A Place with Great Potential
and Soon, Perhaps, Possibility
East Potomac Golf Course
Washington, D.C.
Date: April 1, 2019
Greens fee: $31 (18-hole Blue course) and $16 (9-hole White course)
No city embodies the gap between America’s potential and its reality more than Washington D.C. It is home to our country’s greatest treasures, but also some of its darkest shames (like the highest rates per capita homelessness and income inequality of any American city).
The Washington Evening Star (July 6, 1920).
East Potomac Golf Course doesn’t just show off Washington’s symbols of American potential — it is itself an example of that potential. When it opened in 1920, East Potomac was one of the finest golf courses in America. It hosted the 1923 U.S. Amateur Public Links and was a favorite playground of President Warren G. Harding. It has come a long way since then, though, and not entirely for the better. Michael McCartin’s terrific thesis (and his November 2018 conversation on the Fried Egg podcast) tells the tale of East Potomac’s long decline from a spectacular 27-hole facility (with contributions by Golden Age architect Walter Travis and perhaps William Flynn) to a smattering of 36 run-down, relatively featureless holes. Today, by any fair appraisal, East Potomac’s presentation is mostly unimaginative, and its conditioning is unimpressive at best. It is a story of neglect, mistakes, and political indifference — attitudes that have affected the lives of more than just golfers in this city.
And yet, there is something about this place. The Potomac River is a player’s near-ubiquitous partner on East Potomac’s 18-hole Blue course. So is the Washington Monument. From the nine-hole White course, the Jefferson Memorial and the Capitol dome make cameo appearances. But even in the shadows of our nation’s shrines, there is no pretension to East Potomac. The pro shop features a barrel full of used clubs for $5 apiece. Porta-Johns stand in for on-course restrooms. Cherry blossoms abound, especially on the White course. And here and there, the course shows you something interesting — whether by remnant from its early days or by happy accident, who can say, but interesting nonetheless. Underneath the layers of neglect, there is character and quirk here. There is potential. All great golf courses start there.
. . .
Headed back toward East Potomac’s clubhouse on the Blue course, the Washington Monument is an omnipresent target.
I love Washington. People crap on it, but anyone who can visit without feeling awe should have his blood pressure checked. It’s a mystical place. It’s also hit-or-miss in the spring: I left Mississippi with temperatures in the mid-70s for a tee-time wind chill of 29 degrees. A wind-exposed peninsula jutting out into the Potomac River generally isn’t my first choice for a stroll in these conditions. But the sky was clear, and thanks to the weather, so was East Potomac. You can barely walk out of a sandwich shop for under $40 in Washington, but for $31 (plus $5 more for a pull cart), I had the 18-hole Blue course almost to myself.
When it was unveiled nearly 100 years ago, the Blue course was designed to be played reversibly, like Old Course at St. Andrews in Scotland. As a result, most of the Blue course’s holes are laid out straightaway — and, thanks to the decades-long elimination of bunkers, the holes are mostly rudimentary. The fairways aren’t wide, but they’re wide enough. But noting the generic design shouldn’t be confused with criticism of the routing, which is lovely. The Blue course heads toward the peninsula’s most isolated tip for the first four holes, after which the routing turns around, with the Washington Monument slowly growing larger as the front nine returns to the clubhouse, with the Potomac River on the player’s right. The back nine features a similar pattern: following the river away from the clubhouse until the peninsula can hold no more golf course, before turning back toward the Monument and coming home. This appears consistent with Travis’ original routing (an overhead photo of which appears on page 43 of McCartin’s thesis). The years have been unkind to East Potomac in a number of ways, but the walk, at least, has not been spoiled.
The par-3 15th hole, with cherry blossoms in full bloom, on East Potomac’s Blue course.
At 6,226 yards from the white tees, the Blue course isn’t gargantuan, but the cold wind howling in from the north made the homeward halves of the two nines play considerably longer. Between the cold temperatures and the headwind, I frequently found myself taking two extra clubs and still coming up short. Fairways run all the way up to the greens at East Potomac, and generally, I have no shame about putting onto the green when I’ve come up short. But the grass around several greens was just beginning to sprout, which essentially created a “rim” around the edges of the greens; a well-struck putt would hit that rim, pop up in the air, and land on the green with a lot less speed than it started with. On top of that, the greens are slow — I mean slow. The result of these forces is that I was effectively hitting flop shots with a putter. After three or four of these, I started going to a pitching wedge off the green. The putting surfaces were so slow that, unless I bladed it, anything landing on the green stayed there (and I’m not saying whether I bladed any).
