Untitled Document

13 June 2004

The Olde Course

It was the second day of the Weekend of National Mourning for President Reagan.

I was exhausted from hauling the golf-bag with my son over the Old Course in solemn commemoration. He is now a government employee, of a sort, an intern at my old agency. Since we were now both at enforced leisure with the Agency closed, we could have gone and stood in the mist along the route of the cortege. Or we could have stayed on this side of the river and played golf.

I had the distinct feeling that Irish-American Fathers must have had for generations as their oldest joined the Force. He is a man, now, with every prospect of being a better on than I. He is gaining an interest in what he is going to do for the rest of his life.

But we talked of nothing much of consequence, as befits an afternoon at Arlington in the mist. I love the Old Course, just five minutes from the Pentagon and the other buildings of state by the broad river. It is an antique course, almost in a class where you could add an "e" to Old for atmosphere.

We may not be the Royal and Ancient, but the Country Club at Arlington is a trip in time.

My son and I talked about it in the fine mist that fell all afternoon. Not enough to soak our shirts, but pervasive enough that it coated my glasses with droplets. On the second hole I was forced to take them off and opt for Blind Golf.

After all, the only thing I would be reading was my putts, and my distant vision is still just fine. I was not going to read a scorecard, and if I hit anyone out there, I heard no shouts of protest.

We talked to the Starter at the shack, and he said there was no problem getting off the Spare Nine. “There's a threesome going off there- you just sent them down there,” corrected a groundsman, going by in a yellow slicker in his industrial golf cart.

We walked up the path past the tee-box for the old Front Nine. They call it the “Red Nine” now, not that there is any Communist menace out there. Since we upgraded the third nine holes from a hack in the woods to legitimate states, they call them “Red, White and Blue.” Gives them some flexibility in changing an eighteen hole round, and sometimes they can let one of the circuits lie fallow and rest from the traffic of foot and cart.

We arrived at the turn and decided to take a light lunch while we waited for the threesome to clear the impact zone.

There was trouble at the grill. It is part of the antique infrastructure we are constantly trying to preserve or upgrade. It had been designed to serve the overflow from the tennis courts next door and the golfers making the turn after coming off the old Front Nine, now re-christened the Red.

Inside the screen door was a retired general or admiral. He was too old to tell the difference anymore, except for his carriage.

The grill was broken and one of the Club old-timer maintenance guys had his hands up where the gas lines connect to the elements under the hearing surface.

I thought the gals working the counter were Guatemalan, but my don corrected me. He worked as a lifeguard at the pool for several years, and assured me that most of the help at the club was, though some odd alliance, from the Dominican Republic. The girls were doing their best, but our microwaved hot dogs had a curious chewy sort of texture.

The threesome went off before us, dogged in their approach. Two guys and a gal. They had pretty good swings, all three, but the woman was the best technical player, but exceedingly deliberate in her approach. For my money, far too time consuming for the weather conditions.

I had not swung a club in a couple weeks- I had been traveling, and it took a couple strikes well off the sweet spot to get my hands in front of the ball and start to groove the hits. With the clouds and mist the temperature had plunged down in to the low sixties and the moisture made me wish I had brought a jacket and a hat.

But once we were damp and moving, it didn't matter.

The old course is a gem. I looked down Number one and looked at the lush green and mature trees. “Virginia is a beautiful place,” I said.

“Yeah,” said my son, ironically. He remembered the old bumper sticker. “It's for Lovers.”

He is a leftie, something to watch with a big wheeling swing. He whacked the white ball and it curved left but it was so wet that the long grass grabbed at it and kept the ball on the verge of the fairway, short of the trees.

God, they have some trees here! Today, they couldn't get away with what the Founders did to create the course. It is a miracle, being this close in. They could not build it today on the cheap, not without someone going to jail.

Back in the 1920's, military officers assigned to the Capital did not have much of a choice on golfing. They had a fine club just up the street from the Department of War and the Navy, and they could dine at the Occidental restaurant just down the street on Pennsylvania Avenue. This was before there was a Pentagon Building, or the Air Force, for that matter, and the offices of the Army and Navy were scattered all over the District.

