Chambers Bay, county seek to use this U.S. Amateur Four-Ball to score another U.S. Open
If you (re)build it, will they come (back)?
That’s the question Chambers Bay, University Place, Tacoma and Pierce County are wanting and waiting for America’s golf decision-makers to answer.
Chambers Bay has remade its scrubby, bumpy greens that got almost universally panned at the 2015 U.S. Open—including by the governing United States Golf Association. Gone is the (not so) fine fescue. In its place: greens with poa annua, a grass natural to the Pacific Northwest.
Poa annua has gone from unwanted to essential at Chambers Bay. As it tends to do in our area, the native grass that’s really a weed overwhelmed the fescue on some of the course’s 18 greens at that first-ever Pacific Northwest U.S. Open six years ago. That made for rough putting, a disapproving USGA—and Chambers Bay needing an overhaul to get back in contention to host a major pro golf championship.
So Chambers Bay ditched the fescue and remade its greens with poa annua.
Now, the USGA is back at Chambers Bay, to see how the newer greens play. That will determine whether the links course inside Pierce County’s 930-acre Chambers Creek Regional Park along Puget Sound will get back into the rotation to host another U.S. Open.
Chambers Bay, and for early rounds The Home Course in DuPont, are hosting the U.S. Amateur Four-Ball championship Saturday through Wednesday. An original 2,544 entries became a starting field of 128 sides (256 players) through qualifying events from September 2020 through this month for golfers with handicaps not above 5.4. Plus, there are 34 exemptions from performances in USGA or international events. They will compete in two, 18-hole rounds of stroke play Saturday and Sunday. The low 32 sides will advance to five, 18-hole rounds of match play Monday though Wednesday’s semifinal and final rounds at Chambers Bay.
For the competitors, a coveted title in U.S. amateur golf is at stake.
For Chambers Bay and its owner Pierce County, $134 million or more is at stake. That’s what the U.S. Open generated for the region in 2015.
“The Four-Ball is a continuation with our positive partnership with the USGA,” Don Anderson, Pierce County executive counsel and a point man for the county and Chambers Bay with the top decision-makers in U.S. golf, said Thursday.
“The greens are championship-quality. We are set to...eliminate any prior issues people may have had with them.”
In fact, Anderson said Chambers Bay and Pierce County are so convinced their greens are going to meet USGA’s approval to return pro-championship golf to the links course, “we hope to have an announcement of another USGA tournament shortly.”
Chambers Bay and Pierce County are intending to bid for the U.S. Women’s Open. Anderson said the USGA has openings for hosts in 2026 and ‘27 for America’s premier championship for professional women’s golf.
The USGA already has the men’s U.S. Open booked out through 2027, at: Torrey Pines, San Diego, next month; The Country Club in Brookline, Massachusetts (2022); the upstart Los Angeles Country Club (2023); Pinehurst in North Carolina (2024); Oakmont, Pennsylvania (2025); Shinnecock Hills, New York (2026); and Pebble Beach, California (2027).
In addition to their remade Chambers Bay, Anderson and Pierce County are touting the fact that the area from Federal Way to Lakewood (where Anderson is mayor) is home to one of the America’s largest Korean populations. Six of the world’s top eight ranked women golfers are Korean, or in the case of No. 6 Danielle Kang, Korean-American.
Pierce County also intends to pitch to the USGA for the U.S. Women’s Open that four airlines, including Korean Air, regularly operate nonstop flights from Seoul, South Korea, to Seattle-Tacoma International Airport.
“We hope to segue that into hosting another U.S. Open,” Anderson said of a return of the championship Jordan Spieth won at Chambers Bay in a thrilling finish six years ago.
“It was a financial success. It was a broadcasting success (ratings nationally on Fox television for that Open in 2015).
“But,” Anderson said with a rueful chuckle, “everything that could go wrong did go wrong with the greens.”
Chambers Bay, which opened in 2007, closed for six months in 2018 to remake the grass on all its greens. They now have annual bluegrass green sod, a type of poa annua that grows naturally across the northwest.
The USGA pushed back the U.S. Amateur Four-ball two years, from 2019, at Chambers Bay because of the greens remodel.
So what does the USGA think of the result?
John Bodenhamer, the USGA’s senior manager for championships who oversees the Open championships, is scheduled to be at Chambers Bay to observe play Monday for the start of match play at the U.S. Amateur Four-Ball.
The fact that Bodenhamer is making the trip underlines the USGA’s interest in bringing a U.S. Open back to Pierce County.
It also shows the USGA is using this week to test Chambers Bay’s readiness for another Open.
Golf’s governing body has a staple group of iconic, anchor courses that are the core of its rotation to host U.S. Opens. Those are Oakmont, Olympic Club (San Francisco), Pebble Beach, Pinehurst, Shinnecock Hills and Winged Foot (also in New York).
The USGA also is expected to grant the U.S. Open every other decade to other historic courses such as Merion in Pennsylvania, The Country Club, and Oakland Hills in Michigan.
Anderson says “the dynamics of (the U.S. Open rotation) has changed in the last couple years” to include newer venues in large markets and regions of the country that rarely if ever get an Open championship.
Chambers Bay is in that final tier. So is Erin Hills in Wisconsin, plus Torrey Pines and the Los Angeles Country Club. L.A. Country Club will host its first U.S. Open in 2023.
