Chambers Bay Review

Course Review and Comments

The RTJ design team has created a true links course out of an enormous hole in the ground that yielded very high quality gravel and sand for nearly eighty years. It was this sand especially that made the site ideal for a course like Bandon Dunes or the Old Course at St. Andrews. Much more information can be gleaned at the website above, but a few highlights include the 1st and 18th sharing a fairway, the 5th has two possible greens 150 yards apart, the 7th is a long, dogleg right par four with two big, sand humps in front of the green and a false front that returns balls thirty yards, the 8th is a 600 yarder that rises all the way, the 9th is a 227 yard three shotter with a 100 foot drop. My favorite is the 10th, which climbs uphill between two sixty-foot dunes and narrows to only 15 yards filled entirely with deep traps and putting surface. The 12th is unique in that it is an uphill, narrow, driveable (300 yards)par four that opens to the largest green--but one that has so many undulations that four pros all three-putted in a recent skins game that Aaron Baddeley won. The 14th is a beautiful cape hole that begins high up on the hill and requires at least a 300 yard carry across a huge sand waste area from the back tee, which is, get this--520 yards to the green, the longest par four ever in a major. 15 is a beautiful par three aimed at the only tree--the Lone Fir hole. Sixteen and seventeen parallel the water with and active railroad just thirty yards to the player's right. Both greens have diabolical Sunday pin locations that could change the fortunes of the contestants in an instant. Number 18, named Mount Tahoma for the Indian name for Mount Rainier, is a great going home hole that turns away from the Sound, skirts several gigantic, diamond-shaped concrete ruins that were sorting bins of the gravel operation, crosses another large waste area, then narrows to an amphitheater around another roly-poly, undulating green. A 5-acre lawn is growing in to the right of the 18th fairway to accomodate spectator stands, corporate tents and other facilities necessary to a big event. If Kemper Sports and the USGA allow spectators to follow the action from the tops of the sand dunes like we did watching the Ryan Moore Skin Game, it will be an amazing sight with 30,000 to 60,000 people all over the course.