U.S. Open Wrap-Up: Day Two

Mike Davis became the Executive Director of the USGA in March 2011.  Since taking over the USGA, he has radically changed the U.S. Open.  For decades, the National Open was played at a series of (mostly) old and traditional courses, with lots of rough and narrow fairways.  I didn't like this version of the National Open, which to me felt like the French Open of golf -- it didn't have much to do with the golf played the other 51 weeks of the year, and we seemed to get a high percentage of flukey winners.  (Andy North?  Twice?  No Nick Faldo?  Or Seve Ballesteros?  Or any of the other great Europeans from the 1980's and 1990's?)

But Mike Davis has changed all of this.  Now the U.S. Open is a showcase for whatever experiments he's decided to run.  At Congressional in 2011, he decided to play a U.S. Open on a traditional course, but with almost no rough.  That had a mixed result -- he got a great winner (Rory McIlroy) but an embarrassing score (16 under par) and a boring tournament.

At 2012, the Open went to Olympic in San Francisco, and for the only time under Davis's rule we had an Open that looked like the sort of Opens we saw from 1974 to 2009 -- a really boring tournament won by an obscure American (Webb Simpson), thanks in part to a poor last round from Jim Furyk.  Davis hasn't allowed a repeat of that.

In 2013 he took the Open to Merion in Philadelphia, a great old course that was considered to small to host an Open.  That was a great success -- Merion played well and Justin Rose was a more-than-worthy winner.

Last year he played both the Men's and Women's Opens at Pinehurst -- but a Pinehurst where scads of trees had been eliminated to make the course look like it did in the 1920's.  This worked well for the Women's Open, where Michelle Wie won a thriller.  But the men's Open was a snoozer, with Martin Kaymer shooting 9 under par and winning by eight shots.

So now we're at Chambers Bay, near Seattle, which is evidently meant to be seen as some sort of experiment in "sustainable" golf, or "municipal" golf, or some sort of thing.  It's the oddest golf course I have ever seen.  The land sits in the middle of the big forests that dominate the landscape around Seattle, but there is only one tree on the whole property.  It used to be a quarry or some sort of industrial landscape, and odd hills and huge gray bunkers are all over the place.  To save water (I suppose) there are no trees and no normal rough -- only punitive sections of fescue.  To keep the pros from shooting the lights out, the greens are absurdly hilly and bumpy, and the pins are placed in odd, inaccessible locations.  The result requires the pros to play each hole like they're playing some sort of odd mini-golf set up -- you have to figure out where to land the ball so that it will roll through the odd contours and somehow get within 20 feet of the hold.  Then you have to navigate the odd, bumpy greens.  The whole thing is also unspeakably ugly, unless you're a big fan of the landscape in West Texas.  Or of gray sand.  It looks like golf after the Apocalypse.

On its face, the setup appears to reward long hitters and talented putters.  That's normally the combination you want on a golf course -- it's worked for Augusta National for years.  But the oddity of the layout introduces a randomness that works against the great golfers.  So far, the leaderboard has a mixed feel to it:

T1.  P. Reed:  -5 (66+69=135)
T1.  J. Spieth:  -5 (68+67=135)

T3.  B. Grace (RSA):  -4 (69+67=136)
T3.  D. Johnson:  -4 (65+71=136)

T5.  T. Finau:  -3 (69+68=137)
T5.  J. Luiten (NED):  -3 (68+69=137)
T5.  B. Martin:  -3 (67+70=137)
T5.  D. Summerhays:  -3 (70+67=137)

T9.  J. Day (AUS):  -2 (68+70=138)
T9.  J.B. Holmes:  -2 (72+66=138)
T9.  J. Lovemark:  -2 (70+68=138)

As I see it, this tournament can be redeemed if it's won by Jordan Spieth, who would then be halfway to the Grand Slam.  That would be amazing.  I would also be happy if J.B. Holmes pulled a Webb Simpson and became the first Kentuckian to win a major since Gay Brewer won the 1967 Masters.  Other than that, I'm going to be pretty disappointed with the Chambers Bay Experience.

One final point:  the USGA is spending a lot of time using the Chambers Bay broadcast (on FOX!) to encourage more people to play golf.  But using Chambers Bay to promote golf is like using trigonometry to promote high school.