Local courses will be on national stage

Four Puget Sound-area golf courses will be part of the summer sports vocabulary as they host two high-profile national tournaments and the Boeing Classic, the annual Northwest stop on the Champions Golf Tour.

Sahalee Country Club on the Sammamish Plateau is batting leadoff and will be the site of the U.S. Senior Open July 29-Aug. 1.

Chambers Bay in University Place will host the U.S. Amateur from Aug. 23-29 and The Home Course in DuPont will be the assisting course for the first two days of stroke play to reduce the field from 312 to 64 for match play.

That same week, the Boeing Classic (Aug. 27-29) will return to the TPC at Snoqualmie Ridge for a sixth year.

Few courses in the nation have made a bigger splash in a shorter time than Chambers Bay, which represents a successful nearly $21 million gamble by Pierce County government. Former county executive John Ladenburg relentlessly pushed to convert the old gravel mine into a high-end golf course — one capable of hosting a U.S. Open and attracting affluent tourist golfers willing to pay non-resident greens fees that will be $175 plus tax on weekends this summer.

Ladenburg has said he got the idea for a super course from reading John Feinstein's book "Open" about the 2002 U.S. Open at the municipal course Bethpage Black outside New York City.

Ladenburg said, "I thought, 'Why can't we be Bethpage of the West Coast?' "

His critics complained that the course was too expensive to build and too expensive to play.

"I kept saying, 'It's not a local muni,' " Ladenberg told reporters. "This is a different animal."

The links course, designed by Robert Trent Jones Jr. and Bruce Charlton, opened in 2007 to gushing national reviews.

When it was announced in 2008, eight months after opening, that Chambers Bay would be the site of the 2015 U.S. Open, Ladenburg declared, "We've hit a home run!"

Chambers Bay became the youngest course ever to be awarded the national championship.

"It's the hottest municipal golf course on the planet," declared Golf Digest in 2008.

The U.S. Amateur, which doesn't draw huge crowds, will serve as a tuneup for the Open.

Six days after Chambers Bay opened, The Home Course opened with considerably less fanfare just eight miles south.

The Home Course was built as part of a huge planned-unit development by Weyerhaeuser. The course, which sits atop waste from a DuPont Corp. explosives factory, was designed by Mike Asmundson, a University of Washington graduate who has done a lot of his golf-design work in South America.

The course sat for two years after completion until opening in 2007. Weyerhaeuser, which had no desire to be in the golf-course business, had interest from private golf companies but wound up selling to the Pacific Northwest Golf Association and its affiliate the Washington State Golf Association. The years of inactivity allowed the course to "grow in" properly and few courses in the state have been as ready for play as The Home Course was when it opened.

Eventually, the PNGA and WSGA will have their headquarters at The Home Course. The Home Course's name derives from the fact the course is "home" to PNGA and WSGA members, who enjoy discounted greens fees. The summer weekend greens fees for members will be $49 plus tax.

Sahalee has been in the spotlight before as the site of the 1998 PGA Championship and the 2002 NEC Invitational.

Sahalee means "high, heavenly ground" in the language of the Chinook tribe. Sahalee, ranked No. 84 by Golf Digest in its top 100 rankings for 2009-10, was conceived in 1966 when members from Broadmoor and Inglewood golf clubs formed Par Golf, Inc., and found land they liked on the Sammamish Plateau for a championship-caliber course.

Ted Robinson of Laguna Niguel, Calif., was selected to design the 27-hole layout that now is surrounded by a gated housing community. The course officially opened Aug. 10, 1969.

The course got good reviews from the 1998 PGA Championship and the PGA of America liked it so much it originally scheduled the 2010 PGA Championship to return to Sahalee. Then the organization backed away, citing competition for 2010 corporate dollars with the Vancouver Olympics. Critics have accused the PGA of America (not to be confused with the PGA Tour) of going elsewhere just because other venues such as Whistling Straits in Wisconsin can handle bigger crowds and thus be a better cash cow.

The TPC (for Tournament Players Course) at Snoqualmie Ridge is a celebrated Jack Nicklaus design inside a huge property development. The course opened in 1999 and has been hailed for its variety of holes.

The most memorable hole is No. 14, the par-4 canyon hole where the crowd encourages players to try to drive the green across a deep, wooded canyon rather than play it safe and take an easier crossing.

The TPC at Snoqualmie Ridge was sold by Quadrant Homes (Weyerhaeuser's housing division) to Brightstar Golf Group of Carlsbad, Calif., in 2008.

Nicklaus has said, "I have two philosophies in golf. One, play golf in a pretty place. And two, as an architect, if I can design great golf shots, all the better."