgruntled runner-up in that championship, Dave Hill. For upstart Chambers Bay to be included in such "unique and auspicious" company, RTJ opines, is a rare honor indeed.

Such exceptionality mostly explains why I have come to what the Chambers Bay marketeers are fond of calling "the ends of the earth." Auspiciousness, I've come to believe, is crucial where sports Shangri-Las-in-the-making are concerned. Admittedly, I've never been what techies call an "early adopter," but where the rare pleasures of getting in on the ground floor are concerned I totally get it. In effect, I've come to the Grunge-y edge of America for the same reasons that pimply teens like me queued up for hours back in 1991 to score tickets for Nirvana world tours - because the launch of the meteoric is simply too sweet to miss.

In a sport where even world-class venues often perform Herculean labors and still wait several generations to get some R-E-S-P-E-C-T from the USGA powers-that-be, Chambers Bay has seemingly sprung full-grown from the head of Cronus, embracing with open arms the paradoxical moniker "instant classic." Indeed, more than a year before the local city council had even authorized the sale of the bonds to finance the thing, Seattle Post-Intelligencer sportswriter Jim Moore wrote that, one after one, fellow reporters in the Augusta National pressroom in 2006 had sidled up to ask him if the reports of a new SeaTac golf Mecca were true. "When you're getting noticed like this…before you even open, you must be a special place," Moore gee-whizzed.

Clubs soaked and mellowed, grooves cleaned, proverbial fish gutted, I lug the sticks back down to the Subaru baking atop the motel blacktop, toss them in the hatchback, and set sail for my date with destiny. The map shows Chambers Bay planted in the middle of a Tacoma burb called University Place - some Abercrombie & Fitch-rich exurb, I imagine, possessed of the requisite Barnes and Noble and some tidy branch campus of the University of Washington where upper-middle-class children broaden their horizons whilst depleting their parents' 401ks, without ever having to leave home.

Alas, as the little blue dot on my GPS zeroes in on the charmed coordinates, I'm still up to the gills in strip malls and fingernail-polishing joints and bail bondsman and jackhammers and abject summertime road construction. And when I pull over at the University Place Walmart to load up on some discount ammo for my impending assault on America's most precocious 18 cups, the heady demographic span becomes demographic stretch.

Outside the store two patrons chat casually about the mandatory distance a sex offender must stay away from the schoolhouse doors, while inside agitates a frighteningly long line of overheated folks queuing with Galaxy window fans and king-sized boxes of Huggies pinned awkwardly against their hips. In the speedy self-checkout lane beside mine, meanwhile, floats the ubiquitous traveling golfer clad in his $100 Nike Dri-fit as he provisions himself with some seriously impenetrable sun block.

It turns out University Place is something of a geo-demographic misnomer, the university for which the place is named never having been built on the land originally acquired for that purpose. Instead, a series of industrial and agricultural enterprises set up shop here, cutting, tilling, mining and otherwise manhandling the hills overlooking Puget Sound until even the land was pretty much tuckered out. It took a century for the natives to fashion a post-industrial identity, turning to a 1994 ballot initiative to transform the burg in unincorporated Pierce County into an honest-to-god city. Now, thanks to some zealous rebranding, University Place has traded in gravel pits for miles of pristine bike trails and tidy doggie parks part and parcel of the gentrifying (without being precious) vibe here.

The land that Jones II transformed into the magically delicious Chambers Bay was not-so-gently used, reminds the University Place website, whose punny motto reads "find your place here," a slogan illustrated by the image of a husband and wife, arms intertwined, golf bags slung over their upper-middle-class shoulders as they stride into an epic sunset.

Before salt-and-pepper retirees like these dug divots, the city's web copy informs the roughly 250-acre site was mined by sand and gravel barons prior to being "reinvented as the world-class golf course it is today." What was a generation ago a working-class Washington lumber town is now, judging from the surfeit of spandex-clad bikers and joggers passed en circuitous route up the aptly named Grandview Drive to the last shady spot in the clubhouse lot, a prime candidate for the season premier of "Community Makeover Edition."

Inside the modest clubhouse I meet Jamie Fay, the course's marketing guru. Like most of the staff he's a young, good-looking professional without being impersonal. Chambers Bay is run by Chicago-based Kemper Sports, and customer service here is a well-managed expectation. Fay's youthful golf Mecca already boasts 75 to 100 a day, even in winter, thanks to mild Pacific currents that keep the coastal Northwest surprisingly temperate. Each year Fay and Co. suffer a mere handful of frost delays at a course located on roughly the same latitude as Fargo, N.D.

Chambers Bay's preternaturally well-drained soils make it a favorite among Cascadian golfers sufficiently deep-pocketed to afford two annual memberships, one for their regular club that's unfailingly and obligingly lush and leafy green throughout the summer and so soggy in winter as to be unplayable; the other for the eight-month off-season pass offered by the course to keep the customers coming when elsewhere in Seattleland it's raining cats and dogs.

