For what will the 2015 US Open be remembered most? There’s no shortage of candidates: Jordan Spieth’s ascension to superstardom at age 21, Dustin Johnson’s epic meltdown on the 72nd green, Jason Day’s stirring fight against vertigo, and the confirmation of Tiger Woods’ descent into sad irrelevance are all strong contenders. However, I fear the tournament’s most lasting impact will silently reverberate around American golf courses for years and keep the game more expensive and less accessible to the golfing public than it ought to be – a legacy for which the United States Golf Association only has itself to blame.
This legacy centers around the site for this year’s tournament. Chambers Bay was always going to be a controversial venue: opened in 2007, this public course near Seattle designed by Robert Trent Jones Jr. is 40 years younger than the second-newest course to have held the US Open. (The Highlands Course at the Atlanta Athletic Club, which hosted the 1975 event and hasn’t been asked to repeat the feat, opened in 1967.) I applaud the USGA’s willingness to move away from traditional clubs with dull courses like Baltusrol, Hazeltine and Southern Hills to public-access venues like Pinehurst, Bethpage and Torrey Pines, and moving the US Open to a modern site like Chambers Bay was a logical progression which will continue in 2017 at Erin Hills, a public course in rural Wisconsin which only opened in 2006.
I loved watching the best golfers in the world grapple with Chambers Bay’s sweeping terrain and sprawling, multi-sectioned greens, but the course’s putting surfaces were clearly not of major championship quality. I’ve not played Chambers Bay myself, but I was fortunate to play a lot of golf during my childhood at the Links at Spanish Bay, another Trent Jones Jr. course near Pebble Beach with greens which – like those at Chambers Bay – were originally seeded with fescue grass. Fescue is a wonderful grass to play and putt on, but it is easily infested with poa annua, a weed often transported from one course to another in the spikes of one’s golf shoes. Poa annua itself can be harnessed and groomed to make high-quality greens; the greens at Pebble Beach are pure poa annua, and those at Spanish Bay have since become pure poa as well. However, I played numerous rounds at Spanish Bay during the transition period when poa had begun creeping in but hadn’t yet fully displaced the fescue, and the greens were not good: bumpy to putt on, and unattractive to look at.
This is exactly what we saw at Chambers Bay. Poa and fescue grow at different speeds, and when that difference is exacerbated by mowing practices designed to keep the grass as short and the greens as fast as possible, uneven surfaces and golfer complaints are inevitable. The real shame is that three of the greens were dug up and reseeded following the 2010 US Amateur at Chambers Bay, an event at which nobody complained about the conditions, and this year those three surfaces – nearer to the fescue ideal and not yet infested by poa – putted quite beautifully, which suggests someone at the USGA messed up badly by not insisting that every green be treated identically.
Agronomy lessons aside, the reason this matters so much is a question of sustainability. Over the past half-century, the American golfing public has learned to idolize the lush, green opulence of courses like Augusta National, and to believe their short-iron shots into greens should spin backward because that’s what they see PGA Tour pros routinely do on television. Because of this, many American golf courses are over-watered to the point of absurdity, thereby making the game more expensive, wasteful of water, slower to play (because carts have to stay on paths lest they churn up the overly sensitive fairway turf), and actually significantly less interesting insofar as you’re always leapfrogging the ground in front of you instead of engaging and interacting with it. Links courses here in Scotland play slow and soft when it’s been raining for a while, but they play faster and firmer after periods of dry weather; that variability makes the game so fascinating, but this lesson is lost on too many golfers who still demand lush, manicured perfection in a climate change-threatened, post-Laudato si’ world.
I believe the USGA has quietly but openly been pushing an agenda to make golf courses less green and more brown. More US Open courses now feature native grasses off the fairways, giving even inland courses like Merion (host venue in 2013) and Oakmont (next due to host the event in 2016) a rough-and-ready look full of pleasing contrasts between green and brown. Brown grasses are essential to the everyday aesthetic of both Erin Hills (2017) and Shinnecock Hills (2018). And thanks to the dry spells before each event, Pinehurst (2014) and Chambers Bay (2015) both looked as brown and played as firm and fast as any Open Championship links course in recent memory. This is absolutely the direction in which golf should be headed, but the last two US Opens have not had the desired evangelical effects: Martin Kaymer’s eight-shot win at Pinehurst was the least-watched US Open in history, while the disastrous putting surfaces at Chambers Bay will have pushed many casual golfers firmly into “green is good” camp. You can’t fight the good fight with the wrong ammunition, and the USGA cannot afford another Chambers Bay-sized fiasco when the very future of American golf is at stake, even if most golfers don’t realize it yet.