Nirvana Meets Destiny's Child: Chambers Bay - Part 3. Minor Moguls, Major Course

By: Zachary Michael Jack


To properly play Chambers Bay, the true acolyte/appassionato must be "on the bus," to begin with, both in the literal and figurative sense. So I hop aboard the course shuttle set to take me and a handful of other duffers down the epic slope from the clubhouse to the driving range below for a sorely-needed warm-up session. Unlike the pancake-flat linksland of minor moguls and moors that make up most of the British Open rota courses, the land here is crazily tilted, running down to the water's edge at a precarious pitch reminiscent of the walls of an especially slippery porcelain bath tub.

Still, the mood among the golf expeditionaries on the bus is chummy, good-spirited, we handful of overheated pilgrims speculating breezily on the map in the back of the bus where Chambers Bay virgins are encouraged to pinpoint their origins. Already, the course has drawn customers from such remote outposts as the Seychelles, Siberian Islands, Marianas, and Namibia, though most of the darts are predictably bulls-eyed in golf-obsessed North American, Britain and Europe.

On our steeply downward meander our driver one-hands the wheel long enough to point out the lone tree in the distance, an arboreal signature left by the course's wily architect, Robert Trent Jones II, (RTJ2 for short) that was hacked nearly to death a few years back. I suggest maybe a couple of punk teens with too much Boone's Farm in their veins but our stoical driver's assessment is a touch more grim. "It was done with hatchet," he grumbles.

"Um. I've got one question - why?" writes tree-hugging columnist Katie Zemtseff on the first website, Green Building, I dial up to verify our chauffeur's claim. The online rant continues, "What point exactly is the nameless chopper trying to make? Do you think this person is an activist…? If you think it's an activist, please enlighten me as to what exactly the point of this would be, other than the obvious cut-down-the-tree-to-spite-the-big-golf-course move."

That the spite-the-big-golf-course sentiment is as "obvious" as Zemtseff makes it out be is perhaps reflective of a region that understands the rationale for eco-terrorism even if it doesn't condone it. It's evidence, too, that even with the Audubon Society certification there are still those who believe a fragile landscape like this one may have been desecrated in the making of a golfer's paradise. Coincidence or not, the vandals struck a few short months after the USGA announced that Chambers would host America's most prestigious Open, and the rattled backers of the course's bid took the breach seriously. After the story of the attempted arboreal murder ran in the Seattle Times, a $1,000 reward was promptly posted for information leading to an apprehension.

Once delivered to the practice tee I rendezvous with my playing partner for the day and unofficial host, annual pass-holder and prominent Seattle-area businessman and corporate president Jim Gautney, a broad-shouldered, buzz-cut teddy bear of a man whose principal competition on the golf course is, refreshingly, with himself. Back up at the clubhouse, where we'd first briefly pressed flesh, Jim had confessed to feeling emotional about Chambers Bay. "You just feel great showing up," he'd said, nodding toward the beer commercial-worthy Olympic Mountains in the distance.

"When I bring guests out here they can't believe the treatment you get. And then obviously the uniqueness of the course. It's not something you're going to find anywhere near. I've had a lot of people tell me Bandon Dunes is similar, but as bad as our weather can be occasionally the weather in Bandon can be way worse."

As I dispatch a few hasty warm-up drives careening at odd angles into the hardpan range, Jim affords me the kind of close scrutiny a club regular might give a wanna-be new member. Already he has slipped on his knee brace for the impending battle with the RTJ2 behemoth. The rollercoaster, walking-only course is a work-out, so much so that Jim tells me has shed 60 pounds since he first started swinging here.

It's hell on your knees and calves, apparently. Indeed, the local paper reported after the 2010 U.S. Amateur was held here, "The biggest problem, according to tournament organizers, sheriff's deputies and spectators randomly interviewed, was people falling on their tushes while navigating steep grass-covered sand dunes." One of the fans risking ass and limb to view the world's best amateur golfers back in 2010, Jim has become such a fan of the up-and-down terrain he swore to his surgeon that if he wouldn't put him under the knife in the off-season, he wouldn't get the knee job done at all.

"I first started playing here years ago," Jim tells me, still monkeying around with the brace as he tries to find the sweet spot, "and it was intended to be a novelty because I've never been much of a walker on courses…. It was like 'I'm gonna go play just so I can say I played it.' " He approached the new course, bum knee and all, with the same "once in a lifetime" spirit hacks worldwide conjure when lining up their ball to play St. Andrews. He continues, "I was like, I'm going to play it, but it's not something I'm going to do regularly." Still, after his intended one-and-done, he was hooked. "The first time I played here I just fell in love with it…. There are days out here where you can literally close your eyes and feel like you're in Scotland."

When we reach the 10th tee, where we'll be starting, I let out an appreciative whistle at the blinkering blue of the bay with what looks like the snowcapped Tetons (actually the Olympic Mountain Range) beyond. "It's a beaut," I say, already mopping the sweat off my brow on this unusually warm, strangely still summer day.

"We like to think so," Jim shoots back, "but it has its detractors." The "we" in Jim's statement is the foursome I've joined for the day, consisting of Brian, Jim's long-time playing partner and office suite-mate, another friend, Charlie and Jeff, a retired high school history teacher, golf coach and athletic director, but more recently Jim's devoted caddie. Jeff and Jim are such fast friends that Jim sometimes takes his man on vacation with him to schlep the sticks. Our unofficial fifth for the day, Jim's cousin-in-law, the mercurial Jack, may or may not be joining us later.

