CONFOUNDED BY CHAMBERS BAY
Tiger Woods had an opening round to forget at the U.S. Open,
UNIVERSITY PLACE, WASH.— If Amy Mickelson wants to see her husband win his first U.S. Open, she might think about bringing a ladder.
Make sure it has a USGA logo on it, too. Everything else at Chambers Bay does, from the soft pretzels to the garbage cans to the grandstands where people waited in long lines Thursday in hopes of actually getting glimpse of someone hitting a little white ball.
At least the USGA is taking responsibility for the national championship it runs. Don’t want to blame the R&A, which knows a thing or two about hosting tournaments on real links courses.
“It’s weird,” Phil Mickelson said of a course with mounds and sand so treacherous two caddies were injured carrying their player’s bags during practice rounds. “Amy wants to come out and follow and she simply can’t. She just can’t come out and . . . see.”
The big experiment in links-style golf at the Open proved OK in the first round for players, if not the fans who hoped to see them. What’s not to enjoy about wide fairways, no wind and fans so far away that even after a few beers, they weren’t loud enough to heckle.
The trains that run between the course and the water didn’t seem to be an issue, and neither did the rough that looks worse than it is. The greens were another matter, with some players muttering about how their balls bounced too much and didn’t always keep their line.
“They are not the best that I’ve ever putted on,” Rory McIlroy said diplomatically.
Still, the course for the most part looked great on television, even if viewers had trouble figuring out where the fairways ended and the greens began. And that was the most important thing for the USGA, which signed a deal worth nearly $100 million (U.S.) a year with Fox that pushed this tournament into primetime.
There were long views of the water, and the trains running by. There were also plenty of shots of Tiger Woods looking miserable, though that’s pretty much a given in recent times. Woods even threw a club, though this time he didn’t mean to as it flew up a hillside as he tried to hack out of the rough on No. 8.
Take that away and it was a beauti- ful day on the bay where sunscreen was in rare demand and people lined up for a chance to buy USGA branded lemonade to wash down the dust they inhaled from trudging through sand.
Mickelson liked it enough to shoot a 1-under 69, leaving him in good position to add to his record of six runner-up finishes in the only major he has never won. Dustin Johnson and Henrik Stenson liked it even better, shooting 5-under 65s on a day everyone began to get a sense of what this crazy-looking course is all about.
“About as easy as it can play right now,” said Michael Putnam, who lives a few miles from Chambers Bay and has played here more than 30 times.
Whether it remains that way depends on the whims of the diabolical wizards at the USGA, who surely were planning to gather at midnight on the 18th green to discuss how to dial up the difficulty of a course that on opening day yielded scores better than they want to see.