Chambers Bay Is Too Green On TV?
/Blaine Newnham writes about some of the match play setup touches at Chambers Bay and also notes this about the course we are seeing on television.
While the unfiltered truth is that the "greener course" as depicted on TV might help sell future rounds, it wasn't the way "golf was meant to be played," to borrow a phrase from Bandon Dunes, some 400 miles to the south on the Oregon coast.
"I saw it on television and I complained," said Mike Davis, the man who sets up the courses for USGA championships and appreciates a tawny hue. "The course is brown and tan and we should be proud of that."
Interestingly a friend who was there early in the week called last night to see if I was watching and said that the course in no way looked as green in person as it did on television. Naturally, I found that hard to believe since it was looking extraordinarily lean.
But another site reader confirmed that NBC, who is producing the telecast for Golf Channel's early week airings, had done nothing to pump up the saturation. Apparently the greening happened between the time the pictures left the property and made it on the Golf Channel airwaves.