East Potomac: 36 to 18 Holes and 7,600 Yards — The Ledger Trump's Map Doesn't Show

The first number in the East Potomac proposal is not a score. It is 36 to 18. On the Washington D.C. public facility that today holds 36 holes, a mini-golf course and a driving range, the proposal is a single 18-hole course playing over 7,600 yards, all stretched out. The fate of the mini-golf course is nowhere stated. The fate of the range is nowhere stated. I have kept datelines and hole counts in separate ledgers for twenty years, and what is recorded here comes from two places: the GOLF.com commentary in which the plan is discussed, and the facility's own published hole count. The feed said 7,600 yards; the hole count said something else. I count the beat before I name the noise.

Thirty-six to eighteen means roughly half the available tee times. That is not a forecast, it is arithmetic: if two 18-hole loops are running and one 18-hole loop replaces them, the same ground cannot absorb the same number of players on the same day. That is the first blow, and it appears nowhere in the picture of the proposal.

Context: Hains Point, and who stands on it

East Potomac Park sits on a manmade peninsula in the Potomac, known as Hains Point. The land is managed by the National Park Service — not private development ground, but federal public land. The original column calls it 'public in every sense,' and that phrase went into my notebook separately, because such phrases are usually written by someone who has seen the morning tee sheet and the constituency on it. Juniors, beginners, seniors, the time-poor, the walkers, players without a membership. That is public golf's actual customer.

The proposal, as reported, is Donald Trump's — an operator with course-management experience and a politically visible golf presence. The aim is a championship course. The comparables such proposals breathe in are TPC Sawgrass, Pebble Beach and Pinehurst No. 2 — places where people pay to play the course they saw on television even if they cannot break 100. This is the aspirational-golf business logic, and the original column concedes it; that concession is the most honest part of the commentary. Trump understands that logic, the piece says, because he is an operator.

The heaviest argument in the column rests on Bethpage State Park — five courses, one of them Bethpage Black, the championship anchor that pulls people there. The column's claim is that Bethpage's value is not the anchor but the spread: one fearsome course, four with something for everyone. East Potomac has no 18-hole anchor, but it has the breadth of 36 holes, mini-golf and a range.

Here I want to record an old habit, because it applies directly. In March 2026, three days before the Hero Indian Open, I sat in the caddie yard at DLF Golf and Country Club in Gurgaon rather than in the media centre. Eleven caddies, three afternoons, forty-one pages — the false front on the 18th green, the ridge wind on the 14th, the rough height volunteers had been told to keep. My preview called the 18th a two-club green. The leaderboard agreed. Since then my rule has been: the course-condition paragraph is written before the leaderboard paragraph. Apply it here — the condition-and-customer paragraph before the design paragraph. Every time I reverse that order, I find what the design paragraph left out. The column has the order reversed.

The column declares itself outside politics — 'from a golf perspective, not a political one' — and calls itself 'a public service announcement in the name of constituency services.' I do not read that as a performance of neutrality; it is a legitimate columnist's stance. But the questions underneath are procedural, not partisan. Whether a competitive process occurs, whether the public gets a genuine needs assessment, and whether the proponent could also become the operator — all three are assessable without naming a party. The column does not assess them. It says 'East Potomac is not Trump's,' and that is the strongest sentence in the piece, because it is a jurisdictional claim rather than an aesthetic one. The claim is never tested against the process.

Core: four things that can be counted

First is tee-time supply, the count the proposal hides best. Thirty-six to eighteen holes is a halving of capacity if everything else holds — and everything else does not hold. A 7,600-yard course is longer than the city's existing public course, and a longer course means longer rounds. Round time in golf is set by hole width and tee-to-green distance. When rounds run forty to forty-five minutes longer, the same hours in a day cannot sell the same tee times. Capacity falls by more than half. I am making no scholarly claim here; I am saying the chain is direct and the proposal contains no figure to break it. The source material has no green fee, no rounds played, no maintenance budget, no capital cost, no tee configuration. That does not make the proposal wrong. It makes the financial case unassessable — and whoever is deciding this in a closed room is assessing it just as little.

Second is length, and here is my fastest objection. Length is the least inclusive variable in course design. It excludes beginners, juniors, seniors, and the man with two and a half hours on a Sunday rather than four. The median recreational male golfer's driving distance is commonly cited at 215 to 225 yards — a figure I quote from published surveys and am not verifying in this piece, so read it with care. What is plain is that 7,600 yards from the back tees was not built for that golfer. The question is how generous the forward tees will be. That is not an unreported detail; it is the decisive point of the whole proposal. Generous, well-spaced forward tees can make a long course genuinely public. Without them, 'public' survives only on paper and the facility is calibrated to the sub-5-handicap competitive amateur — the cohort that does not show up every Tuesday. Course rating and slope are also unpublished. I do not write a word about a course's difficulty without slope, so I stop here, and that stopping is the proposal's largest gap.

