The Man Who Saved Chambers Bay's Lone Fir Tree Will Watch the Open from Afar

By: Bart Potter

The tree that draws your eye, beyond the 15th green, is, of course, the only tree at Chambers Bay, the smallish Douglas fir that earned big notoriety in golf and agronomy for being grievously wounded by vandals - and surviving.

When the U.S. Open comes to Chambers Bay next week, hundreds of cameras will be aimed at the tree, and the story of its injury and healing will be recounted many times.

David Wienecke, the golf course superintendent at the time, is the man who can tell it best.

His first reaction, when he saw the deep gash in the tree trunk that morning in 2008, was disbelief. "Just shock," he says today. "First of all, did this really happen? And then, why would someone do this?"

Someone, or more than one person - he'll never know - had spent hours with a hatchet, Wienecke believes, trying to cut the lone fir down. "If they'd had an axe I think they probably would have succeeded," he says.

They still call it the Wienecke Tree around Chambers Bay. But the man who did more than anyone at the golf course to save the tree, and help it live on, no longer works at Chambers Bay.

It was the job of a lifetime, a cap to a career reflecting the esteem he enjoyed among his agronomist peers in the golf course superintendent industry. Wienecke was the first employee hired, in fact, when Chambers Bay was taking tangible form, emerging from the mind's eye of public officials who looked at an abandoned gravel mine beside Puget Sound and saw not just a golf course but a major championship venue.

Their vision, laughable to many at the time, is today reality - the Open will be played at Chambers Bay June 18-21.

Wienecke will watch the tournament from afar.

In 2012, less than two years after he completed work to get the golf course ready for the 2010 U.S. Amateur, and still in the middle of preparations for the Open, Wienecke resigned as Chambers Bay superintendent.

Many "firsts" have been applied, or soon will be, to Chambers Bay: first course in the Pacific Northwest to host a U.S. Open; first Open to be played on 100 percent fescue grass; first venue designated on the same day by the United States Golf Association, barely a year after the course opened, for a U.S. Amateur in the then-near future and a U.S. Open five years farther out.

Wienecke's hiring in July 2006 was the first "first" of all. It was recognition by Pierce County and KemperSports, the management company hired by the county, that their superintendent and chief agronomist had better be a guy with the stature and track record to lead the work of preparing Chambers Bay for a major championship.

They couldn't have been sure at that time, before the course was even open, that it would ever host a major. "When I was hired there," Wienecke says, "they told me that was their dream, and I said, 'You're crazy.' And yet we achieved that."

Wienecke, then 53, had the credentials. He holds an MS in horticulture from Oregon State University, with a focus on turfgrass agronomy and golf course management. He worked for the USGA from 2001 to 2004 as regional agronomist for the Southwest Green Section, covering Southern California, Arizona and Nevada. Just before he came to Chambers, he was director of golf maintenance for two 18-hole courses at Braemar Country Club in Tarzana, Calif.

When Wienecke took the job in 2006, Chambers Bay was about 20 percent built on the reclaimed grounds of the former Glacier/Lone Star Northwest Gravel Mine. "It was a very special site," Wienecke told The Olympian newspaper in 2008. "That played into it."

In his time there, Wienecke spearheaded the work that earned Chambers Bay the highest level of recognition from the Audubon Cooperative Sanctuary Program. A March 2010 article in The Olympian said:

"The vision of Chambers Bay's founders and builders, from the beginning of planning, absolutely included creating a golf course worthy of major championships.

"But an equal priority was a commitment to environmental stewardship that was in place long before the United States Golf Association came calling with its two biggest events.

"'The concept, from the very inception, was to be unique, distinctive and very high-caliber,' said Wienecke, 'to stand alone, nationally and internationally.' "

Wienecke worked on the renovations to Chambers Bay before the U.S. Amateur and then, for most of two years, the changes the USGA wanted to put in place for the U.S. Open.

"To be superintendent and do renovations is really tough," says Wienecke. From the perspective of three years distance, Wienecke can say there are things he misses - and doesn't miss - about his time at Chambers Bay.

He doesn't miss working within the competing priorities of the USGA - which "owns" the course awarded a U.S. Open - and an actual owner that in this case is beholden to taxpayers; or working for a management company - KemperSports - rather than directly for the owner, Pierce County. "I don't miss those challenges," he admits.

Chambers Bay is a special place, Wienecke says today. And it is "absolutely" a championship golf course, worthy of a U.S. Open. "I do miss the emphasis for quality that we had there," he says. "I didn't realize before I had the job the difference between championship-level golf and everyday golf. It's like you're on a different planet."

