UNIVERSITY PLACE, Wash. – At a Stanley Cup, or at a World Series, championship games often are staged at historic venues, but you don’t read a whole lot of stories about them. It’s the players who take center stage.
At golf’s U.S. Open, it’s different. The course often becomes one of the biggest stars in the show. It was the case when we first went to Bethpage Black (2002, 2009), a public facility, ventured to a retro-Open at Merion (2013), and made our way to a scruffy, sandy, throwback Pinehurst No. 2 last summer.
Here at Chambers Bay, a humpy, bumpy landscape that looks like a place astronaut Alan Shepard might want to hit a small bucket, we are venturing into the Great Unknown.