Golf Course Architecture - Issue 63, January 2021

73 both directions. The back tees from 7,574 to 7,818 yards; the forward tees from 5,935 to 5,155. The course won’t reopen until late spring 2021. But a recent October walk through revealed a number of stirring new moments that revealed shots and vistas that were never there or lost for decades. For one thing, you can now see the famed clubhouse from almost everywhere on the course – most dramatically as you approach the infinity-edge green of the 485-yard, par-four fifteenth hole. By removing superfluous material and mounding behind the greenside bunkering, Green has made the fill pads look as if they are perched slightly just above grade. Yet many of the greens provide run up zones for the mid- handicapper or someone trying to play a deft recovery. At the long par-three second hole, 275 yards from the back, what had been a front right bunker has been snuck towards the tee enough to provide room for a shot that can now use the slope behind the bunker to kick leftwards onto the green. Green solved one nagging Congressional routing problem. By finding room for a new, short, downhill par-three tenth hole – only 160 yards from the back, to a well- guarded, fall away green and water on the far side – the walk around the course is now seamless. Classic-age elements include convex mounding on the opening holes and, at the uphill par-three seventh hole, a virtual wall of sand across the front left that evokes the severity of the eleventh at Shinnecock Hills – a course with which Emmet was intimately familiar. At the uphill, par-four fourteenth hole, 470 yards from the back tee, Green reclaimed an old drainage ditch and quirky mounding in the left rough that abutted an out-of-bounds – clearly not an ideal position. Bail out right off the tee into a safe cove of fairway and a player will then confront a second shot that is blinded by the crest of a little hill that intervenes – something Green anticipated on paper using a topographic map. At the 610-yard par-five sixteenth, Green opened up the view around and behind the green to make the hole look like it was part of the surrounding community. The sensibility is enhanced by the presence of an ominous bunker complex in the second shot landing area that evokes the spirit of Hell’s Half Acre. Any unease of spirituality is resolved, in effect, by the consoling presence just back and left of the putting surface by Hermon Presbyterian Church, a white clapboard, Gothic Revival house of worship from 1874. It makes for a perfect Currier & Ives moment. Congressional Blue is now back – not with a vengeance but with subtlety and class. It’s already on the docket for the 2031 PGA Championship and the 2037 Ryder Cup. The way the winds are blowing in Washington DC these days, the talk about Congressional initiative is real. GCA Construction of the new tenth hole, a short par three to a new green on the lake Photo: Congressional CC/James Lewis Photo: Brad Klein