Fill in the blank. The 115th U.S. Open at Chambers Bay was _______. The answer certainly depends on who is responding.
Some players might say it was a travesty. Some called it all tricked up. While the most popular cry was an indictment of the greens and some players were ready to indict Mike Davis who was the main man responsible for the controversial setup.
If a ticket buying fan was filling in the blank the response might have been great, if they had waited it out in the eighteenth hole bleachers for the exciting finish.
But if that fan had tried to hike the hills of Chambers Bay to follow his favorite golfer he might have said it was a waste of time. Many holes were roped off and accessible only to those inside the rope. 
And if you’re Jordan Spieth I imagine his response would be something along the lines of awesome.
But with some time to evaluate Chambers Bay from a distance it is easy to see there are some things the USGA got very right and there are some areas where they may have gone overboard.
First the fan experience. I am only a distant observer but from day one it was obvious the fans had a tough chore at Chambers Bay. I have been to dozens of tournaments and a bunch of majors and when my brother and I first hit the course we always want to walk the entire course.
That gives us good sense of the layout and that’s especially true of an old classic and certainly would have been our gameplan at Chambers Bay after listening to all the praise given to Robert Tents Jones Jr. for his links style design.
That was virtually impossible at Chambers Bay since many holes we roped off for safety reasons due to the steep sidehills. The eighth hole was totally off limits to fans and many of the holes that were open left fans too far from the players. When you combine 50-100 yard fairways and add steep dunes into the picture fans are left hanging.
The addition of thousands of grandstands including a 6,000 seat stadium surrounding the eighteenth, were supposed to give fans their best look at the players but they are a poor substitute for being up close to the players. 
Next, the course and the setup but keep in mind I am just an amateur/hacker with an untrained eye.
During the run up to the Open one hole that stuck out to me was the par three ninth hole. It’s called “Olympus” and the reason is obvious: there is a tee over 100 feet above the green. Any par three with a one hundred foot drop is not a good golf hole, it can’t be. Now Olympus played well over 200 yards from the top tee and with a contoured green it’s a hit and hope shot.
I am sure the teeing ground was built to showcase the magnificent views of the sound and it certainly did that. But as far as a good hole, the lower tee has it all over the elevated tee.
For weeks before the Open we were getting looks at a glorious, bayside, verdant, links style course from most of the media outlets. If you go to the Chambers Bay website you’ll see plenty of green and certainly some brown and tan but a lot of green. The USGA’s own flyover videos feature a course that is more green than burnt.
But when the U.S. Open teed off on Thursday it looked like a course in California that had been on water restrictions for two months. I understand that Mike Davis wanted a firm and fast layout and he got it but it may just have been a bit much. There were tee balls that landed on one side of the fairway and then rolled all the way to the other side, off the short grass and into the long, wispy, fescue. Ouch.
The flip flopping of pars on the first and eighteenth holes was overkill. Eighteen was designed by Jones as a par five and should have remained as one. Did Davis want to keep that USGA history of super difficult par fours to finish? I don’t know but with the hole as a par five on Sunday it was one exciting golf hole and provided a great finish.
The par three fifteenth hole had a tricked up tee which made the long days even longer. The USGA added a much longer tee box to the two already at the fifteenth. The new one stretched it to close to 250 yards but players had to play over the twelfth fairway. So there was always a traffic jam there. Couldn’t the original tee box at 167 or another at 123 yards have sufficed? 
Hopefully history will remember this Open for Jordan Spieth’s win and not Dustin Johnson’s three putt nor the controversial greens. All week the greens were subject number one and the target of some bitter comments.
When Jones and crew had decided that this was an all fescue layout he claimed it was a true links course. But as with thousands of courses in the U.S. a foreign grass invaded the greens: poa annua. Some greens were worse than others, and some had already been replaced but it was too late to do them all so we were left with inconsistent greens.
Most of these players spend their days on the PGA Tour which offers them perfectly manicured greens (on most days) which run as smooth as glass. Chambers Bay’s surfaces were likened to broccoli and cauliflower. Some said they were the worst ever in U.S. Open History.
While Davis defended that the Open had been played on bumpy greens forever he did acknowledge they were less than what he had envisioned.
“What happened this time was something that really was beyond the control of the grounds staff here and the USGA,” Davis said.
“Having done a lot of these things (conducting Opens), I look at it and say, ‘Yes, we had bumpy greens,’ “he said. “But at the end of it, we’ve had bumpy greens many, many, many times at the U.S. Open. We’ve played this event 115 times, and the vast majority of them have been on poa annua greens. Later in the day, there’s a bounce to them. If you have ever looked at that famous putt Tiger Woods made at Torrey Pines on the 72nd hole, that ball was in the air 30 times.”
The greens were tough but all the players were faced with the same surfaces but some would counter that those playing later in the day had it worse. But that’s true at any tournament and who can argue with the results of this one.
I will say this; I am a Mike Davis fan. He is a proactive leader and gets what the USGA can do for golf. But he is a true golf geek. This is the guy who when promoted to Executive Director insisted on keeping his U.S. Open set up duties.
Chambers Bay was his laboratory and he played the role of mad scientist. He pushed the envelope to the edge with his limited watering and some tee box selections. But he let Chambers Bay’s characteristics shine through. The ball rolled and bounced like a real links layout and he adjusted his pre-planned layout strategy.
The elevated tee box was only used once and the eighteenth remained a par five after his one day trial.
There was a great mix of tough par fours and drivable ones, a mix of challenging par threes and the players were faced with a myriad of lies, stances and had to think their way around his course. And that’s what he really wanted.
Overall Chambers Bay provided us with a wonderful week of exciting, surprising and entertaining golf. It was a fun week. With the finish we watched on Sunday how can anyone argue differently.
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