Wienecke arrived at work at Chambers Bay in pre-dawn darkness, as usual, that day in late April 2008. When he got around to the tree, the first thing he saw was the mess - the beer bottles and cigarette butts. Then he noticed the wood chips, and then the foot-and-a-half slash, eight inches deep, on the Narrows Bridge side of the trunk.

Wienecke immediately summoned two arborists to the scene, and for 12 straight hours they worked feverishly to save the tree. A non-toxic epoxy was applied to fill the gash, and braces were attached to shore up the compromised part of the tree. In the days that followed, Wienecke heard from agronomists and arborists from around the world weighing in with their thoughts about the lone fir tree.

As they studied the tree to devise a strategy for saving it, Wienecke and the arborists discovered that the tree, small for its age - which Wienecke estimated at 50 to 70 years old - was in general poor health.

Development of the golf course, which involved reviving degraded terrain, watering and improving the soil, had actually been beneficial to the tree, Wienecke says. But finally, it was the serious injury to the tree, and the care lavished upon it, that saved its life.

The U.S. Amateur came to pass in 2010, with Chambers Bay offering a living laboratory for the course-setup experiments of Mike Davis, then the USGA's senior director for rules and competition. Davis was promoted in 2011 to be the USGA's executive director.

That was another first, according to Wienecke: USGA heads had tended to come from the corporate side of the golf industry, like Davis's predecessor, David Fay. Davis was, and is, an extreme hands-on guy, Wienecke says.

But make no mistake: Davis is as politically savvy as any USGA director has ever been, by reputation and Wienecke's own experience, he says.

In early September 2010, just over a week after the U.S. Amateur, Wienecke was quoted in The Olympian about the way Davis used the scope and flexibility of Chambers Bay's landscape to make dramatic changes, day to day during the Amateur, in the placement of tee boxes and the length of holes.

For instance, according to Wienecke, on the final day of the Amateur (August 29), No. 10 went from 436 yards to 311, No. 15 from 246 to 139 yards, No. 16 from 396 to 279 yards. The 17th was trimmed from 218 yards to 160, the 18th from 605 to 515.

Today, Wienecke says of Davis: "He's just amazing. He's a wizard at changing things around that you would never think of."

In The Olympian article Wienecke also discussed how the fescue stood up to restricted watering during the Amateur: " 'If you could measure it, concrete would come in at .001 percent on the TruFirm, a measurement devised by the USGA to test the hardness of a golf course for major championships.

"The lowest Chambers Bay got was .18 percent the first two days of the stroke-play part of the championship, and 'that was way too firm. We needed to soften it up.' The course played at about .25, just about perfect,' " added Wienecke, for most of the Amateur.

"That's just an example of how unique and special this grass is,' Wienecke said."

In that same 2010 Olympian column, the reporter wrote: "If you can get Wienecke talking - which you should do if you get the chance - you might not track with all the esoterica of golf course agronomics that is his working language. But you couldn't help but pick up on the pride and passion - for his job and the golf course he works on."

Wienecke says now he thought he was just being honest with the reporter. The post-Amateur article, he says, was respectful of the course and Davis's masterly manipulations of its versatility.

The parts of the article about grass and water, he thought, were nothing more than tributes to the resilience of fescue. There was nothing critical or controversial about the story, Wienecke says.

After the article came out, he heard from a superintendent colleague who said, "You're going to take a lot of heat." And, he says, he did take heat.

It would be most of two years after the Amateur before he departed Chambers Bay, and he was busy. "The Amateur was a huge victory for everyone involved," he says. "From that time on, we were doing renovations for the Open."

Yet another first: Chambers Bay is the first course designed by Robert Trent Jones Jr. to host a major championship. Trent Jones Jr., "RTJ" or "Bobby" to people who know him, was incorporated in every renovation decision.

"While I was there we were always meeting and collaborating," Wienecke says. After the Amateur, Wienecke and crew - working closely with Jones' longtime shaper, Ed Taano - worked on refurbishing hole Nos. 1, 3, 7, 9, 12, 13 and 18. The renovations included new bunkering, new tees and rebuilt greens.

The way U.S. Open crowds would move around the course was part of the equation, too. For instance, the area between No. 6 and No. 15 was largely the work of Wienecke and Taano.

