By Sam Belden
To this point, 2015 has been an excellent year for golf. We’ve witnessed the continued rise of some of the game’s top young stars, as well as a few new winners and plenty of tournaments that have featured riveting finishes. That being the case, you might expect this month’s U.S. Open to have a few tidy storylines and a small group of clear favorites, but that actually couldn’t be further from the truth. Despite a relative decline in parity over the past couple of years, the tournament, one of golf’s four ever important majors, is as wide open as it’s ever been.
The x-factor is this year’s venue. Chambers Bay, a British links-style course located in University Place, Washington, has yet to host a PGA Tour tournament. To date, the most important event held there was the 2010 U.S. Amateur (won by current European Tour member Peter Uihlein), so it’s clear that the fat cats at the USGA are in love with the location. We’ll have to wait and see how it translates to the professional game. One thing seems to be certain: the course setup will be tough and intimidating, which is consistent with what the USGA has historically done with U.S. Open venues. Last week USGA president Mike Davis made it clear that players will need to get well-acquainted with the course if they want a shot at winning.
It’s important to note that almost no one in the U.S. Open field has ever played a professional round at Chambers Bay, so we don’t really have a strong idea of who will feel at home on the course. So far, the strongest takeaways from the game’s elite have focused on the course’s extreme links design; recently, Tiger Woods remarked that the setup was even more extreme than the ones seen yearly at Great Britain’s Open Championship, while Phil Mickelson agreed that Chambers Bay bears more resemblance to an Open Championship course than a U.S. Open course.
Speaking of Woods and Mickelson, both figure to arrive at the U.S. Open as major question marks. Woods has teed it up at all of 12 PGA Tour events since the start of the 2014 season and has notched just two top 25s; six of those starts ended with either a withdrawal or a missed cut. Recently, he tied for 17th at the Masters, but that result came on a course that Woods knows and loves; Chambers Bay doesn’t fit that description. Mickelson has finished in second place at each of the last two majors–and he’s playing well again–but at the end of the day, we’ve learned that the soon-to-be 45-year old just can’t be trusted when trying to predict results. He could be right there in the thick of it and complete his quest for the career grand slam, but he’s equally likely to miss the cut. There’s no way of knowing how he’ll take to the course.
How about the golf’s current top dogs, Rory McIlroy and Jordan Spieth? Well, McIlroy has missed his last two cuts over in Europe, despite the fact that they came against fields that are comparable or weaker than the standard fare on the PGA Tour. Yes, those tournaments were the last two of a five week stretch on the road, and yes, the Northern Irishman did win twice in May, but you can’t simply dismiss a pair of MCs based on track record. Even if those finishes were caused by fatigue and fatigue only, it appears that something is not right with his game. Spieth has generally been spellbindingly good over the past few months; in fact, his only missed cut came at the Players Championship, a quirky track that he hasn’t played very much as a professional–sounds a lot like Chambers Bay, doesn’t it? In fact, Spieth’s inexperience makes it difficult to predict his performance in a major. In nine major starts, he’s got a pair of top twos at the Masters, but nothing inside the top 15 in the other seven.
Look up and down the world rankings, and it’s the same old story – it seems that all of the world’s best players bear some baggage that makes them a tough sell for this year’s tournament. Bubba Watson and Henrik Stenson are Nos. 3 and 4 in the world, respectively, but both are a couple of months removed from the last time they made noise on the PGA Tour. Rickie Fowler is a fascinating choice, but his win at the Players Championship in May could lead him to become more complacent about winning, just for now. Jim Furyk, Dustin Johnson, Sergio Garcia and Jason Day are all talented, but they give away too many tournaments; each has lost at least one major due to poor shotmaking. Adam Scott and defending champ Martin Kaymer have been running on fumes. The most familiar Americans–Matt Kuchar, Zach Johnson, Brandt Snedeker, Hunter Mahan, Webb Simpson, Keegan Bradley and Jason Dufner–just haven’t had the game of late. The Europeans that have won the U.S. Open in the past, Graeme McDowell and Justin Rose, are long shots; the former is struggling through a terrible season, while the latter hasn’t been very successful at the Open Championship over the years, which could prove problematic at Chambers Bay.
The lack of course history at Chambers Bay really does present a real problem with predicting this year’s U.S. Open. When club meets ball and play finally gets underway, it will likely be one of the aforementioned players that comes out on top, but this could be a year where one of the tournament’s many open qualifiers makes a serious run. We just don’t know. While there’s still a couple of weeks before we finally reach that day that’s been circled on the calendar, only so much can change, and it looks like things are going to be wide open in Washington.
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