"Welcome to the ends of the earth," the Chambers Bay catchphrase proudly declares, and from the tee of the 10th hole, aptly named "High Dunes," the slogan fits, the golfer's gaze naturally slipping out of the indigo inlet before teetering on what seems like the very edge of the Pacific Rim. The course literature describes the tenth as a "natural wonder," but the real story here is the very manmade, exceedingly tall dunes, all 60 feet of them, carved out when Robert Trent Jones's crew discovered some choice sand 50 feet below grade and decided to go in after it, backhoes a blazin'.

For a golf course architect striking a vein of silica on-site is something akin to striking a mother lode. After saying what was surely a Hail Mary, architect Jones screened the blessed sands and, in his words, "recapped the entire golf course, so it's a perfect consistency." By the time the great sand caper was one for the history books, Jones and Co. had moved a reported 1.4 million cubic yards of the stuff.

The 10th measures nearly 400 yards from the blues, a "short hole" by Chambers standards, where fast and firm and sandy translates into super-long roll-outs. Chambers is the first layout I've notched in my search for a true golf Mecca that plays significantly over 7,000 yards from the tips. Owing to that fact, and the lame excuse that my usually stand-up golf bag is listing badly to port after too much time cramped in my car, I've commissioned the services of an in-house caddie, 6-foot-4-inch Skylar, a sneaky-long one-time finance major from the University of Washington who has the wingspan of a Michael Phelps and the waspish waistline of a young Tiger Woods. When he'd gotten the call, Skylar had marched right up, shaken my hand, slung my sticks on his back uncomplainingly as a Sherpa, and, after drawing a deep breath, gravely pronounced we'd be playing "Zone Three" pin placements, whatever that meant. "Sunday pins," he'd grimly explained, causing us all to squeeze in a few more practice swings.

And yet with Skylar's local knowledge I somehow manage a kick-in par on 10 after flag-hunting with my 9-iron. But the opening frame has not been without its mayhem as Jeff, with Jim waving him off, had toted his boss's bag halfway up the dune left of the fairway to a wicked side-hill lie and, in a sudden gravitational malfunction, ended up sliding wildly down the equivalent of a five-storey-tall dune on his derriere, kicking up an ungodly cloud of dust whilst clutching his man's club for dear life. It had been a heart-stopping moment, the first in my golfing life when a member of my foursome seemed in real danger, unless you count being forsaken on the back nine by the beverage bunny. But Jeff, the old coach, had sprung up, dusted himself off, grinned sheepishly, and laughed with us about it all the way to the next tee.

After another bombed drive on 11 leaves me the happy recipient of a barrage of "sandbagger" accusations, Skylar fills me in on his history the place. In ninth grade Grandma encouraged him to apply for the Evans Scholarship for caddies. He needed a course at which to loop to qualify, so Gran clipped a news article about the ribbon-cutting at nearby Chambers. In the beginning, he recalls, around 150 loopers would show at the caddie shack each morning chomping at the bit for a carry, though that number soon winnowed to around 100 once the course showed its true nature.

Caddying at a golf Mecca can be a financially rewarding proposition, but on a course that amounts to one giant runaway-piano-of-a-sidehill lie, it can also be something less than time-efficient. My bagger informs me he looped for one foursome that took six and half hours to get around, most of it spent looking for lost balls in the dunes. In his five-plus years on the bag here he's caddied for a 78 on the low end and, on the high side, a 162 tallied by a sanctimonious duffer who "insisted on counting every stroke." On his first day then 15-year-old Skylar showed up in golf shoes for his training loop. After his first nine holes of serious vertical, his boss looked at his bedraggled young charge and cheekily quipped, "How'd those shoes work for ya?"

Chambers turns out to be, for the middle-handicapper anyway, a 10-round fight rather than a first-round TKO. It takes a few rounds just to learn what unorthodox punches the course intends to throw. For starters, it's dry here, so dry that Pierce County spokesman Hunter George once reported a chronic Bloody Mary shortage on the Sunday of the 2010 U.S. Amateur - so well-drained Jim tells me he's not once seen standing water on the premises, not even in the wet and wooly Washington winters.

"This is the kind of golf I like to play," he enthuses as both of us, even with our caddies doing most of the work, suck wind and leak sweat. "This course requires a lot shots that other courses don't require. It requires imagination…and backstops. There are places the caddie will say 'Hit it here,' and you go, 'Are you serious, you really want me to hit it there?' "

Most courses, my playing partner tells me, are pretty straightforward: you stand up at the tee, you see the hole, you hit it to the prescribed spots. "On this course," he says, "when you stand up on the tee and look at it, it's almost counterintuitive. It tries to trick you into hitting it at a certain place that's not where you want to hit it at all."

Skylar's handling of me in the grips of this Joseph Campbell-worthy Supreme Ordeal has been mostly pro forma, as within the first few holes he shifts deftly into the first-personal plural "Looks like we've got 200 yards to the stick…225 into this wind," he'll say, adding, "We don't want any part of that left side, etc." Prudently interspersed with such garden-variety cautions are ego-saving euphemisms and salves like, "The way you're stinging that driver, go ahead and play the Big Dog" and "We've hit some nice putts…. They're just not dropping."

To a fault young Skylar finds a way to twist my unforced errors into unearned props. "Let's keep that aggressive line," he urges when, ham-handed, I consistently drill my approach putts eight to 10 feet past the rabbit hole.

Still, I, your shepherd, am grateful someone is carrying my crook o'er these parched hills and dales, someone able to offer companionship and occasional crack (of the Irish kind, mind you) on what shows every sign of being a very, very long day on the hard-pan, pinball, rollercoaster dunes and moguls of the almighty Chambers Bay.

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.