Trent Jones Jr. describes the give and take of the discussion about changes to Chambers Bay as an enjoyable chess match, with Mike Davis as his respected opponent. "The dialogue we had was at a very high level," Jones says. "Personally, I enjoyed it. I hope Mike Davis did."

Right in the middle of all of it, until 2012, was Wienecke. "Most of what's happening there is because of something that I did," Wienecke says. "Now, it wasn't me alone - it was my crew and RTJ and Ed Taano and Pierce County and the USGA working in collaboration. But I built most of what you see there when I was there."

Along the way, Wienecke says he did everything his bosses and the USGA asked of him, and never questioned the directions he was given. He emphasizes that he was never asked to do anything he thought would harm the Chambers Bay ecosystem. "I can tell you categorically that never happened," he notes.

Wienecke believes KemperSports had long wanted to hire someone from Bandon Dunes Golf Resort, another client with high-profile links-style courses. Jones agrees: "I think basically KemperSports people were very much favoring Bandon Dunes."

Before the Amateur, Jones says, there were relatively few changes made to the course in preparation for the predominantly match-play tournament on a course that was still in its infancy. Jones says Wienecke was extremely busy getting the course playable for the Amateur - literally removing stones from the gravel and sand.

"He was like the godfather of the course," Jones says of Wienecke before the Amateur.

After the Amateur, "in preparing for the big show," Jones says, the long and short of it is the USGA agronomists wanted their own guy.

"They wanted somebody who was young, that they could instruct, and the person would listen to their point of view," Jones says. "As much as we all loved Wienecke - I particularly enjoyed his sense of humor and his dedication to the game - they felt they needed somebody younger who had come from Bandon Dunes.

"It was no disrespect to Wienecke. He did his job and he did it well."

Wienecke had no hand, late in his time at Chambers Bay, in the hiring of Josh Lewis to be his assistant superintendent. After Wienecke resigned in May 2012, Lewis, who had worked at Bandon Dunes, was immediately announced as interim superintendent.

In July of that year, Lewis was officially named superintendent to work under Eric Johnson, newly hired as director of agronomy. Johnson came directly from Bandon Dunes.

In an article in The (Tacoma) News Tribune announcing Wienecke's departure, Chambers Bay general manager Matt Allen said, "We are certainly supportive of him and his transition."

The U.S. Department of Defense and Joint Base Lewis-McChord (JBLM) knew what they were getting when they hired David Wienecke in 2012: top guy in his field, respected peer to fellow superintendents, proven steward of golf-course environments … and none of that came by way of references from Chambers Bay.

Wienecke, for his part, had no idea what he was getting into when he came to work at the two military golf courses at JBLM. "Never in my wildest dreams would I have thought the Army was an environmentally focused organization," he says.

After Wienecke left Chambers Bay, he almost immediately went to work at the Washington State University Extension research facility in Puyallup, Wash. A couple months later, he came to work at JBLM, first as a temporary researcher, then taking on his current job: golf course sustainable operations and environmental services manager at Eagles Pride at Fort Lewis and Whispering Firs on McChord AFB.

The title encompasses his role as head superintendent, including overseeing a greenskeeping staff of 18 people between the two courses. In his time at JBLM, he's launched a major soil-amendment study with WSU; revamped the practice and environmental philosophy for maintaining the golf courses; started monthly bird-watching walks at Eagles Pride; and secured certification for both courses by the Audubon Cooperative Sanctuary Program.

Wienecke, 62, is a busy man, engaged and absorbed in the woodland ecosystem that is his workplace and laboratory. He refuses to play the sour grapes game about Chambers Bay. And he has nothing bad to say about the USGA. Wienecke says, "I have nothing but the most pride in what I did there."

The Douglas fir he worked hard to save, the Wienecke Tree, is now healthy and strong against the winds that whistle through the Puget Sound Narrows, ruffling the needles and tiniest branches but leaving the trunk and largest branches unmoved.

"I appreciate that as a legacy," he says. "It was a heroic effort that turned out well for a priceless part of the course."

Wienecke, too, is strong and healthy, philosophical if not unmoved by the life changes of recent years and his experience at Chambers Bay. "There have been good and bad, things I miss and things I don't miss," he says. "I wish them well."

Bart Potter writes about golf from his home in Olympia, Wash. He's covered cops and courts, arts and entertainment and sports as a daily journalist, and for three years wrote an award-winning golf column for The Olympian newspaper. He's taught journalism at a public college and a private university. You can find him at Grey Goatee Golf and Travel at http://greygoateegolf.com.

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