Clubhouse This Golfing Life with Michael Bamberger24 GOLF.COM / S e p t ember 2019
A Whole
New Mall
Game
THE FATE OF EAST
POTOMAC BLUE, DC’S
106-YEAR-OLD MUNI,
IS UP FOR A VOTE
THE OVAL
OFFICE’S
MOST
PASSIONATE
GOLFERS,
RANKED:- Trump
- Eisen-
hower - George
H.W. Bush - Clinton
- Kennedy
- Obama
- Fo r d
- Franklin
Roosevelt - G.W. Bush
- Nixon
Source:
GOLF.com
Hail
To the
ChiefT
Park Service is making a concerted effort to find potential
new operators for the three golf facilities under its watch
in the nation’s capital: East Potomac, Langston and Rock
Creek. The introductory remarks to the formal Request
for Proposals run 24 pages, and with the financial docs,
the deferred-maintenance disclaimer and all the rest,
you’re north of 300. But here’s a Park Service sentence
we can all understand: “We’re looking for an operator
who’s committed to providing affordable and easy-to-
access golfing, to improving facilities and courses and to
preserving the unique histories and landscapes of each
of these courses.” Well, amen to all that, even the archaic
use of golfing. (Let’s go golfing!) By October 2020 a new
deal is supposed to be in place.
GolfDC could get it again. Another group, grandly
named the National Links Trust, hopes to implement
what Travis had in mind originally, for the Blue Course
to be reversible. Other groups are expected to enter bids.
Wherever it winds up, Kim Thomas, a GolfDC owner,
hopes the courses will continue to be a place where kids,
especially, get bit by the bug. “If you hit a ball on the range,DC’s obelisk is
both aim point
and symbol at
East Potomac,
a muni that
fosters access,
inclusion and
growth.HE STARTER PAIRED US
up on a recent, steamy
Friday morning, and luck-
ily, my playing partner
knew the course. I didn’t need Google
Maps to play the seventh hole, a slight
dogleg left, just Sharon: Drive it down
the right side, then take dead aim at
the Washington Monument for your
second. Welcome to the Blue Course
at East Potomac Park!
The course has a celebrated
pedigree (Walter Travis designed
it in 1916), history (home track to
Presidents Harding and Coolidge)
and owner (the National Park
Service). Through most of the long,
painful, separate-but-unequal chapter
of American golf, East Potomac was well-integrated, and
remains so today. (Sharon is a black woman in her sixties
with a 16-handicap and a perfect practice swing who stood
3 over on the seventh tee.) There are two nine-hole courses
beside the Blue Course, plus a tired driving range and a
clubhouse and snack bar where I saw a golfer with two
thermoses in his picnic bag, one for his soup, the other
for his iced tea. True Everyman golf.
The land is flat, the holes are ordinary, the traps are
shallow, the greens are slow and the conditioning is only
adequate. But the price is right ($35, walking), the pace
is fine (Sharon and I played as a twosome in four hours)
and on most nice days the Blue Course tee sheet is filled.
A for-profit outfit called GolfDC, which oversees every
aspect of the 36 holes at East Potomac and at two other
public courses in Washington, must be doing something
right. About 40,000 rounds per year are played on the
East Potomac Blue Course, slightly more than the number
of rounds played at our nation’s most famous municipal,
Bethpage Black.
Now, for the first time in over 30 years, the National Ian
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illey;^Opposite,^clockwisefromtop:
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