Nirvana Meets Destiny's Child: Chambers Bay - Part 4. A Companionable Links

By: Zachary Michael Jack


A few holes into my first-ever round at Chambers Bay I learn the real carnage happens on the greens here - at least that's what the leader of our fearless foursome-turned fivesome, Jim Gautney, explains as we settle into a round begun on the course's back nine.

On hole No. 12 Jim confesses he once literally had to turn his back to the hole, putting the ball away from the cup to allow for the egregious slope and speed of the green to bring it back. Jim's looper for the day, Jeff, seconds his boss's notions, telling me that during the U.S. Amateur here in 2010 the greens were rolling at 14 on the Stimpmeter. Hearing our developing pissing contest, my caddie, Skylar, whips his out, too, adding that the greens were so slick at the Amateur that they were, in the words of his fellow Carl Spacklers back in the caddy shack, "actually cracking."

Indeed, after the championship in question, then-course superintendent David Wienecke, a closet wordsmith if ever there was one, penned an original piece called "The U.S. Amateur Recap" and posted it on the course's website. The summary opened with Wienecke's good-humored smackdown of Joe Golfer's unrealistic ambitions: "For those that think, 'I want my golf course to play like Chambers Bay during the 2010 U.S. Amateur Championship,' no you don't." Sure, fast and firm translates into bounding, British Open-sized drives cosmetically enhanced by downslopes or pinballed off a fortuitous mogul into a speed slot. But in and around the greens that kind of speed means knee-knocking treachery.

Brian, who today is playing the best in our four-ball, opines, "You don't know soggy until you've played Washington golf in the winter." But then again, he suggests, you don't know crusty-fast until you've played Chambers in the run-up to a summer USGA tourney.

The man in charge of the thin green line between super-slick and just plain ridiculous back in 2010, fescue-whisperer Wienecke, had to be part scientist, part savant, and part witch doctor. He'd previously confided to me that when he'd first arrived in July of 2006 he thought he'd never see a U.S. Open course played on the finicky turf that grows on nearly 130 acres tee to green here. The stuff was simply too unpredictable.

Then, when it became clear the USGA had embraced the fickle fescue grass as a possible new politically correct PR flag to fly (a.k.a. the USGA's water-conservation-friendly catchphrase "brown is the new green") he'd assumed he'd have to water the hell out of it just to keep it alive then spray the fungicides until Kingdom Come. With poa or other standard golf courses grasses, agronomic dilemmas could almost always be addressed ad hoc by plenty of water, chemicals and fertilizer, or, if not, by a call to the state extension service at the nearest university. But fescue, the rogue, responded to no man.

It had all seemed pretty academic back when Wienecke mentioned to me the droughty surfaces here can go up to three weeks without watering when necessary, but now, consistently bombing my putts 10 feet by on the slicked-up dance floors, I'm forced to pick Skylar's brain in what amounts to an emergency cram-and-therapy session rolled into one. "I feel like I'm putting over top-dressing," I moan.

Like any good shrink Skylar reassures me I'm not crazy, validating my bitch session by running his ample palm over the mix of fine sand and seed the grounds crew applies here to keep the traffic-averse grass growing. The actual blades are few and far between and a bit gnarly. Looking directly down on them you see mostly bare ground, like you're looking birds-eye at some middle-aged man's thinning dome. Still somehow the putts roll true without a visible shake or shimmy in them.

When we arrive at hole 15 Skylar pronounces this course architect Robert Trent Jones Jr.'s personal favorite among RTJ's 18 "puzzles." In the distance stands the Lone Fir, the tree famously attacked by vandals and a so-called "lighthouse" for the golfing hoards scanning the defoliate hills for a vertical landmark at which to dispatch their Titleist.

Though Chambers, like most links, is designed to be played in the capricious zephyrs puffed in from the sea, today it's scary calm. Below us now, nearer the shoreline, runs a railroad so perfectly in keeping with the British links theme that I ask, only half-jokingly, whether it's an architectural folly, and Cousin Jack, who joined us belatedly on the last hole, calls over his shoulder that, nope, it's the real thing. After a head-scratcher of a lag putt in which I'm actually forced to putt off the green to cozy my ball up to the hole, I'm compelled to eat crow as a real-life Thomas the Train chugs obligingly into view, as if straight from central casting.

On the 16th Skylar stops to point out the humped backs of the two storied islands rearing out of the light cobalt chop. The first, Fox Island, is studded with multi-million-dollar domiciles and is, Google tells me, approximately 95 percent white. Further to the north looms the less chi-chi and considerably more psycho-dramatic MacNeil Island, until 2011 a state penitentiary. Mysterious and brooding, it once housed Robert Stroud, The Bird Man of Alcatraz, for a few not-so-short years in the early 1900s.

Until recently a full third of the hogs-backed isle's roughly 1,500 residents were officially classed incarcerated. Remaining on the island, confides Skylar, is a facility for "child molesters" or what the State terms "sexually violent predators." Unlike Alcatraz, he adds, no one's desperate enough to try to swim for it, the undercurrents south of the Tacoma Narrows much too boss for even the most liberated, or motivated, swimmer.

