Congressional Country Club (Blue Course)

Favorite Hole

No. 12, par 4, 265-455 yards

The most eye-catching element of this par 4—the nest of flashy bunkers on the inside of the dogleg—is artificial, but the basic form of the hole is pleasantly natural, riding the edge of a ridge above the 11th fairway.

The strategic design is simple and clear: if you successfully challenge the bunkers off the tee, you’ll earn a shorter approach. Swinging wide right isn’t a terrible idea, though; there’s only one bunker on that side to worry about, and the angle into back-left pins in particular is ideal. However, Andrew Green makes the risky play attractive through a clever visual trick: the green is visible from the tee, just left of the cluster of bunkers. It simply doesn’t feel right to aim far enough away from the line of the green to reach the safe portion of the fairway. Because of this, I’m sure players often bite off more than they can chew.

The contouring of the green and surrounds is typical of Green’s work. The putting surface has internal ripples that define pinnable sections, and the shaping on the edges of the green pad is abrupt and angular, reminiscent of Donald Ross’s style.

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Overall Thoughts

After Billy Hurley III won the Quicken Loans National at Congressional Country Club in 2016, he made a startling admission to Jason Epstein, the club’s director of golf and athletics. Hurley said the reason he had been relaxed enough to close out his first PGA Tour was that the Blue Course didn’t make him think. As Epstein told Scott Michaux of Global Golf Post, Hurley said, “All I had to do was throw the ball up in the air and I knew it was going to come down soft. There’s only one way to play Congressional and that’s easy for me.”

Not exactly what you want to hear from the winner of an event at your course.

So when Andrew Green became Congressional’s consulting architect in 2018, one of his key tasks was to give the Blue Course more complexity. His ambitious redesign, completed in 2021, succeeds on that count.

Take his work on the course’s par 3s. As a result of Robert Trent Jones’s and Rees Jones’s revisions between 1957 and 2006, Nos. 2, 8, 10, and 13 had become quite similar to each other. All required longish shots, and all but 10 played slightly uphill to greens bunkered front right and front left. In his overhaul of the Blue Course, Green worked to differentiate these holes from each other.

On No. 2, he moved the green back and extended it to the left, creating a beastly rendition of a Redan hole. A clutch of gnarly bunkers guards the front-left side of the green, and a single flashed bunker on the right marks the line a savvy player can use to run his ball along a kicker slope and onto the green. As on any well-executed Redan template, the green runs away and to the left, and a hazard-free area long and left is the best place to miss.

In reworking the seventh hole, Green transformed a cookie-cutter Jones green into a wide, shallow, rippling sculpture that attracts the eye through much of the front nine. There’s a short-grass runoff behind the green (side note: I wish there were more of these on the Blue Course), and a back-middle mound bedevils recovery shots.

The most radical change in Green’s plan was to the par-3 10th, which since 2006 had been a straightforward water-crossing hole that created an awkward, back-tracking transition to the 11th tee. Today, the hole plays from a tee next to the clubhouse to a wavy green jutting into the near side of the pond. Timid players can aim at a hidden short-grass area left of the green but must be precise in order to catch the ramp onto the putting surface. It’s a far more memorable and layered shot than it used to be, not to mention a godsend for photographers.

Finally, on No. 13, the course’s final par 3, Green maintained the Joneses’ traditional ridge-to-ridge concept but significantly reshaped the hole’s features. The green now sweeps into a high back-right tier that will surely be pinned on championship Sundays.

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These four refreshed par 3s represent the basic virtues of Green’s work at Congressional. They are immediately distinguishable from each other, easy to remember after one round, and difficult from the back tees while still being playable for golfers of average ability. The same can be said for almost every hole at the new Blue Course. The par-5 11th, once a straightforward par 5 with water along the right, now finishes on the opposite side of a creek and poses a dilemma after a good drive: cross the hazard now or save the risk for the next shot. No. 15, formerly a rote ridge-to-ridge par 4, now features a blind approach to a reverse-Redan green that overlooks the watery arena centering on the 10th and 18th holes.

Overall, Green’s work infused variety, playability, and strategic interest into what had become a one-dimensional and somewhat humorless championship test.

Yet as much as I respect the redesigned Blue Course, I can’t quite love it. I find a lot of the shaping ostentatious rather than pleasing or stimulating. To my eye, the intricate bunker lips, jagged green edges, and other manufactured features distract from Congressional’s natural landscape rather than complementing (or offering a provocative counterpoint to) it. For instance, the creek on the 11th hole, which plays such a compelling strategic role, looks neither natural nor attractively unnatural. The shaping of its banks strikes me as fiddly and overworked.

Still, I expect the Blue Course to show well on live broadcasts. Its bold features will translate brilliantly to pixels and LED nodes, as will its state-of-the-art conditioning, which is supplemented by SubAir systems, Better Billy Bunker liners, and cutting-edge turf types. This, then, is the true objective of Green’s redesign: to create an impressive stage for a TV spectacle.

There’s nothing wrong with that, of course. I’m glad that Congressional has decided to open the Blue Course to public view by hosting televised championships, and I recognize that the club’s recent architectural moves align with that objective. For playing purposes, though, I prefer golf courses that are a bit more modest and at home in their environments.

1 Egg

Congressional Blue earns an Egg for its muscular but not overly severe topography, bold and inventive design, and top-of-the-line championship conditioning. Andrew Green’s renovation has transformed one of the dullest venues on the PGA and USGA rotas into one of the most distinctive and intriguing. The aesthetics of the course, however, are not to my taste.

Course Tour

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