Enterprise

Year Opened: 1976

Architect: Robert L. Elder*

Web: http://pgparks.com/places/sportsfac/golf.html#Enterprise

Phone: 301-249-2040


Phew. Man. I was glancing at the last entry, the one purportedly on Patuxent Greens, and even I’m confused and I wrote it. Chelloveck? Couldn’t I have just channeled “Swingers” and been all “you’re sooo money, baby” or “who’s the big winner?”or “it is so on”, though, truth be told, I don’t think that would have conveyed the mood I was striving for. Think something along the lines of “The Lost Weekend”, except longer and without the eerie violin bits.

Today’s segment will focus on Enterprise Golf Club, the so-called “Augusta of the North”, which has about as much in common with the real Augusta as I do with George Clooney. A pretty apt analogy, this, since while Enterprise is a golf course and I am ostensibly a man, both Augusta and Clooney take those basic concepts and kick it up a notch, well more than a notch really, but I’m kinda clueless as to what’s like bigger than a notch – kick it up a slash? kick it up a gash? Right? No good. But I bet George would know. Well, anyhoo, Enterprise stakes its claim on the numerous perennials and annuals (these would be like your technical terms for your various floral types) scattered about the property. Well, numerous might be an exaggeration and scattered seems a bit careless as a word choice – what I remember is this: some petunia-ish numbers planted around the back of the 18th green. There might be a flowering dogwood around somewhere. Oh yeah. You know what, there are the formal gardens of the imposing Newton White Mansion behind the 10th tee box, named after the first commanding officer of the U.S.S. Enterprise prior to WWII. I guess he wasn’t up to running the ship while Japs were flying around, he was more of your peacetime dry-dock type of commander. Hey, I’m with him – who needs a bunch of kamikazes nose-diving into the Ledo deck during afternoon calisthenics when you can hang in San Diego, washing down mojitos and canoodling with surfer-babes.

Enterprise has a very secluded and pastoral feeling considering its proximity to the Beltway and Rte. 50, with a horse farm next to the parking lot and not a house in sight - well, except for the mansion. A coiled metal sculpture depicting a golfer greets you by the large putting green. Most golf course artwork runs to a particular type (hilarious posters like the Three Stooges in golf get-ups, or two cartoon fish yukking it up at the pond bottom among a bunch of golf balls and broken clubs, or a cartoon of a guy nailing his monitor with a golf club with the thought-provoking slogan: Born to Golf, Forced to Work; or motivational posters portraying concepts like Frustration, Patience, Determination, and Risk with suitable photographs and appropriately pithy captions)…compared to these, this piece is like Rodin’s “The Thinker”.

Beyond the putting green you’re welcomed by the dark, low-slung clubhouse which sits on the highest part of the property and is nicely landscaped, this being the Augusta of the North and all. And since when is Prince George’s County in Maryland considered “the North”? Have you seen the PG cops in action? God help you if you happen to be pulled over for DWB (Driving while Black). Allegedly there’s a driving range located somewhere remotely off the parking lot but I can’t tell you one way or another since I’ve never been.

A strollable course, the first hole is down the path from the clubhouse a ways, past the mansion on your left to the starter’s gazebo. The hole itself isn’t much, a short right-veering four-par with a semi-blind tee shot and a huge green flanked by pines. You can get lucky cutting the corner off the tee as there’s but a few sparse trees on the right. Me, I got lucky. And then again when I grounded a 4-iron onto the green and bombed in a putt to start off one round at 1-under. That’s happened perhaps one other time. But I didn’t stay in red figures for long, about 3 minutes, in fact, this after losing a ball left into the trees with my tee-shot on the next hole.

There are really no great highlights on the front nine but no real dogs either. When you get to the 5th tee, you’ll see a sign not to hit until you hear a bell that the group in front of you is supposed to gong once they’re greenward-bound. So you wait. And wait. Knowing what I know about human nature, I’m always a bit suspicious that the bell-ringing might be over-looked. So wait we will….

So I suppose I would be remiss without confessing that I feel somewhat to blame for the recent economic “downturn”, the one where we dabbled in socialism by having the government take over certain “under-performing” industries and basically “punished” the corporate malfeants by essentially putting them in “time-out”. (OK. Cool. I just effin stomped my previous record of using quotation marks in a sentence, though even I have to throw the challenge flag on “time-out”) And I’m to blame how? After a year or so of trading in putters virtually every weekend, I have basically come to terms, however reluctantly, that my stubby center-shafted Never Compromise, while definitely short on looks, is perfectly suited for my contrarian semi-sidesaddle open-stanced set-up. Sure, my contribution to the overall GNP might seem a paltry sum, but I definitely kept the UPS trucks moving about. What can Brown do for me? Bring me a goddam putter that looks good and can make an occasional putt. How would that be?

