From 36 to 18 at East Potomac: Who Measured the Door of Public Golf

John Garrity, 79, was carrying his own bag when his heart gave out on a hole at East Potomac. What saved him that afternoon was not a drive and not a fairway — it was the phone in the pro shop. Someone took a cart out and brought him in. At a private club that courtesy is so ordinary it never appears in a report. At a municipal course it is the entire system: the marshal, the check-in desk, the tee sheet, and the man who comes looking for you. Nowhere in the paragraphs of the redesign under debate is that system named.

There is no Strokes Gained here, no tournament field, no world ranking. This is a facility story, not a performance story. And the facility stories of my career were all learned by sitting somewhere other than the scoreboard.

Context: one island, thirty-six holes, one proposal

East Potomac Golf Course sits on Hains Point in Washington, D.C., a manmade peninsula of fill inside the Potomac. The land is federal and managed by the National Park Service. The complex today holds 36 holes, a mini-golf course and a driving range — something for the beginner, the child, the senior, and the person with one hour to spare.

The proposal replaces it with a single 18-hole championship course stretched past 7,600 yards. The Trump Organization's name is attached — capital, brand and political visibility arriving together. The strongest sentence in the GOLF.com commentary is that East Potomac is not Trump's. That sentence is jurisdictional, not aesthetic, which is why it holds.

Bethpage State Park is offered as the comparison — the New York public complex with five courses. One championship anchor, and four beside it that anyone can walk onto. The commentary says Bethpage has something for everyone. That is correct, and it is the whole hinge of the argument.

Core: length is the least inclusive design variable a course owns

Rome, September 2026. My first overseas assignment at 25 — the second World Championships at the Stadio Olimpico, filing to a London agency by dictating down a phone line. I took a seat at the long-jump apron with a stopwatch and a notebook. Carl Lewis won at 8.67m, Robert Emmiyan took silver at 8.53, Larry Myricks bronze at 8.33. Nobody in the tribune was counting, so I counted: 19 strides in Lewis's run-up, 21 in Emmiyan's, and Lewis's last ten metres hand-timed under a second. I saw engineering, not drama. The lesson from that evening is still my method: sit somewhere other than the finish line. The pro shop is not the finish line. I trust the mixed-zone voice more than the podium speech, and here that voice belongs to the staffer who goes looking for a 79-year-old.

One rule has sat in my notebook since the first day: no adjective without a number I measured myself. Length is the least inclusive of all the design variables a course possesses. That sounds backwards, because length is always sold as challenge. Challenge and doorway are different things, and a public facility's job is to keep the doorway open before it sells the challenge.

The median recreational male golfer's drive is commonly put at 215 to 225 yards. From the back tees, a 7,600-yard course asks that player for two extra shots on every hole — five hours, three balls, and an experience nobody repeats. Beginners, juniors, seniors and the time-poor are excluded by that variable alone. The real question is not how long the course will be, but how generous the forward tees will be. That is the number missing from the available material. Without a tee configuration, the word public is decorative.

The second figure is plain: 36 holes to 18. That implies roughly a halving of tee-time capacity — the capacity on which an urban municipal's whole economy rests. The chain after it can be drawn with confidence even without a spreadsheet: longer course, slower rounds, lower daily throughput, and a higher green fee per round to fund the same maintenance budget. What happens to the mini-golf course and the range is unspecified, and that is the single most consequential unstated detail, because those are what the people without the time or the money for 18 holes actually use.

The third strand is economic, and here the commentary is at its sharpest. TPC Sawgrass, Pebble Beach, Pinehurst No. 2 — names that extract a premium from golfers who cannot break 100. This is aspirational golf, and Trump understands it like an operator. The plan is not irrational; it is optimised for a different customer. Reading that line, I think of Seville — 43.18 seconds, Butch Reynolds' 43.29 from 2026 broken, and still the desk told me that evening that tactics were not my lane. Seville taught me that a record time can still miss the man. Here too the scoreboard is clean and the story sits behind it.

Fourth, an old habit: I pull every claim down to its sample size. The only form datum in this entire debate is Senator Lindsey Graham's 2026 account of a 73 at Trump National Washington — or possibly a 74. Secondhand, hedged by the reporter himself, no attested card, no course rating, no slope, no tee information. n=1, uncorroborated. Treat it as colour, not as a performance record.

For me the truer comparison comes from India. Delhi Golf Club's trees against DLF's broadcast-friendly stadium course was never an argument about beauty; it was an argument about entry. Caddie programmes kept producing champions while green fees kept everyone else outside the gate. Tokyo 2026 let me watch the same mechanism from the other side: 4am from a spare bedroom in London, Kasumigaseki Country Club, no spectators anywhere. Nelly Korda gold at 17-under 267, Lydia Ko bronze at 16-under 268, and Aditi Ashok fourth at 15-under 269 — one shot off a medal and the best Olympic finish by an Indian golfer. Fourth is fourth; write the number first, then let the context speak. I logged fourteen hours of feed and filed 900 words by nine. Nobody on the desk had watched a single shot. That day taught me a facility story can be written without a credential, but never without a score.

Contrarian: the ledger the commentary did not weigh

Here is where I part company with it. The Bethpage comparison is structurally sound and half-read. Bethpage's value is not the anchor, it is the spread — one fearsome championship course and four beside it you can take a child to. Extracting only the anchor inverts the model, and the commentary is right about that. What it never concedes is that a championship anchor on federal land also delivers real returns: qualifying events, state and national amateur championships, golf tourism, a credible spine for junior programmes, and a far stronger case for capital investment. The piece refuses that entire side of the ledger, and that refusal is its clearest analytical hole.

Second, and decisive in my reading: the one number nowhere in evidence is the transaction structure. A lease? A concession contract? A donation? Design influence only? Public access, pricing and permanence all flow from that term sheet, and the term sheet is absent. Until it exists, both remaining public and quietly privatised are guesses. The commentary describes itself as constituency services, which means it argues from representation rather than data. That is coherent for a columnist and leaves the governance analysis unfinished.

Third, the pressure nobody names: deferred maintenance is the proposal's real leverage. A facility already failing is politically easier to redesign than a healthy one. What the repair backlog actually is, nobody asked. And fourth, stated carefully: a sitting president proposing a redesign of federal property he could plausibly operate raises conflict-of-interest and federal-ethics questions that exist independently of whether any rule is broken. No finding is established, and none should be inferred.

Takeaway: the question is not the course, it is the signature

I still count the strides before I let the sentence jump, and here the strides are visible. The rebuild is coming; capital and politics on both sides are pushing the same way. The real question is not whether the course measures 7,600 yards. It is who signs that document on behalf of the public, and whether the width of the forward tees, the future of the mini-golf course and the ceiling on the green fee are settled before that signature lands. At sixty-four I am still deciding which lane deserves the longer story. East Potomac's lane may be the longest of all, because what is at stake there is not a score. It is a door.