Before getting on the road back to Bandon, I wanted to add another perspective to the multi-headed discussion taking place on this board about this year's US Open. I would have added this to one of the already existing threads, but couldn't decide where this fit in best.
PART I - THE GREENS
Every US Open needs its story. At Congressional, it was the weather. At Pinehurst, it was the baked out look. Here, it was the greens.
I walked the course each day, but like almost all of us (Ben Sims and Richard Choi aside), I didn't get close enough to get a good look at the up close nature of the surfaces. I did watch quite a few putts live, and not once did it appear to me that the surfaces were egregiously bumpy.
What I did see were guys struggling with line and speed.
The greens at Chambers are in some ways very similar to the greens where I work. There are wild undulations in spots, there are predominant slopes that effect greens in a general direction, and there appear to be patterns in the direction the grass grows that affects speeds in different directions.
These are not uniform greens, and I don't believe they were ever intended to be. These greens, like the rest of the course, require a great deal of local knowledge to master. As a caddy, one of the hardest aspects to convey to guests is the speed of certain putts. Uphill putts will often run out, while an obvious downhill putt might ground to a halt. Combine that speed factor with a line that has to take on a side slope, and you're left with very tricky problems to solve.
The missed putts I saw this week had little to do with dirt or bumps, and more to do with guys not being able to trust something other than what their eyes saw. When the bumps did come into play, as another poster indicated, the smarter players seemed to take them out of play with a bit more speed. You have to adapt to the surface, and it appears that some players preferred to die it in the hole as opposed to being a bit more aggressive with their pace.
As David Tepper, John Kirk and others have pointed out, Poa is an unavoidable feature of golf in the Pacific Northwest. My very basic understanding of the life cycle of a green in this area is that between the 6 and 10 year marks, you have to start dealing a changing mix of grasses, and there is no one answer for each individual course. There are many different types of Poa, and depending on which species are dominant your maintenance practices may differ, as they will if you are in a phase where you're trying to eradicate the interloping grass or if you are trying to work with the new mix. At Bandon, there are four courses of different age with greens in a different phase of the Poa transition, each with a different model of treatment in place right now.
To use one example, at Pacific Dunes the greens have under gone a massive transformation during the last 10 months, mostly due to efforts to ensure a pure putting surface for the USGA's Women's Four Ball Event last month. Right now (and for just about all of 2015), they are rolling as good as I've seen them in my time at the resort.
And this is what folks like Chamblee, Poulter and others (including a great number of posters on this site) don't get. You're dealing with an organic entity, one whose nature has a lifespan that is highly dependent on its particular location, its initial planting, its age, its usage and any other number of unpredictable factors. I'm in the camp that would argue if you think they can host a US Open at Pebble Beach, there really is no baseline of quality for the greens for this championship. What there should be is some kind of balancing between speed, slope on the greens and adequacy of surface, and I don't think the USGA and Chambers Bay were too far off it this week. These were not flattish greens running at 13 or 14 (we'll see that at other venues). They were contoured greens running at a speed that pushed the limits of unsuitability without breaking them.
There was no Shinnecock issue here, every single green was playable, if played correctly. This was also no Southern Hills, where particular hole locations were simply impossible (note Jason Day rolling in an almost identical putt to DJ's birdie roll moments before). There may have been a few bumps, and there may have been some pin positions that were tougher than others, but from what I saw they did a pretty good job of matching the set up on the greens to what the turf would allow, without going overboard.
More to follow.