Finally, when my caddie explains the unsettling lack of mammalian life on the all-but-defoliate course with the offhand remark, "There's nothing for the predators to eat out here," I too am feeling some ill-defined cravings - for greenery, for tree-lined target golf, for water-water-everywhere I might actually drink. On the not-so-little 206-yard par three 17th hard by the railroad tracks I need to move my ball a clubhead-length out of the way of Brian's putt, but when I look up for a vegetative reference point with which to align my pearl there's nothing - notta - save high fescue waving in the wind.

On true linksland the potential for flesh wounds and bloody hell must be omnipresent. Plenty of tight, uneven lies result in a wealth of skulls and chili dips, all with the potential of decapitating your poor playing partners, whose heads are often the only thing you can see bobbing above a mogul, mound, swale, or swell. "Heads up, gentlemen" becomes my frequent huzzah, and, occasionally, for the sake of variety, "For the love of god, save yourselves!" Dubbed "Derailed" for its capacity to ruin an otherwise good round, the 17th, like so many aspects of Chambers Bay's predestination, is prophetic in and of itself. In February of 2011, fully four years after RTJ's team assigned the hole its appellation, the AP Newswire hummed with the ironic news that opposite this very hole a 109-car BNSF freight train had jumped the tracks in the middle of the night, sideswiped a southbound freighter, and leaked enough sodium hydroxide to bring out a Hazmat team in their Martian-styled suits to determine that there was "no public threat" to golfers or anyone else. Amtrak between Seattle and Portland was forced to take the day off while the mess was cleaned up.

The promise of shipwrecks and derailments, both literal and figurative, prove part of the recipe at Chambers Bay, where the unseen and seen mingle to lend mysteriousness, as surely they must in all true golf Meccas. Frighteningly close by is the Carr Inlet Acoustic Range, an underwater testing facility used to confirm that submarines maintain their stealthily silent mojo after repairs. On April 29, 1988, at the very hour the fair residents of Tacomaland had settled down to supper, a nuclear-powered U.S. Navy sub, the USS Sam Houston, ran aground on Fox Island in a famously boneheaded accident that earned the offending Officer Lieutenant Jeffrey H. McClellen the PGA Tour-worthy nickname "Lemon Head." Add to this unceremonious beaching the historic collapse of the infamous "Galloping Gerdie" Tacoma Narrows Bridge just four months after its opening in July of 1940, and you have enough calamitous forms of "derailment" to keep things interesting for a golfing lifetime.

Call me Ishmael, or Lemon Head, but my second nine with Jim and Co. proves a long slog. Even U.S. Amateur champ and then top-ranked amateur in the world, Peter Uihlein, was less than elated after his hard-fought victory in 2010. "It's just one of those surviving [type] courses," a visibly wearied Uihlein told reporters. And Uihlein would have otherwise had plenty of good reasons to party that day. Not only had he just won the biggest prize in all of Amateur golf, he was also celebrating his 21st birthday.

Staring with the fourth, "Hazard's Assent," where, wonder of wonders, I manage to get home on the 530-yarder, the course turns its back on the white-noise of the Sound and heads uphill into the giant scooped-out wall of the original quarry for most every hole save the climactic tilt of the day, the ninth, a nifty little 200-yard downhiller that drops 100 feet from the tee to a Redan green guarded in front by what Jones modestly described in his blueprints as a "deep cavern." Our second nine is a longer, more arduous march, and by its end our once convivial chatter has ceased completely.

The course is long enough and tough enough, the targets few enough, the wayward balls numerous enough, the dunes grass high enough, that each shot demands your full attention, which in turn has the effect of silencing your inner Chatty Kathy. In the end we're four very pooped men and two very weary caddies seeking the occasional bird while doing our best to get back to the house with our manhood intact. This links wears on you, burns you. At high noon on a sun-kissed midsummer day it appears before you as a parched and suffering land. Puget Sound's shimmering aquamarine seems but a cruel mirage seen from a desert island, or, conversely, what the mainland must have looked to a wistful Birdman of Alcatraz staring forlornly upon its shores, fancying his freedom.

On the upside it's easy to bond with your mates at Chambers Bay, as if you're four ships in a fleet sent on an impossible mission. But unlike Meccas in places like the old gray toon of St. Andrews, or ritzy Carmel-by-the-Sea, it's difficult to summon a second wind here sufficient for post-round hijinx. After putting out, for instance, Jack ventures hopefully, "It's Miller time," but the overture falls flat. We're too pooped to party. Filling the difficult silence that inevitably follows a beer-me rain check, I ask Charlie how he likes Tacoma. "Every city has to have a poor cousin," he quips dryly, comparing the City of Destiny unfavorably to everyone's favorite City of Hippery: Seattle.

As we - Jim, Brian, Charlie, and Jack and I - shake hands amiably in the parking lot, I'm thinking just as hardscrabble Midwestern farm towns deserve a bumper crop dropped in their lap once in a blue moon so, too, do the proud old factory towns of the South Puget Sound. After more than 100 of sawing and digging and otherwise grubbing a hard living from the ground, golf at up-and-coming Chambers Bay in University Place, Wash., seems a veritable walk in the park.

Where innovation is concerned, it feels good to be an early adopter, good to run out in front of the pack, great to revel in salad days like the ones before a grunge band no one had ever heard of became the Nirvana of "Smells Like Teen Spirit," like the many fateful moons before "Micro-soft" became Seattle's Microsoft, like the years before Augusta National, the apple of Bobby Jones's eye, became a real Georgia Peach. As the saying around Chambers Bay goes: It really could happen.

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.