BETHESDA, MARYLAND | Forget everything you remember about the famed Blue Course at Congressional Country Club. Whatever you recall – beyond the classic features of the magnificent Spanish Revival clubhouse and the 18th green jutting into the pond beneath it – doesn’t exist anymore. Like old Yankee Stadium, the address where great things happened is essentially the same but the new and improved venue is incomparable.
In ol’ Blue’s place is the New Blue – a course better in every conceivable way from the first shot to the last. Architect Andrew Green retained only two elements of the former layout – the routing and the par on each hole. Beyond that, he’s taken a course that habitually clung to the lower half of U.S. top-100 lists and transformed it into a legitimate destination course outside the nation’s capital.
“To have a golf course that measures up to the weight of Congressional and the clubhouse, it’s really good,” says Jason Epstein, the club’s director of golf and athletics. “The golf course is now, and will be for a long time, the star of that show.”
That is not something anyone ever believed before despite Congressional’s long history of championship golf that includes playing host to four major championships and two former PGA Tour events. In all its previous incarnations, the old Blue was an experience that never really lived up to its reputational ranking.
Golf began at Congressional in 1924 on a sparsely treed lot with a course designed by Devereux Emmet that included an opening par-6. After World War II, Robert Trent Jones Sr. was hired to spruce up the original nine and build a third nine, creating the familiar downhill par-4 to a peninsula green and closing par-3 on his new stretch. Two years later, RTJ re-routed the front nine to complete what the world knew as Congressional Blue. His son, Rees Jones, handled renovations in 1989 and 2006.
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