Your 2015 US Open Site

...is a place that has been open less than a year! It's called Chambers Bay and it's a municipal course just outside of Tacoma, Washington. Designed by RTJ, Jr. and Bruce Charlton (though Geoff Shackelford says you should replace RTJ, Jr with Jay Blasi as the team who did the work), it is situated on "part of a 1,000-acre park that occupies an abandoned, reclaimed gravel quarry on the shore of Puget Sound," according to Golfweek.

Two interesting tidbits from that same Golfweek story:

Chambers Bay is the first course opened since 1962 that will hold a U.S. Open. It’s also the first time the USGA is bringing the championship to the Pacific Northwest.

I really would have thought that they may have asked Pumpkin Ridge to max out the place before they went elsewhere. Maybe they did that and Pumpkin Ridge refused. Either way, we have a course designed in the ultra modern era set up for 2015 Open.

The question now is what the USGA perceives of golf courses that have been built in the 2000s. As the Golfweek article states, the USGA has had courses in the rotation that were originally constructed sooner than 1962. In all of those Opens, the USGA has been making drastic changes in recent years - skewing fairways to needlepoint proportions, growing very scary and injury-causing rough, and playing to a score over par. Those were on the classics, but they were on courses much older.

Thus, does the USGA feel that by selecting Chambers Bay that they may not have to do as much work on the course to get it ready for the Open? OR, are they willing to take dynamite to a course that is not even a year old? The answer to that question would be a great window into Mike Davis and the USGA.

Here is Chambers Bay's Hole by Hole page just so you can get a flavor for it.