During its 100-year history, the Blue Course at Congressional Country Club has rarely been left at peace for long. Initially it was a Devereux Emmet design on a rolling, lightly treed property 10 miles northwest of the nation’s capitol. Emmet’s course featured two par 6s as well as the architect’s signature cross bunkering and chocolate-drop mounding. After the club served as a training ground for spies during World War II, Robert Trent Jones built a third nine, which he combined with a redesigned version of Emmet’s front nine to form the modern Blue Course. Between the late 80s and mid-aughts, Jones’s son Rees carried out an array of renovations, ultimately producing the 2011 U.S. Open course on which a 22-year-old Rory McIlroy shot 268. After that tournament, the club appointed Keith Foster to refresh the Blue Course’s architecture but replaced him with Andrew Green when Foster went to prison for smuggling items made from endangered species. Green’s redesign, which debuted in 2021, exemplifies his approach to championship golf architecture: medium-wide fairways, very few trees, punitive bunkers with lumpy edges, and medium-large greens with internal contours that define pinnable sections of varying difficulty.

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Take Note…

“House” doesn’t feel like the right term. Designed in 1924 by Philip M. Julien, Congressional’s sprawling Spanish Revival clubhouse is a visual focal point throughout the property, especially now that Andrew Green’s tree removal has opened up long views. Over the past two decades, the structure has been restored and expanded by the firm Pollock Dickerson and is currently the largest clubhouse in the United States.

Pray and play. For a taste of building architecture on a humbler scale, check out the Presbyterian church behind the 16th green. This 1872 structure is from a different world, one in which Congressional Country Club—and American golf in general—did not yet exist.

Nip and tuck. Today, the area just south of Congressoinal’s clubhouse, where the 10th and 18th protrude into different sides of a large pond, is a striking amphitheater for golf. My guess is that it will be a madhouse during the 2037 Ryder Cup. It’s also one of the most monkeyed-with spots on the property. Robert Trent Jones established the first iteration in 1957, with a par-4 17th hole playing downhill to a peninsula green and a par-3 18th crossing the water. In preparation for the 2011 U.S. Open, Rees Jones reversed the 18th hole, turning it into the 10th and allowing the famous 17th to become the finisher. Finally, in his redesign, Andrew Green eliminated Rees’s 10th hole and built a new version that plays from a tee on the hill near the clubhouse to a green on the same site as RTJ’s original 18th.

Major tradition. Congressional has hosted three U.S. Opens (1964, 1997, 2011), a PGA Championship (1976), and a Women’s PGA Championship (2022). Particularly memorable was the 1964 U.S. Open, won by a dangerously dehydrated Ken Venturi. Recently the club has strengthened its relationship with the PGA of America, and over the next 20 years it will host another Women’s PGA (2027), two Senior PGAs (2025, 2033), a PGA Professional Championship (2029), a Junior PGA (2024), a PGA Championship (2030), and a Ryder Cup (2037). For a sense of how the course will look and play at these events, check out the final round of the 2022 Women’s PGA, available in its entirety on YouTube.

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