The 115th edition of the United States Open Golf Championship tees it up Thursday at Chambers Bay Golf Club. Located on the Puget Sound, Chambers is an eight-year-old Robert Trent Jones II design that is municipally owned by Pierce County. It has little history and tradition, having previously hosted the U.S. Amateur won by Peter Uihlein in 2010.
It was certainly a shock to the golfing world when the USGA announced in the spring of 2008 that it would bring its National Open to Chambers Bay. Usually, the U.S. Open is played at historic sites, some with a national golfing tradition dating back 100 years. So in analyzing the choice of Chambers Bay as a major championship site, exactly how do the game’s three major tournaments choose their ever rotating sites?
The British Open is the oldest of the game’s major championships, having first been contested in 1860 at Prestwick alongside Scotland’s western coast. Prestwick is no longer an Open site because of its lack of length and constricted area, but the R&A does have a set group of golf courses it uses on a 10-year basis. Every fifth year the Open Championship is played at St. Andrews, the birthplace of golf. It will be played there this year and will return again in 2020. The other eight sites are divided equally between Scotland (Turnberry, Troon, Carnoustie and Muirfield) and England (St. George, Hoylake, Birkdale and Lytham). Usually a site other than St. Andrews will host the Open every decade or so. For instance, the last three Opens at Muirfield were in 1992, 2002 and 2013. However, the definitive nature of this rotation may change in the coming years as the R&A considers bringing its championship to Royal Portrush in Northern Ireland.
The PGA Championship has always been a haphazard affair with regard to its sites. For a major period of time, the PGA of America had zero identity with regard to its major affair as it visited such one-year wonders as NCR Country Club, Kemper Lakes, Tanglewood Park, Pecan Valley and Oak Tree. It had to deal with the Shoal Creek issue in 1990. Lately though, the PGA of America has come up with a major site formula that includes a cycle of returning to the same site as well as hosting its biennial Ryder Cup matches at some of those same venues.
This year’s PGA is at Whistling Straits alongside Lake Michigan in Wisconsin. This will be the third time it has hosted the PGA and it has a future Ryder Cup scheduled for its site. The same is true for former U.S. Open venues such as Medinah, Hazeltine and Bethpage. Baltusrol and Kiawah Island will once again host the PGA in the near future, and a couple of new sites, namely Quail Hollow and Trump National, host the PGA in 2019 and 2021, respectively.
The PGA visits San Francisco’s Harding Park in 2020 for the first time. This is a bit unusual in that the PGA Championship has been contested on the West Coast just 10 times since 1916. The last West Coast PGA was in 1998 at Sahalee in the Seattle area. I will admit that the PGA Championship has adjusted to the times and its organization as well as course setup is much improved from its scatter-shot days in the 1960s, 70s and 80s.
Up until this year, the U.S. Open was usually contested at a traditional, century-old golf course that had a National Open pedigree. The USGA is located in New Jersey, and many of its historical sites are on the East Coast, including Oakmont (eight U.S. Opens and a ninth in 2016), Winged Foot (five Opens plus 2020), Baltusrol (seven) and Shinnecock (four). The Open folks also have some favorite places out of the general New York area, such as Pinehurst in North Carolina, a Donald Ross design that has been the venue for the 1999, 2005 and 2014 tourneys.
While the USGA prefers to play its championship on the East Coast, it loves the financial ramifications of a West Coast Open. It was an eye-opener to the USGA in 2008 when the National Open was played at Torrey Pines in San Diego. With play ending Saturday and Sunday at 7 p.m. Pacific time, golf played out during prime time in the eastern and central time zones. Tiger Woods was in the hunt, Rocco Mediate was hanging on for dear life, and the U.S. Open was competing with the Simpsons and 60 Minutes for the prime time television market. Because of the Tiger factor, advertising revenues were way up for the Open and suddenly a West Coast bias factored in to the playing of the National Open.
The Open will continue to return to Pebble Beach every 10 years (for a sixth time in 2019), returns to Torrey Pines in 2021, and will be back in San Francisco at the Olympic Club sometime in the mid-2020s. Going to Chambers Bay for the first time will open up the Seattle-Tacoma market to the USGA and will give it four valid West Coast sites for future tournaments. The USGA is still trying to pin down Los Angeles Country Club as a future setting too.
Finally, the field at next week’s U.S. Open will be different from your garden variety PGA Tour event in that 98 golfers were exempt and the other 58 get in via the qualifying route. Rory and Rickie and Jordan don’t have to qualify to get it, based on recent results such as their status in the world golf rankings or winning tournaments of note. However, in the meritocracy that is golf, former world No. 1 Luke Donald had to qualify his way in while last week’s Memorial Tournament champ David Lingmerth is out. Others of note who did not get through qualifying this week included Steve Stricker and Casey Martin. Lee Janzen, who won the National Open in 1993 and 1998, got in through the 36-hole qualifying route as did 15-year-old Cole Hammer of Houston. He shot 64 and 68 at Northwood Country Club in Dallas.
Of course, Tiger Woods is in the field. He has a 10-year exemption from his 2008 win at Torrey Pines. While I don’t think he’ll make the cut, I do hope that he won’t have a repeat of his third round at the Memorial last Saturday. If Tiger can shoot an 85 on a course where he has had great success in the past, he could end up carding a score in the 90s at Chambers Bay. It is a course he has visited on one occasion, a course that will be set up for the United States Open Golf Championship, a course where the winds could gust up to 40 miles per hour.
The U.S. Open tees it up at Chambers Bay on Thursday. It will be a wide-open affair and it is anyone’s guess as to who will be the favorite. We’ll know a whole lot more a week from Sunday.
