Nirvana Meets Destiny's Child: Chambers Bay - Part 2. Landing a U.S. Open

By: Zachary Michael Jack


[Editor's Note: In the first installment of this two-part story (http://www.cybergolf.com/golf_news/nirvana_meets_destinys_child_chambers_bay_a_golf_mecca_of_predestination_part_1) author Zachary Michael Jack discusses arriving in the Puget Sound area and discovering Chambers Bay, the unlikely site of the 115th U.S. Open.]

Prior to arriving on the shores of Puget Sound, Chambers Bay general manager Matt Allen was the assistant GM at the first of the moderns to blaze a shortcut to golf Meccadom, Bandon Dunes. The very fact that Allen was hand-picked by Kemper Sports to come to Tacoma after helping upstart Bandon host a Curtis Cup and a U.S. Mid-Amateur speaks volumes about the long-term vision here. From the get-go Kemper wanted someone at the helm with the demonstrated ability to handle big-time tournaments, and possessed of the golf pedigree to handle the reigns of a Mecca in utero.

For Allen there's a real correlation between America's re-embrace of links golf at Chambers Bay and the architectural movers and shakers he worked alongside at his previous gig on the southern Oregon coast. "In part the trend has to do with the leaders of the architectural community," he tells me, "the Tom Doaks, the Bill Coores, the Ben Crenshaws, and even the David Kidds for that matter. They're part of a group of architects that have really given birth to a new era of architecture that's a little bit of a throwback…."

Links golf, Allen learned from his former boss and Bandon developer Mike Keiser, is "hands down the most fair and welcoming way to play" because it doesn't require a slew of forced carries over hazards. You have a chance on every stroke. "That's one of the geniuses of the architecture here at Chambers Bay," he adds. "You can pretty easily play this golf course with just one ball."

Still, there are plenty of memorable 18-hole tracks around Golf Nation where a hack can play his entire round without losing a single pearl, I point out, pressing him to put a finger on the 'X-factor' that makes this course one of destination golf's hottest tickets. "I still think in order to have acceptance in this country you have to have something else," he concedes. "Whether that's the U.S. Amateur, the U.S. Open or a certain ranking in [a magazine] editorial, or, in Bandon's case, this sort of build-it-and-they-will come charm, you have to have some third-party endorsement that causes people to overcome their resistance."

That's as close as I get to getting Allen to dish on exactly what the special sauce is here. For now, he's comfortable taking the long view as he projects the role of precocious Chambers Bay into a promising yet not uncomplicated future. "We don't know what the Pebbles and the Pinehursts and the Torrey Pines and our other public-access U.S. Open sites are going to look like 50 years from now," he tells me.

Still, even given the industry's challenge to sustain Baby Boomer participation rates in the decades ahead, Allen likes his chances with the dark horse course he's backing. "We're already seeing places like Pinehurst abandoning plans they once had to build more golf, and you see the same at Pebble. Pebble Beach is advertising for the first time ever packages, doing everything they can to try to get people to come. Now, whatever the new glory is, the new standard, I imagine we'll get it. I don't think 25 years from now we'll have any fundamentally different experience than those courses, presuming we continue to have U.S. Opens."

As a public course especially, the key to avoid becoming a one-hit wonder is to land multiple U.S. Opens, following the example of Long Island's Bethpage Black, which hosted two U.S. Opens between 2000 and 2010 while avoiding the kind of downgrade suffered by Torrey Pines which, to Allen's way of thinking, probably won't get another Open anytime soon. "There's lot of talk about West Coast sites," he admits. "We know Pebble's in for 2019. That's certainly our goal, too, to be every seven to 10 years having an Open."

Chambers Bay's path to becoming a West Coast Bethpage Black, whose debut hosting the 2002 Open made it the first publicly-owned and operated course to host the ultimate championship, will inevitably create its own unique set of challenges. After 30-plus hours of Johnny Miller and TV's other talking heads going gaga over the 1936 A. W. Tillinghast-designed gem, the staff at Bethpage Black found themselves oversold, overhyped and so thoroughly overbooked in the aftermath of the championship that pilgrims were willing to sleep in the parking lot to score same-day tee times.