Today, however, it's unseasonably toasty - 90 degrees says the bank clock - and the merciful Fay ushers me underneath an all-weather pavilion where general manager Matt Allen stands to greet me. It's easy to label Chambers Bay destiny's child, not least because its nearest metropolis, Tacoma, claims as its centuries-old sobriquet "City of Destiny," a little fact I discovered while boning up on local history at the security-patrolled Tacoma Public Library, where patrons must check their bags before using the bathroom in a neighborhood where the security guard helpfully advised me not to walk after dark.

Because no one downtown, not the visitor's center marm nor the Chamber of Commerce designated hitter, could actually tell me what City of Destiny meant, nor anything much about the new course that is putting the city on the map in the world of destination golf, I took it upon myself to do a little independent digging.

Underrated Tacoma turns out to be the site of the oldest golf club west of the Mississippi, a loose confederacy organized in 1894 when a bunch of barmy Scotch immigrants founded a club in something called Eisenbies' Cow Pasture a few short years after their countryman Willie Dunn designed Shinnecock Hills on Long Island. By 1896, the Tacoma Daily Ledger breathlessly detailed an "animated scene" where "golf balls were whizzing in all directions from morning till night." In fact, the rag prophesied, "With the finest golfing weather here all year round, there is no doubt Tacoma will become the Mecca for Golf in America."

In life as in golf, chance favors the prepared mind, it's true, but Chambers and Tacoma are better evidence of another of history's guiding principles - chance favors good P.R. Tacoma, I learn, was dubbed a City of Destiny not so much because it was fated or gifted but because it lobbied hard, and ultimately successfully, to become the terminus for the first transcontinental railroad in 1883. The railroad's zealous marketers, who took a back seat to no one in the propaganda department, took care of the rest.

A similar pioneering spirit applied, former Chambers Bay golf course superintendent Dave Wienecke shared with me in early interviews when he was still the course's chief fescue-whisperer, back when Pierce County made the bold decision to purchase and redevelop the 230 coastal acres on which Chambers Bay now sits, insisting on a sprawling, generous links with uninterrupted views of Puget Sound and the Olympic Mountains beyond while investing in "green" golf with the same zest other municipalities pinch pennies with.

Years later, Wienecke still shakes his head at the impossibly long odds of it. "To have the political will to make that happen against the voters . . . They were against [the course]. They said, 'We don't want to pay for this. This sounds like a boondoggle.' Now they're really proud of it . . . both the trail users and the golfers saying, 'We're so lucky to live here. This is so special.' "

The man taking the political football - or hot potato - and running with it was Pierce County executive John Ladenburg, who somehow convinced the city council to authorize the selling of a whopping $20.77 million in general obligation bonds to build the course and the accompanying trail system. From the get-go Ladenburg wanted the touchdown and the two-point try, urging his staffers to think high. "I told these guys to design this as if opening day was the U.S. Open," he told the Everett (Wash.) Herald in May 2007.

When Mike Davis's USGA began discussing the exciting possibilities of hosting a U.S. Open here mere months after Wienecke's first day on the job back in July 2006, the then newly-appointed course superintendent remembers thinking, "You guys are dreaming." Normally it takes at least a generation for a world-class course to come of age and score a major championship, he reminded anyone with the balls to prophesy the course's phenomenal future. Now Wienecke admits, "I saw the promise, I saw the potential, but I guess I didn't believe it would actually happen. I used to work for the USGA, and my friends there told me that there's a good chance that this was going to happen, but even still I just thought things are going to have to be a miracle for this to come true."

It's not unusual in golfdom to speak of a miracle piece of property, or a miracle shot, but spontaneous, unscripted manna and the ploddingly technocratic USGA seldom mingle in the same sentence. In fact, the propitious mystery of Chamber's selection is one Weinecke (who has since moved on to another job) still can't fully fathom. "I don't know if we'll ever know," he says of the exact factors that lead American golf's typically cautious governing body to choose the new course for the ultimate honor.

"My friends at USGA told me that the Championship Committee had given them direction to find a new site, a site some place they had never been before, and in a place that they could actually practice what they preach, in terms of the firm and fast."

Wienecke continues, "They [the USGA] has to have something that logistically could work. It has to be around a big city. It has to be in a place that they felt they could get the political and financial support. A host of other things politically had to happen. Mike Davis even told me when he first heard that this might be a candidate he said, 'Oh, sure.'

"They were awfully skeptical."

Next Up: Part 2 - Chambers Bay Readies for the 115th U.S. Open

Zachary Michael Jack learned to play golf alongside his father in the pastures of their seventh-generation farm in the Midwest. A former nominee for both the Herbert Warren Wind Award and William H. Hill Sports Book of the Year Award, Zachary's books on the sport include the travelogue "Let There Be Pebble: A Middle Handicapper's Year in America's Garden of Golf"; the golf parable "The Links of Evalon," and, most recently, a golf novel for teen and young adults entitled "Pond Ball Clintock and the Gods of Golf: A Novel for True Believers." Zachary teaches in the Sports Leadership concentration in the Master of Leadership Studies program at North Central College outside of Chicago.

Tweet