Michael Greller says he’s never rewatched that final round.
Inevitably, he’s stumbled on snippets here and there. After all, the 2015 U.S. Open at Chambers Bay was ground-breaking, controversial, dramatic, cinematic. It was the first-ever Fox broadcast. The first-ever major championship at Chambers, a mind-bending new-school links course carved from a Washington gravel pit. The first-ever U.S. Open in the Pacific Northwest. It was also the greatest moment of Greller’s professional life.
So, yes, he’s seen some scenes. Like, for instance, the footage of him and Jordan Spieth sitting frozen in the scoring trailer as a now-infamous three-putt crowned Spieth a U.S. Open champion.
But despite the layers that made that day so meaningful — the drama of the finish, the generations of friends and family in attendance, the decade-long dream suddenly and improbably fulfilled, the national championship on the same turf that birthed him into golf — he’s never sat down and watched it happen.
After all, how could a recording live up to the real thing?
“I GOT MARRIED RIGHT ABOUT … HERE,” Greller says, walking to a specific cement square and turning to face an imaginary cast of assembled friends and family, motioning to his wife Ellie to walk down the aisle as their kids, Barrett and Greta, look on. Ellie laughs and rolls her eyes.
The jaw-dropping expanse of golf course stretches out behind him. Train tracks border the property to the west, separating the back nine from the Puget Sound, and a string of evergreen islands stretch out in the distance, where the Olympic Mountains loom, their peaks still coated with snow.
It’s a perfect June evening at Chambers Bay, warm and hopeful. By 7 p.m. the sun hasn’t yet considered the horizon. I live an hour away and Greller’s much closer than that, which is how I convinced him to pack his family in the car one Thursday night and come take a walk through time.
“I don’t come out here a lot, but when I do, I get goosebumps,” Greller says, surveying the golfing kingdom below. “There’s not a lot of people who can say the best moments of their personal life and their professional life came at the same place.”
But for Greller it’s true. It was 10 years ago, after all, that Spieth and Greller played one of the wildest finishing stretches in U.S. Open history, riding a rollercoaster of birdies and doubles and pressure-putts against the epic dunescape backdrop. It was 12 years ago that Michael and Ellie got married here, with Spieth and his now-wife Annie skipping a big-time tournament to attend. It was 15 years ago that Michael landed his first big-time caddie gig here, looping for a kid named Justin Thomas in the U.S. Am, the beginning of a friendship that led to an introduction to a wiry kid named Jordan Spieth. And it was 18 years ago, in the summer of 2007, that Chambers Bay opened and a local sixth-grade math teacher named Michael Greller decided to caddie there in the summer to earn some free golf and extra cash.