And now that the US banking and credit sectors are in freefall, I’ve got to rethink some of the Nigerian e-mail offers I’ve been deleting without compunction, you know, the ones that tell me that one of my ancestors has left me several million large; all I need to do is send a few grand to facilitate transfer of said funds. I suppose I could block these scammers, but now that the johnson-lengtheners and dick-hardeners have seemed to stop selling me their ointments and elixirs and salves (perhaps they have a window into my sexual ambiva…oh whatever), it would be pretty depressing opening my e-mail account and finding like 2 messages, one from GoogleAds and the other …something about online drugs, so at least the Nigerians fill up my inbox. The pertinent question is - what is it, this place Nigeria? Back in the day, I remember it was a country in the continent of Africa, but now that the Palintology revisionists have accorded Africa country status, what does that make Nigeria? A township? A province? Another thing. Why do they write so much? Don’t they realize I have the attention span of a drunk teenager texting and uploading a photo of her tits while driving 70 mph in rush-hour, trying to uncork a bottle of Shiraz and downloading a song from XM onto the iPod, this while rummaging through the Louis Vuitton bag for a lighter to fire up the one-hitter and calling LoveLine to ask Dr. Drew whether the curling iron jammed in her vulva might pose a health risk? I don’t need all the details of the demise of the late Ambassador Mboku Dioya, just give me the pertinent details: how much should I send and when can I expect my $5.3 million? I’m not no professional venture capitalist, but this Nigerian investment gambit seems to be a slam dunk, a win-win, a low-hanging fruit, a no-brainer…

Oh yeah, about those corporate crook CEOs. You know what? They can have their golden parachute. Really, no problemo. But here’s some caviar, I mean the caveat. We’ll give you a parachute, you can paint it gold I don’t give an ess, up onto the Gulfstream V you go and all that stuff you hijacked along the way comes with. Like the absurdly preposterous house you live in – not the whole thing, mind you, just the unnecessary crap. Like the Great Room. And the granite-topped kitchen island with the 8-burner Viking stove, the indoor grill and the built-in sink. Out that goes. You can keep the microwave because that you actually use. The 3-story entrance foyer. You're fuckin' kidding me, right? The six Jacuzzi-equipped marble-tiled bathrooms with plasma TVs, I think not. There’s just three of you and when’s the last time Junior took in a soak? The manicures, the spa treatments, the $350-a-head dinner tabs, the massages, and the $400 haircuts? Christ, you’re a friggin’ banker, not Louis Quatorze. The Terrain Rovers? You won’t be needing those anymore. The house in the Hamptons, oh, that goes, no question. The elephant in the room you’re always babbling about and the 800-lb gorilla – just for ballast, sure, why not.

What about your assorted lackeys and Blackberry-toting toadies and yes-men? Well, somebody’s gonna have to clean up the mess after we strap the loaded parachute onto your major-player plate-is-full take-no-prisoners envelope-pushing master-of-the-universe paradigm-shifting big-swinging-dick, set the altitude for 30,000 feet (so you can get a global view of your predicament), aim for the bull’s-eye on the box you’re always thinking outside of, and a quick shove out the door and off you go. Now let’s see you hit the ground running…

…Alright, we’re ready to hit, the bell has finally rung.

The strength of the course is holes 10-12. Keeping with the Augusta theme, this would be your Amen Corner. The tenth, a winding downhill then uphill par 5 past a large sycamore on the right of the fairway, is a fun hole, with a blind tiered green and a number of small church-pew bunkers up the left side awaiting errant second shots. #11 is a testy, tight tee shot over water that you have to shape right to left to get a good look at the narrow, bunkered green. Then you face a really tight tee shot out of a chute of trees with a creek in front of the fairway. The hole is short so anything over the creek and not in the woods on either side is fine, though left is a better angle on this short dogleg. My typical play is somewhere near the fence along the left side. The most difficult hole to par is the sixteenth, a long dogleg right par 4 with a creek and pond below the elevated tee, culminating with a large green on an upslope. It’s a wide-open tee shot but the tendency is to get a tad greedy and try and sneak it past the few large trees on the corner of the dogleg.

The round culminates with the pretty 18th, a short but sneaky-hard par 4. The tee box is set in a stand of pines and it’s difficult to pick a target line with all the trees around the teeing area and beyond the fairway. The approach shot is difficult considering its modest length as the green is very narrow, and any off-line shots either direction will end-up in a bunker, a mulchy flower-bed or trees - so if you’re gonna miss be short or right, since the land slopes down towards the green and you might get a lucky kick out from the trees. Going left is just plain no good.

The rest of the course is perfectly decent: a good mix of short par 3s, some blind tee shots and changing elevations, the aforementioned flowers and shrubbery and decent conditioning for the price.

A basic 5.5.

* Countless minutes of Internet research have not revealed whether Enterprise designer Robert L. Elder is one and the same as Robert Lee Elder, the first black golfer to compete in the Masters, held at Augusta (of the Deep South). Some facts suggest it may indeed be the same person: Lee Elder, though born in Texas, married a woman from Washington, D.C., however, he apparently resides in (or has been to) Pompano Beach (which was the Washington Senators spring training site before they moved to Texas, the state that happens to be where Mr. Lee Elder was born, see what I’m saying, it all ties in); Robert L. Elder’s golf designing credits are fairly limited and relatively local – a course in southern Pennsylvania is the furthest from DC, so it’s possible Lee Elder dabbled in golf course design while still playing a modest schedule on the Senior Tour. However, somewhere in Lee Elder’s bio you would think it would simply mention that he designed a few golf courses. It mentions parents dying while young, dropping out of high school, caddying, playing a match with boxer Joe Louis, hustling, changing his clothes in the parking lot because the club didn’t allow blacks into the clubhouse, winning his first tournament to gain entry into Masters (which generated a lot of hate mail, gee, I’m shocked), and becoming the first black golfer to make the U.S. Ryder Cup team. But nothing about designing golf courses.

