Green-fairway confusion will contribute to 6-hour rounds at Chambers Bay

Tiger Woods warned us two weeks ago, after his first look at Chambers Bay, that making one’s way around the first-time U.S. Open venue would be a slog.

“I don’t take a long time in practice rounds, but we played in 3 1/2 hours, just the front nine, had lunch, kind of sat down there and talked about it, and played another 3 1/2 on the back,” Woods said two weeks ago at Muirfield Village. “So we spent a while.”

Watching Woods and Jordan Spieth practicing where to hit shots -- and, more important, where to miss them -- on and around the baked-out putting surfaces on Tuesday made it clear that playing the links-style track will be an exercise in patience. Extreme patience.

Indeed, if you can’t get enough U.S. Open “action,” you’re in luck: The unfamiliarity golfers have with the course on the outskirts of Tacoma, Washington, especially the confusion about where a fairway ends and a green begins, will contribute to a pace of play that would make a tortoise proud.

“We’re going to see six-hour rounds on Thursday and Friday,” sportswriter John Feinstein said Tuesday on the Golf Channel. “It’s a good thing ... that the days here are so long because they’re going to need them to get these later players in before dark because the rounds are going to take so long.”

With a USGA official accompanying each group in all four rounds this week, at least a player won’t have to hold up play waiting to hail a rover to raise a rules expert on the walky-talky to determine if a ball is on or off the green.

In addition to extreme elevation changes, wickedly undulating greens and drastically different tee boxes on the same holes, Chambers Bay offers a feature distinct to this week’s locale. Delineating the line between the hard, brown greens and the spacious, sloping fairways is likely to cause much of the pokiness.

To help ensure there are no episodes like the one in the final round of the 2010 PGA Championship -- when Dustin Johnson grounded his club in a bunker that he mistook for a patch of dirt -- the USGA has outlined the putting surfaces with white dots around the edges.

While Jason Day, who played a practice round with Woods on Monday, foresaw few problems with the unusual way in which the USGA has indicated the boundaries of the greens, Spieth noted the putting surfaces will contribute to long days inside the ropes.

“I think they’ve done a good job with it really, because they’ve put most of them on slopes to where the ball probably won’t stop or won’t roll down or won’t roll away,” Day said on Monday. “Sorry, it will roll away, sorry. I don’t think there will be any issue with people knowing if it’s on the green or not.”

To Spieth, it won’t be connecting the dots that will slow play down but, rather, the expanses of the putting surfaces.

“I think it’s going to be a fun challenge,” the reigning Masters champion told reporters on Monday. “It’s a beautiful challenge, as well. I think it might be slower rounds of golf, given the size of the greens and the difficulty of the course. So at least we have some nice views.”