The course and field
The greens aren’t the only ones being tested this week at Chambers Bay in the third USGA championship it has hosted, after the 2010 U.S. Amateur and that 2015 Open.
The golfers will traverse the up-and-down course that will play at 7,475 yards for the first U.S. Amateur Four-Ball held in Washington. That’s 91 yards longer than Chambers Bay played during the U.S. Open six years ago. Par was 70 then. It will be 72 for this U.S. Amateur Four-Ball.
The first hole was both a par 5 and a par 4, at 598 and 496 yards on alternating days at the 2015 Open. It will be 569 yards and a par 5 this week. The fourth hole has gone from a par 4 at 495 yards for the Open to a par 5 at 545 yards for this Four-Ball. Instead of alternating as a par 4 and par 5 at 525 and 604 yards as it was at the Open, the 18th hole will be a par 5 at 590 yards to close rounds at the Four-Ball.
In four-ball, matches are played in pairs, with a player and a partner, called a side, against another player and partner. Each golfer plays his own ball on each hole—as opposed to foursomes, where each side plays only one ball. In four-ball, the player with the lowest score wins that hole for his side. In stroke play Saturday and Sunday, the low score is the side’s score for that hole.
The USGA started the U.S. Amateur Four-Ball Championship in 2015 “to ensure that a spirited team dynamic would be featured at the game’s highest level.”
If there is a favorite side heading into this week at Chambers Bay it’s defending U.S. Amateur Four-Ball champions Scott Harvey, a 42-year-old self-employed property manager from Kernersville, North Carolina, and Todd Mitchell, 42, an insurance agent from Bloomington, Illinois. They won the 2019 Four-Ball at Bandon Dunes, another links-style, coastline course on the coast of southern Oregon.
The 2020 Four-Ball Championship had been scheduled for Philadelphia. The USGA canceled it because of the coronavirus pandemic.
Harvey and Mitchell are one of two sides in this week’s event to have competed in all five previous U.S. Amateur Four-Balls. They advanced to the semifinals in 2015 and the quarterfinals in 2017.
Harvey and Mitchell tee off at noon Saturday at Chambers Bay in round one.
The field represents 40 U.S. states—including 10 from Washington—plus six other countries: Canada (three players), Puerto Rico (two), France, Hong Kong, China, South Africa and Sweden (one player each).
One of the 256 players in this week’s Four-Ball has played in a U.S. Open: 18-year-old Preston Summerhays. The son of PGA Tour coach Brad Summerhays competed in the 2020 U.S. Open as the 2019 U.S. Junior champion.
The youngest golfer in the 256-man field isn’t yet a man. Curtis DaSilva from Monterey, California, was born in 2005. Yes, he’s 15. His side partner is 16-year-old Brandon Knight, a sophomore at Foothill High School in Pleasanton, California. They tee off Saturday in round one at 7:36 a.m. at The Home Course in DuPont.
The field includes identical twins, David and Maxwell Ford. The 18-year olds from Peachtree Corner, Georgia, are not on the same team, though. David Ford and Kelly Chinn, also 18, tee off Saturday at 12:48 p.m. at The Home Course. Chinn’s father Colin is a retired rear admiral in the U.S. Navy. He serves as joint staff surgeon at the Pentagon and is the chief medical advisor to the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.
Maxwell Ford and Bruce Murphy, a junior at Johns Creek High School in Georgia, begin play Saturday morning paired with DaSilva and Knight at The Home Course.
Danny Woodhead and Michael Wilheim tee off Saturday at 12:12 p.m. at The Home Course. Woodhead, 36, caught a touchdown pass from Tom Brady in the Super Bowl in February 2012, during the undefeated Patriots’ upset loss to the New York Giants. Woodhead played nine seasons in the NFL at running back for the New York Jets, New England, San Diego and Baltimore. He retired from football following the 2017 season.
He’s says he’s been golfing since he was 8 years old in Nebraska.
Asked in a USGA player profile questionnaire to list his any hole-in-ones he’s had, Woodhead responded: “I’ve had a few at putt-putt courses.”
The spoils
The winning two-man team of the 2021 U.S. Amateur Four-Ball gets:
- A 10-year exemption from qualifying for the U.S. Amateur Four-Ball, provided the side remains intact and amateur
Exemptions into the 2021 U.S. Amateur Championship (Aug. 9-15) plus any other USGA championships in this year for which they are age-eligible
- Gold medals and custody of the U.S. Amateur Four-Ball Trophy for one year
- Their names inscribed on a plaque recognizing all 2021 USGA champions that will be in the Hall of Champions at the USGA Golf Museum in New Jersey
And, Pierce County executive Anderson believes, they will have a good tale to tell about Chambers Bay when they get home.
That is part of what makes this a decently important week for the return of major championship golf in Pierce County.
“In some ways, yeah, I think it is a test,” said Anderson, who has been to recent U.S. Opens, including 2017 at Erin Hills, to observe “back-of-the-course” issues such as security, parking, media tents, merchandise and fan flows and parking at the nation’s golf championship.
“We have 256 elite amateur golfers playing here. They are going to go back home to their friends and talk in their clubs about what they thought of our golf course.
“That’s an effective promotion and marketing tool for the course in itself.”
This story was originally published May 21, 2021 at 8:06 AM.
