Northwest Passage

So Robert Trent Jones Jr. could be excused for taking an extended lunch break on the veranda. Space is limited, so it’s not uncommon for groups to share the circular tables.

After a group leaves Jones’ table, three spectators quickly claim their seats. The architect greets them warmly: “Hi, I’m Bob Jones.” Small talk reveals that the three are first-timers to the Masters. After 15 minutes, the question that no doubt had been festering for a while among the trio comes to the surface. “Are you any relation to the Bobby Jones whose name is all over the clubhouse?”

No, but in six years, Jones will get a chance to emerge from the considerable shadows of golf’s other Robert Joneses—not only that of Augusta’s co-founder but also of his own father, Robert Trent Jones Sr., one of the best-known architects in golf history.

That’s when Jones Jr.’s Chambers Bay will host the 2015 U.S. Open, which will make him the first architect to watch the Open contested on one of his original creations since his father at Hazeltine National Golf Club in 1991. (Jones Sr., known as “Trent,” died in 2000.) “It’s an honor of a lifetime,” says Jones. “Ecstasy is too pale a word to describe the feeling.”

But as Jones learned in person, being a U.S. Open architect is not all bliss. He was 11 when he attended his first U.S. Open, the 1951 championship at Oakland Hills Country Club, which his father had made much more difficult prior to the tournament.

The players howled at the changes. Even winner Ben Hogan thought the course was too hard, telling Jones’ mother, Ione: “If your husband had to play this course for a living, you’d be on the bread line.”

Times have changed, and so has the U.S. Open. For most, the tournament conjures images of a traditional parkland layout at a Northern private club with perfectly manicured, narrow fairways and thick rough, in the manner of Oakland Hills or Winged Foot. 

Chambers Bay shares none of those qualities. It is located in the Pacific Northwest, a region that has never seen the U.S. Open. It is a rugged muni, owned by Pierce County. It has wide fairways and little rough. Having been constructed on a former gravel pit next to Puget Sound, the course has just one tree. And it opened in June 2007, less than a year before the U.S. Golf Association awarded Chambers Bay the Open.

Whereas most great courses unfurl hole by hole like the chapters of a novel, Chambers Bay is a giant pop-up book that opens to reveal its entire plot in a single epic setting. From the parking lot atop a hill that showcases the massive scale of the site, every hole below is visible as they wind among the massive dunes and rugged waste areas.

“When we examine a potential U.S. Open site, we look at the golf course first,” says Mike Davis, the USGA’s senior director of rules and championships. “Our choosing Chambers Bay is great in the sense that it perhaps makes a statement that today’s golf course architects are building some of the best golf courses yet.”