Allen is of two minds about such rock-star status as it relates to what figures to become the runaway popularity of Chambers Bay. Whereas the financial solvency of a private golf Mecca may be assured by well-endowed members in much the same way an elite private college is kept afloat on the generosity of its alums, a public course needs greens-fee infusions as badly as an ordinary college needs tuition dollars. For a public course, and one owned by a county no less, boots on the ground - spikes on the course - are its lifeblood.

"I think Pierce County would say that over-popularity would be a great problem to have," Allen says of the sleeping-in-the-parking-lot phenomenon. "The county, given their responsibility to pay the bond debts associated with the place and to ultimately have it be a general fund-contributing source of revenue, would say, 'Let it happen. Let's make sure we can say to the people that didn't fund it directly but certainly have the ultimate responsibility for the debt,' that we've done right by them." The goal is to get back in the black and become what Allen calls a "revenue center."

The biggest bugaboo standing in the way of nascent Chambers Bay becoming the Northwest's version of Bethpage Black may be the Old World grass fescue, which likes company but abhors a crowd, as Allen is quick to point out. "You can't put 50,000 golfers out here at Chambers just because people want to sleep in the parking lot and play, or you'd have no turf," he tells me. "That and the seasonality here as compared to Torrey Pines in San Diego . . . We want to play as many rounds as we can, keep the turf healthy, give people access, make money for our client, and be responsible to the debt that the county has.

"But I think you also want maybe not to let it happen through the wholesalers, like what has happened in San Diego and in New York." There, Allen claims, access to a non-resident often comes at a 300-percent markup through a broker. "We'd always want the starting-time process to be friendlier that that," he maintains of Chambers, where mid-summer green fees run around $170 for a Pierce County resident (around $275 for the rest of us), not including caddie payment on this walking-only track.

In the land of Starbucks and drive-thru lattes served by baristas in steamy lingerie, it's not surprising that branding comes up again and again in my conversation with Allen, whose hope is not just to tie the course's rep to transcendent natural icons like the bald eagles that ride the thermals above the treeless golf course, but with the fresh-air image of Cascadia itself, a land of tree-huggers, progressives and peaceniks, at least in the popular imagination.

That golf can be green and guilt-free somehow seems more buyable here in the Pacific Northwest than elsewhere - less added-on and more baked-in. Further solidifying the environmental props is the coveted Silver Sanctuary status awarded Chambers by the Audubon Society, a product tie-in in which Allen and his staff see significant moral as well as financial capital.

Like Seattle corporate flagships Starbucks and Microsoft, right-place, right-time synergies prove essential to the golf Mecca experience Allen hopes to bottle here. "People choose, or maybe seek, or are drawn to projects that have the potential of Bandon or Chambers Bay, and that have the associated uncertainties, risks, pressures, expectations," he offers as an explanation for how a course like this seems to attract a dedicated corps of pilgrims and pioneers who prefer to live on the ragged, risk-loving frontier of golf.

Allen says people come to work at places like Chamber's Bay because it's a calling, not because it's a job posting they see on Craigslist. "I not only put myself in that category," he says, "but everybody I've worked with at both Bandon and Chambers. Those that were the core leadership that created the culture of the place all acknowledged a synchronicity that brought them there . . . It was never about the being perfect in the on-paper sense, but it's what ends up being the perfect team, when you all came together under the pressures of opening a course, or having a championship, and get glued together."

Like the Scottish links on which it's modeled, Chambers Bay isn't as much about perfection as it is about character and calling; it believes less in the unspotted and unblemished and more in the doctrine of redemptive grace and praiseworthy, if not all-too-human, fallibility.

The course already has its disciples, from USGA executive director Mike Davis, to Links magazine, which named it the best municipal course in the country. In any case, Chamber's Bay makes an argument a Scotsman would happily embrace: a golf course, like a life, need not be perfect to be whole.

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.