The day we played was a fine example: With nobody else around, we finished the front nine holes in less than two hours. I’ve never had the good fortune to find the secret to golf, but because Rock Creek is so accessible and almost never crowded, it always beckons me to come back for more. “One week you’ve discovered the secret to the game, the next week you never want to play it again,” he writes. Sportswriter John Feinstein talks in his book “A Good Walk Spoiled” about how there’s a fine line between good golfing and bad. It was the perfect central meeting place for us stooges, with my friends Mo and Larry coming from Silver Spring while I was driving into DC from Arlington. On this recent November day, our threesome - all retired guys who’ve known each other for many years - got together to play at Rock Creek. Norton praised the public-private partnership as a way to “infuse desperately needed capital into these golf courses to maintain and preserve their historic features while making them fully available to the public.” The new operator, National Links Trust, took over operations and committed to improvements. In October 2020, the National Park Service signed a 50-year lease for the three historic golf courses. Norton said at the time that the three courses had “long been in desperate need of capital investment to reverse decades of deterioration and to maintain and preserve their historic features.” From the looks of Rock Creek as well as East Potomac, where I also play, nothing much has improved since 2014. All three of these courses host a large number of African American players. Eleanor Holmes Norton introduced a bill in Congress in April 2014 to improve Rock Creek and the two other federally owned golf courses in Washington, Langston Golf Course and East Potomac Park. With its beautiful sylvan surroundings of Rock Creek Park, the course has the potential - with the appropriate care and attention - to become a diamond in the rough, so to speak.ĭC Del. I don’t blame the small staff who work at Rock Creek for the condition of the course they’re trying to maintain it as best they can, but there’s not enough financing to keep it up to speed. It was great on a personal level to have the Rock Creek Golf Course all to ourselves, but it’s a shame for DC that relatively few people choose to play there.Īs is well-known by Washington-area golfers, the front nine holes of the course are in poor condition, while many of the holes on the back nine are closed completely. Eric Green is a writer in the Washington area.
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