The two nines appear at a glance to be indistinguishable, but in truth, the back nine stands head and shoulders superior to the front. There is more movement to the holes, more action around the greens, and more creative use of the space limits that are inherent to a golf course surrounded by water. The 12th hole exemplifies these differences: a short par 5 (456 yards from the white tees) whose fairway doglegs right to a green tilted toward the fairway. The fairway isn’t wide, but neither it cramped by trees, so a drive wandering too far left suffers only the ills that come from being out of position. A drive to the right side of the fairway (on the inside of the dogleg) gives the player an obvious chance to get on in two, but if the 200-ish-yard approach goes long, then the next shot must navigate a green running back toward the fairway. It’s a model for what East Potomac could be: simple, but demanding enough to offer a challenge to every skill level.
. . .
Even with all my lallygagging to take pictures, I finished my 18 holes in just over three hours. I’d left a few shots out there (the wind and conditions had something to do with that), but I’d played well enough to want more. So I popped in the pro shop, paid up for a round on the nine-hole White course (usually $16, but for reasons not entirely clear to me, I got on for $10), and headed to the first tee. The temperature was tolerable now, but the White course’s population was just as sparse as the Blue’s had been.
East Potomac’s White course is what remains of the executive-length, nine-hole course added in the mid-1920s, during the facility’s heyday. It might have been laid out by William Flynn, but (as the diagram on page 122 of McCartin’s thesis shows) its original design was compromised terribly by the construction of East Potomac’s driving range after World War II. But like the Blue course, traces of the White course’s ancestor have survived. Short but occasionally quirky, the course plays to a par of just 30; it has three par 4s under 300 yards and no par 5s. As with its 18-hole neighbor, the White course’s playing corridors aren’t enormous, but the trees are decoration — they’re not really in play. Even out of position, you’re never dead.
The White course’s fifth hole is the best par 3 on either the White or Blue course.
The second, third, fourth, and fifth holes comprise the best four-hole stretch on the property. The 381-yard second is the White course’s longest, with a dramatic view of the Jefferson Memorial and Washington Monument from the tee. The third and fourth holes are both short par 4s (266 yards and 285 yards, respectively) that run alongside one another and abut the driving range; they are obvious casualties of its construction, but fun birdie opportunities. On my visit, a man with a short set of clubs was alternating between the two holes — dropping three or four balls on the tee box, playing the hole with each ball, and then heading to the other tee to start all over again.
After the two short par 4s, the par-3 fifth presents the best green complex on either the Blue or White: an elevated plateau of a putting surface, flanked by large bunkers with a punchbowl-ish backstop (covered, unfortunately, with rough). It appears not to be original to the course (a 1927 aerial photo on page 44 of McCartin’s thesis shows the present site of the fifth green as fairway), but if so, then the White course proves it needn’t be restored to its precise, original condition in order to be worthwhile.
Drainage on the White course’s ninth fairway is a sad state of affairs.
But like the Blue course (and maybe more so), the White course’s conditioning impedes its entertaining potential. The eighth and ninth holes suffer from terrible drainage; the course hadn’t seen heavy rain in 11 days, but the fairways were still soggy (and, in places, downright muddy). Municipal golf needn’t be pristine to be enjoyable, but even a municipal course’s conditioning can’t get in the way of fun. That’s a problem. It’s East Potomac’s chief problem.
. . .
There is reason to hope that better days are ahead. The National Parks Service, which oversees Washington’s municipal courses, recently began a process designed to secure a long-term lease of the city’s three golf facilities. This would be a dramatic change from the year-to-year process that has disincentivized major renovation projects.
The work to be done at East Potomac would be a long-term commitment; there is no quick fix here. But there is undeniably something about this place. It has seen brighter days; even for those who love it, this is not its finest hour. But for both East Potomac and the nation for whom this city serves as capital, perhaps brighter days are ahead again.