Congressional Country Club was founded in 1924 as a club for Washington’s political and business class first and a golf club second, and for its first three decades that ordering showed. The clubhouse, a vast stone pile with the presence of an embassy, was always the point. The golf course that came with it took rather longer to earn its own reputation, and it did so only after being pulled apart and rebuilt.
A Course Rebuilt Before It Was Fifty
Devereux Emmet laid out the original eighteen at Congressional in 1924, but the club spent much of the following three decades in financial difficulty, first through the Depression and then through the disruptions of the Second World War, and the course drifted rather than developed. In 1957 the club brought in Robert Trent Jones Sr., who added nine entirely new holes and reworked nine of Emmet’s originals into what is now known as the Blue Course. It is worth pausing on that, because it means the layout that has since hosted five major championships is not really Emmet’s course at all. It is Jones’s answer to it, built from half of the old routing and half of his own design, and it is the version the game has kept coming back for.
The Hottest Week in Major Championship History
The Blue Course’s major reputation begins with heat. The 1964 U.S. Open, played over 36 holes on the Saturday in the old format, arrived during a stretch of brutal Washington summer weather, with temperatures well into the nineties and humidity to match. Ken Venturi, who had been battling a circulatory problem in his hands for two seasons and had barely kept his career going, played the final round accompanied by a doctor after the USGA granted special dispensation, and stumbled to the eighteenth green looking, in the famous phrase of the day, like a man who had walked out of the desert. He won by four over Tommy Jacobs, on a course stretched to 7,053 yards, the longest in U.S. Open history to that point. It remains one of the most physically dramatic wins the championship has produced, and it put Congressional on the game’s map for good.
Stockton’s Putt, Els’s Nerve, and McIlroy’s Statement
The championships that followed each added their own layer. In 1976, Dave Stockton holed a fifteen-foot par putt on the final green to beat Raymond Floyd and Don January by a shot and win his second PGA Championship, in a final round pushed to Monday by weather. In 1997, Ernie Els closed with a 1-under 69 to win the U.S. Open by a single stroke over Colin Montgomerie, the margin decided when Montgomerie bogeyed the seventeenth. And in 2011, Rory McIlroy, twenty-two years old and playing his first major since an infamous final-round collapse at the Masters that spring, took the Blue Course apart. He finished at 16 under, the lowest score in relation to par in U.S. Open history, and won by eight shots over Jason Day, setting eleven championship records along the way. Where Venturi’s win had been about survival, McIlroy’s was about control, a statement that the collapse at Augusta had taught him something rather than broken him.
Not Done Yet
Congressional is not a museum piece trading on old finishes. The club is scheduled to host the KPMG Women’s PGA Championship in 2027, the PGA Championship in 2030, fifty-four years after Stockton’s win, and the Ryder Cup in 2037. Few American courses have been rebuilt this completely, waited this long between marquee assignments, and still kept getting handed the biggest weeks in the sport. Congressional’s answer to the question of why has always been the same one Jones gave in 1957: if the course you have is not quite good enough for the occasion, build the one that is.