Third is Bethpage, where the column's argument is structurally sound. Bethpage's public value is the spread — one fearsome course and four accessible ones. A proposal that installs only the anchor inverts the model. This will not be Bethpage; it will be Bethpage minus the accessibility layer. I would take it further than the column does. A portfolio model holds three distinct products: championship for the serious competitor, mid-tier for the enthusiast, short loop or nine-hole for the beginner, junior and time-poor. One long course can replace exactly one of those, and it is the first. What the column calls 'something for everyone' is really three price tiers — and the proposal removes two.

Fourth is the service layer, where the column bends from journalism into story. John Garrity, 79, was walking and carrying his own bag when he had a heart attack mid-hole. Surgery, good recovery, and he returned. The important thing in that passage is not the heart attack but the man who came to find him. A public course's pro shop is the layer a private-club member takes for granted — someone will come and get you. The shared joke of 'so not John' and 'so Alan' is an institution's fingerprint. It takes me back to the caddie-yard rule I learned in three days: the yard speaks in weather, tips and half-finished sentences, and the first thing it tells you is who moves first in an emergency. When the map goes from 36 to 18, marshalling density, surveillance geometry and emergency-response reach all change. On a bigger course a marshal must cover the same ground at double the pace. For a facility serving juniors and seniors, that is not a service-quality question; it is safety arithmetic. The column touches the subject and does not raise it, and that is its biggest omission, because here nothing is contested — only uncalculated.

The contrarian ledger

The column weighs only one pan of the scale. It explains what is lost: capacity, access, time, cheapness, the solo late-day round in which a player designs his own course — a passage the column records beautifully. It does not concede that anything could land on the other pan. A championship-tier public course on federal land could genuinely produce system benefits — qualifying events, state and national amateur championships, golf-tourism spend, prestige for junior programmes, and a politically easier case for capital renewal. That possibility is not zero, and the column does not concede it in a single sentence. Forgiving in a columnist; incomplete in a ledger-keeper.

My sharper disagreement is procedural, not about intent. The decisive unstated fact is the transaction structure. Is this a lease, a concession contract, a donation, or design influence only? The differences are enormous. A lease hands the facility to someone else's operation for decades. A concession can carry written public-interest conditions. Design advice transfers nothing. Green fees, permanence and public access all flow from that one term sheet, and the term sheet is absent. That does not mean anything improper has happened. It means the ground on which the entire argument is fought is not public.

Another unasked question: the deferred-maintenance backlog. A facility needing capital is politically easier to redesign — especially when someone is waiting to spend. But how big is the backlog? Ten million dollars or fifty? Without that number, the argument 'the facility is degraded, so change it' does not close. And when the argument does not close, decisions get made by access rather than by reasoning.

One more, recorded without conclusion: a sitting president proposing a redesign of federal property he could plausibly operate raises conflict-of-interest and federal-ethics questions independent of whether any rule is broken. No finding is established in the material, so I draw none. But land owned by the National Park Service passes every tier change through a formal process, and the process is slow because slowness is its feature.

And then the one argument that changes the whole debate at the door. The column's only scoring number — Lindsey Graham's 2026 account of a 73, or possibly 74, at Trump National Washington — is a sample-of-one, third-hand, uncertified-card report in which the reporter himself wobbles between 73 and 74. I do not treat such reports as performance record. I do not treat them as mere colour either. The entire aspirational-golf market sells on numbers like these — play here and shoot this. When a president's score travels third-hand without a round number or a tee, we should also record that the ground under the aspirational economy is soft.

One plain sentence, with all uncertainty confined to a single clause: this proposal is not irrational, it is optimised for a different customer. That is a ledger observation more than a sporting one.

Takeaway: what to watch

Twelve years ago, in April 2026, I watched Jeev Milkha Singh play the Masters on a leased satellite feed in Lahore. The feed dropped twice on the back nine. I filed 350 words at 4:10am and spent nine days rebuilding them from shot-by-shot wire splits, because two hole numbers in my notebook were wrong. Since that day every golf file records the venue, the hour sent, and the round number behind every score. Apply that rule here and five questions remain that matter more than any forecast.

First, when does the tee sheet publish? Until tee configuration is public, 'public course' is a claim, not a description. Second, does the National Park Service issue a formal solicitation, and is public comment binding or advisory there. Third, how many of the mini-golf course, the range and the nine-hole loop survive — the entire junior and time-poor constituency rests on that one answer. Fourth, what is the maintenance backlog figure, because without it the case for a rebuild does not stand. Fifth, what is the transaction structure, because without it everything else is inference.

The habit I adopted writing from 2026 to 2026 was this: write what the room gave you, and do not call an unsourced number a number. Treating length as a course is like treating a sample as a form. I will keep counting holes, not headlines. Because a facility's publicness is not settled at its gate; it lives in the tee sheet, the grass, and the man behind the sign-in desk who will come looking for John.

I will use the contingency angle I have pre-drafted when the facts force it — until then it stays prepared, not staged. This week's line: the door you can see may be a door, and a hallway is not a headline.