Landlords of the links. The Chambers Bay greenskeeping staff gathers for a team picture in the final days of preparation for the United States Amateur. (Photo by rick walter)
Golf in the early days was always played on commons or links land that bordered the sea. The natural characteristics of this type of land made it easily the most suitable for the game.
“Sandy, gravelly soil which is of little value for agricultural purposes is by far the best type of land for a golf course,” wrote one of the great pioneers of American golf architecture, Alister MacKenzie in 1932, referring to the rolling sand dunes.
This was because the game required players then to hit the ball very low, primarily because that is all their equipment allowed, but also to keep the ball out of the wind, to get maximum roll on the firm surface. The challenge was to successfully negotiate the sloped bunkers (which resulted not from bulldozers but from mounds of divots and the burrowing of animals seeking shelter from the wind), the undulating ground, the dunes and the gorse and heather that covered parts of the playing ground. The first grounds staff on these courses were rabbits who kept the turf short, crisp and free from weeds. Trees on golf courses were unheard of. It would have been like seeing a huge Douglas fir in the middle of center field at Safeco Field. Trees came into play in the early days of golf when courses began being built inland on what was called parkland terrain, and even then, purists refused to consider this real golf.
Chambers Bay is as close to a pure seaside links course as has ever been built in the United States precisely because it lies on the exact same kind of terrain as the original Scottish seaside courses and because the natural makeup of the turf is the same.
In the late 1980s and into the 1990s there was an explosion in golf-course construction in the United States, and one of the trendy designs that architects produced was “links-style.” It mattered little whether these courses were on anything approaching true links turf or whether they, in fact, had any true style. It mattered little whether the course was near the sea or a lake or a suburb of Pittsburgh. If you could get a bulldozer on it, you could shape the ground into just about anything you wanted. Many of these artificial “links-style” courses are blended into suburban sub-divisions by eradicating trees and dropping lumps of dirt where the trees were, stamping the name of a celebrity golf-course consultant like Fred Couples or Ernie Els on the scorecard - and voila - an instant classic course has been created.
Chambers Bay needed no such contrivances. It comes by its links-style honestly and in its building, the architects merely followed the land - the way it was done in the early days. The architect hired to build Chambers Bay understood that the moment he saw the site. “Aside from some aspects of Shinnecock (Long Island), which is open to the sea breezes, I have never seen a site as pure for links-style golf in this country,” Robert Trent Jones, Jr. said. “No place else has this feel.”
The sand and gravel mine hard by railroad tracks that run along Puget Sound was a working mine for more than 100 years. Some 250 acres of that mined-out land was claimed for the golf course, which allowed the architectural team to build on a grand scale. By comparison, St. Andrews’ Old Course is only about 85 acres.
The shapers, the guys who come in at the final stages of the building process to contour the land, already had the perfect links underbed to work with. After that, fescue was planted on all areas of the course and you have for a national championship a dry (in summer), firm, undulating, windswept, treeless (aside from the single miraculous fir behind the 15th hole), seaside course that golf purists dream about and that Alister MacKenzie would most certainly give a tip o’ the cap to.
Links courses are hard and fast. And Chambers will be just that. Judging how far a ball may roll from anywhere within 100 yards of the green will be a major requirement in order for a player to survive the test on this course, and many players will not have seen anything like the bald, brown green complexes that will be faster than they have ever been, according to superintendent Dave Wienecke.
When the top amateurs from around the country and the world step on Chambers Bay many will be in awe. When they finish their rounds, they will know what real links golf is and don’t be surprised if more than a few of them look a little shell-shocked. Welcome to links golf, lads.
