Congressional Country Club (Blue)

Two Indiana businessmen originally founded the Congressional Country Club, primarily as a venue for politicians and cognoscenti to meet, unconstrained by red tape.

Founded in 1924 and officially opened by President Calvin Coolidge, the Congressional Country Club started out with a relatively straightforward 18-hole course designed by Devereux Emmet to meet the needs of the elite membership. Golf was a secondary consideration for the club in the early beginnings and during World War II the Congressional was commandeered as a training ground for highly secret activities.

Forty years after its formation, the Congressional burst into the golfing limelight, playing host to the 1964 US Open. It resulted in a remarkable victory in baking heat and high humidity for a sick Ken Venturi, who played the final rounds with a doctor after receiving special dispensation from the USGA.

A who's who of architects have had a hand in revising the course down the years. Robert Trent Jones added nine new holes to the Congressional portfolio in 1957 and also remodelled the original Devereux Emmet design. The 1964 US Open course was the longest track ever used for the US Open. Rees Jones made further course changes in 1989.

The New World Atlas of Golf describes the Congressional as: “Situated in undulating, wooded country, the subtly contoured greens and large, well-placed bunkers are the course’s main features.” According to Tom Doak, writing in The Confidential Guide to Golf Courses: “If it weren’t Washington’s most fashionable club, you’d have never heard of Congressional’s Blue course, which is of championship length but whose reputation is largely inflated by Beltway hype.”

Clearly the Congressional is not a favorite of some critics and the par three 18th became a serious bone of contention resulting in organizers employing various course configurations, including using two holes from the adjacent Gold course for the 1976 PGA Championship, which Dave Stockton won.

The entire Blue course was used for the 1997 US Open, where Ernie Els won by a single shot from Colin Montgomerie. This was the first and most likely the last time that the US Open would finish with a par three. In 2009, the “Open Doctor”, Rees Jones, was called back in to reverse the direction of the 18th hole (now the 218-yard 10th), with the rest of the routing shifted accordingly, making the long and testing 523-yard par four 17th the new home hole. It's a brutal closing hole with a peninsula green and it's also the longest par four on the card.

The US Open returned to the Blue course in 2011 and it was a one-man show. From the off, 22-year-old Rory McIlroy led the tournament, breaking a plethora of US Open records on route to claiming his maiden major title at Congressional.