By Tony Dear, CG Contributing Writer
One hundred seventeen years ago, Old Tom Morris was handed four guineas by the Royal County Down Golf Club in Northern Ireland and instructed to build a championship-caliber course over the club’s heaving sand dunes just outside the town of Newcastle. With a few shovels and the equivalent of about six dollars, Morris created a layout which, with modifications by member George Combe and later Harry Colt, evolved into one of the greatest in the world.
Five hundred years or so before that, shepherds started knocking stones around the dunes with their crooks at St. Andrews in Scotland. Somehow and somewhen, a 22-hole course emerged (reduced to 18 in 1764) that bears no architect’s name and which no doubt cost less to build than what Royal County Down paid Morris.
Now that’s pure links golf.
Its promotional material would have you believe the links at Chambers Bay, where an army of bulldozers shifted 1.4 million cubic yards of dirt and a layer of sand 12 inches deep was spread over the entire course to improve drainage, is similarly pure. Ryan Moore visited recently and told Pierce County Executive John Ladenburg, the man whose idea the whole thing was, how impressed he had been with the way the holes were routed through the dunes.
“But Ryan,” Ladenburg replied, “there were no dunes here. We had to make them.”
No, Chambers Bay isn’t pure links golf. But really, so what? The point is that, thanks to the creativity and ingenuity of designers Bruce Charlton and Jay Blasi, Chambers Bay is a very, very good golf course that will challenge and entertain everyone who plays it, regardless of how close it is to the genuine article. And to be honest, once the fescue covering the sandy ridges has grown, the occasional clumps of gorse have flowered and the wind and rain come howling in off Puget Sound, it will be close enough to the real thing to make no difference.
For the truly authentic Scottish, Irish, English or Welsh links experience, however, you should still get on a plane and fly across the Atlantic. But then, for the truly authentic Chambers Bay experience, complete with views across the Sound to the Olympics, British golfers will have to come here.