East Potomac: 7,600 Yards and the Question of Who Really Owns a Public Golf Course

The 79-year-old man was walking. No cart, no caddie, nobody to push his trolley. He slung his bag over his shoulder the way a tradesman carries a toolbox and stepped onto the first fairway of his home course in Washington, D.C. — a place he had played every week for decades, knowing every tree root and every sunken patch of turf. Then he went down, on an ordinary morning, on the grass of a public golf course anyone with thirty dollars could walk onto.

I read that detail in a GOLF.com commentary on the proposed overhaul of East Potomac Golf Links, and I sat still for a long time. It raises a very concrete question, with nothing soft about it: if that man's home course is replaced by an 18-hole loop stretching beyond 7,600 yards, where do his mornings — and the mornings of thousands like him — go? Modern golf chases the long yardstick so hard it forgets how the player breathes.

East Potomac sits on Hains Point, a man-made peninsula pushed into the Potomac River, on federal land managed by the National Park Service. Today it is a portfolio: 36 holes, a mini-golf course, a driving range. The proposal on the table collapses that into a single championship 18 measuring more than 7,600 yards, tied to the ambitions of Donald Trump — a man famous for his appetite for building courses, and for the belief that a handsome course raises the value of whatever ground it stands on.

To read the proposal properly you need a yardstick. Bethpage Black, the public course on Long Island that hosted the U.S. Open in 2026, 2026 and 2026 and the 2026 Ryder Cup, measures roughly 7,400 to 7,500 yards. The course proposed for East Potomac would be longer than a layout fit for a major. And Bethpage is not a single course — it is a system of five, with the Black as the summit and four others serving ordinary players, including a short course for beginners, a range, and a clubhouse open to locals all year.

The piece contains a small detail many readers skim past: Senator Lindsey Graham's account that Trump once shot 73 — or possibly 74 — at Trump National Washington in 2026. The author retells it with a very light scepticism. I do not care whether that score is true, because it is hearsay within hearsay. What matters is its rhetorical function: the author uses it to question the confidence of a man willing to decide for other people what they need.

The core point sits here: the proposal does not expand a public course's capacity to serve — it shifts the structure from breadth to prestige, stripping out three cheap entry points to build one expensive one.

Thirty-six holes plus mini-golf plus a range is a portfolio. A single 7,600-yard course is one asset. To someone who has spent a career hosting large events, the difference resembles moving from a multi-sport festival to a stadium that stages exactly one discipline. That stadium can be beautiful. But it serves a narrow slice of spectators, and the people who came for the other sports lose their seats.

Who can play 7,600 yards? The commentary answers directly: amateurs under 75, club champions, tournament players. That is a small fraction of a municipal course's clientele. The median player — the 95-to-105 shooter, the after-work nine, the three-year beginner — faces a longer, harder, slower and more expensive course. Yardage is a design parameter and, at the same time, time, money and barrier.

Based on my experience watching rounds at public courses in Melbourne and Sydney, I have found a fairly durable rule: the longer the course, the thinner the pace, and the thinner the pace, the fewer people come back. At Albert Park or Moore Park, what creates the life of the place is not difficulty but the ability to squeeze in nine holes in an afternoon. A championship course cannot be squeezed. It demands the whole day, a player with the game for it, and a tee time booked in advance.

Then comes the layer most easily skipped: the "aspirational golf" model. People pay heavily to play TPC Sawgrass, Pebble Beach or Pinehurst No. 2 without a prayer of breaking 100. That is real, and Trump understands it better than most people in golf. But those courses are tourism assets. Players fly in, stay two nights, buy a shirt, take a photo, leave. East Potomac is a local civic asset: players drive fifteen minutes, play every week, pay out of the everyday wallet. Importing a destination model into a local municipal course confuses two economic systems, unless data proves tourism demand actually exists — and in the commentary, that data is absent.

Removing mini-golf and the range is a bigger loss than it looks. They are the first two rungs of the player pyramid: where a ten-year-old first holds a club, where a family with three different standards of play finds one shared afternoon, where a new migrant learns on-course etiquette. Cutting them does not weaken public golf in a single season. It thins the player base over fifteen years, and a thin player base is the hardest thing in the industry to repair.

The governance question is far clearer. The land is federal. The Park Service manages it, and any large change must pass a land-use authorisation, a public-comment stage and environmental review. The line the author repeats — "it isn't his" — is the heaviest argument in the piece, and it is not an argument about taste. It is an argument about standing.

One more technical detail will, I suspect, return in the meetings: the man-made peninsula is described as having "dubious buoyancy". A low, filled spit of land at the mouth of the Potomac. Anyone who has built a course beside water knows that drainage, bank reinforcement and irrigation upkeep over the next twenty years will cost far more than the initial construction. A handsome drawing does not pay that bill.

I want to push the problem further than the author does, because a blind spot sits there. The author calls for asking the golfing public what it wants instead of telling golfers what they will get. I agree in principle. But who turns up to that consultation? The people on a club list, the people free at seven in the evening, the people who can write a clean email to the Park Service. The 6 a.m. Tuesday player, the man carrying his own bag, the person who does not know what a "public comment period" is — they do not come. Public opinion in municipal golf tends to be captured by exactly the group with the loudest voice, which is the group that benefits from a long, hard, beautiful course. I do not oppose asking. I worry the answers collected will not be representative.

The second blind spot: Bethpage. It is offered as the gold model, and structurally it is. But that ladder is also rationed. To play the Black at a weekend, New Yorkers queue overnight, prove residency, and accept a fee well above the other four courses. Coexistence of summit and base does not automatically produce fairness; it merely produces something fairer than a single course standing alone.

The third blind spot, and to me the most troubling: both sides are arguing about prestige while the real problem is maintenance money. American municipal golf has decayed for three decades because city budgets were cut, not because a championship course was missing. If a 7,600-yard layout is built while annual maintenance funding is still not committed in writing, then in ten years East Potomac will be a declining course again — only a more expensive one, harder to return to the community, and having already lost the mini-golf and the range. Exhaustion is not a stopping point; it is a crossroads where we choose the next road. American public golf stands at that crossroads, and it stood there long before this drawing appeared.

What I take away after 49 years at the edge of arenas and meeting rooms is a different reading of the word "public". A public golf course is not a cheaper version of a private one. It is infrastructure: the place where a 79-year-old walks with his bag, where a child first grips a club, where a new migrant learns to belong to a city. A transfer is a chess game in which the winner counts time, not money — and at East Potomac, the side counting time is the ordinary golfer, the one who will still be there after the drawing is folded away. The question I leave behind: if a golf course must be more beautiful to be loved, who taught us that ordinary things are not worth keeping?