If you wished to golf, there were only private opportunities. Many officers belonged to the Bethesda Country Club, just over the District line to the north. You can see of few of their pictures in the high-necked uniforms near some of the trophy cases. But the private clubs were too pricey for most officers. Remember the days. One of the criteria of service in Washington was whether you had enough of your own money to entertain.

You certainly could not live in style here on a Lieutenant Commander's pay.

There arose a popular movement in the Army-Navy Club. Out in one of the neighborhoods in South Arlington that had been settled by freed slaves a farm was coming up for sale.

Arlington County had been part of the original District, but had fallen back to sleep after it proved ungovernable on the West side of the Potomac. Congress gave it back to Virginia in the 1840s, and it had bristled with forts and guns when the Federals occupied it in 1861 to protect the approaches to the capital.

The farm had a challenge as a place to grow anything, with the great house up on top of the hill on the precincts of what had been part of the Arlington Line fortifications. Fort Richardson was on the property, the massive earthen ramparts were settling back into the rich red Virginia soil.

The property ran down the slopes of the hill in three directions. Not good for plowing, but suitable for a golf course. The controversy raged through a couple annual meetings, and the membership of the Army-Navy Club suffered one of those religious schisms that afflicted the Reformation Church. It was diners versus golfers, tennis addicts versus swimmers.

In the end, there was a walkout and the creation of a new sect. Money changed hands and the farm came into the possession of a newly chartered body called the Army-Navy Country Club, which gave rise to endless confusion and missed appointments at the Army-Navy Club downtown.

The visionaries of the new Club included young Dwight Eisenhower and Chester Nimitz, whose individual calls to greatness would be answered in time. But in the meantime, the officers set about laying out their club. They caused an Army Major from the Corps of Engineers to be assigned full-time on the Government's nickel to supervise the construction of the course.

They found an architect to lay out a challenging Donald Ross-style course that wrapped around the hill with eighteen holes ripped through the trees. Teams of active duty soldiers from the Corps did some of the work, and by 1931 the sound of club against ball was heard, and the rattle of balls in the trees and the muted cursing after the slice.

The old Number 16 is typical of the challenges of the original course. The mowed grass starts part-way up the sweeping hill to an upland plateau, the last thing you can see clearly from the tee, and then it plunges away out of sight in a right-hand dogleg. It plunges into the valley with a steep lateral pitch that makes all balls want to roll down into the thicket of undergrowth and trees. The green, three solid shots away, is fronted by a rocky creek.

Dwight Eisenhower once observed that if he awoke suddenly and found himself on Number Sixteen he would know that he had died and gone to hell.

The officers were visionaries, but a tightfisted bunch. They stipulated that they could bring their own liquor to the bar to keep costs down, and began to refurbish the old farm house. They put in tennis courts and a swimming pool, and a series of improvements began that would continue with military precision and no small amount of indignation from the retired membership that wanted cheap dues.

In the 1950s a private developer went out of business in far Fairfax County, and the visionaries of the Board saw an opportunity to make a bold move. They bought another campus to serve the members who increasingly had to live out beyond ring-road that would become the Capital Beltway.

Today there are twenty-seven holes at the Arlington Campus, twenty-seven more in Fairfax, fifty tennis courts, three pools at Arlington, and an indoor tennis complex constructed on the site of a Civil War Hospital.

Complementary memberships are extended to the President and members of the Supreme Court, so its entirely possible to slice inadvertently into a foursome composed of the Secret Service or an Associate Justice. I saw President Clinton birdie Number 18 one time, shortly after one of his security detail walked out of the bushes just as I was wildly swinging on my tee shot.

My son and I did not hit them all that well in the mist on the national day of mourning for President Reagan. But we got around in fine style.

A bad day on the course at Arlington is infinitely better than a good day at the office. I think Mr. Reagan would have understood.