Tying this piece neatly together, Elder won the Nigerian Open in 1971, the year the Washington Senators moved to the Lone Star State and became the Texas Rangers, confusing an 11-yr old boy that eventually became me. In 1989, current el Presidente George W. Bush bought the Rangers from a Bush family friend and oilman, Eddie Chiles, the year dad became President. Continued feeding at the Bush family friend trough will lead to the Texas governorship and eventually to a catastrophic mind-numbing historically ineffectual 2-term Presidency, the repercusions of which will be felt for a very long time, or at least until I get my check from Nigeria.

In 2008, Barack Obama became the first black elected President, in no small part because of Mr. Lee Elder, the Jackie Robinson of golf and possibly the designer of Enterprise Golf Course.

Patuxent Greens

Year Opened: 1970

Architect: Russell Roberts/Buddy Loving

Web: www.patuxentgolf.com

Phone: (301) 776-5533

O you should viddy me now, O my brothers, shamefully shivering and shaking and quaking after a fretful bezdoomny and not so refreshing blackout, a real frightful strakh of restless and dinful zvook-filled spatchka, delirium-stained and soiled bedcoverings coiled around my ailing self. This dire circumstance of unwellness, however, isn’t so unexpected, O my brothers, now is it, given that my drunken pyahnitsa has reached a fortnight’s duration. The tick-tocker is like hammering rabbity in the face of hawk-like doom, the talons ready to stamp my passport at death’s frontier, but even my half-hearted attempts at snuffing it seem real pathetic-like, I mean as snuffing-it goes - isn’t the point of doing-oneself-in proper to accept a brief moment of discomfort and then eternal peace like with no…pain; not a monthlong of terrible twitching and nasty and not insignificant pains in the gulliver and guttiwots. This was nothing like that horrorshow picture “Leaving Las Vegas”, which I viddied at the sinny, where this real despondent like chelloveck snuffs it with the old whiskey but not before having some of the old in-out in–out with a zoloto-hearted devotchka of the night, a real like sympathetic sort, not whatsoever resembling the cold-hearted cunny leaving gloopy messages on my phone recording apparatus, some talk of dinner dalliance in the offing.

However, today would be like rather differently lived, the start of a new way, this is what the malenky goloss in my head bespoketh. What then did this portend, this talk of a new way?

But the bolshy more powerful voice was gentle encouraging and prodding my poorly feeling self to pour another swig of stale sourish beer into the dry and slimy-yahzicked opening of my gaping rot. Unfortunately, the desperate diminished pilsner provisions (to wit: two mere cans remained, well now it was but one..) in the barren tundra of the ice box meant, O brothers, that your ailing taleteller must avail himself of some more libation, this to quell the harsh punishments and like grievous retribution of great God and All His Holy Angels and Saints, who were arranging for a real all-mighty comeuppance against your faithful droog and woedraggled writer.

And it was clear to me what needed to be done. Clear as an unmuddied lake, as an azure sky of deepest summer. And I dropped to my knees, O my brothers, not in humble supplication but to scrabble about for various dribni coins strewn about the brudniy dirty kilim. I must admit that thoughts of passing off cent-pieces as ten-centers crossed my distressed malnourished mind, but I also recall yesterday’s misadventure, a real weepy and like tragic part of the story, when your faithful droog and long-suffering narrator was tolchicked real spiteful-like by the liquor shop bruise boys after me having a go at this coin-switch ruse for a second day in a row. But the sumny and honest truth, O my brothers and sisters, was that only meagerly and miserly cent-pennies were of avail in my wanton and wretched flat, and I’m not much for shop-krasting or purse-snatching and possessed little of value that I could place as collateral at the pawn shop, so I busied myself with rolling the last of the cent-pieces into the dime wrappers and trudged down to my automobile. And O my faithful friends, I had like a moment of dulcet heaven-sent inspiration as I fumbled with the klooch on the car lock, (an inspiration, no error, like an artist's encouraging Muse or when some sumna and grievesome missus hears or sees the ghostly yet beneficent apparition of Mary the Virgin, Jesus' mum) for tis then that I remembered the rear storage compartment of the car and most especially the golf bag lying therein. So as varied and scowling and reproachful-looking chellovecks scraped and brushed the brittle snow off their cars on the way to their drudgesome robotas, I knelt grovelling real pitiful-like beside my car and started to toss it for the odd shiny silvery speck. In my desperate and hasty and hurried state (for the withdrawal forces were storming the beach and erelong they’d be laying siege to my already long-suffering and overtaxed tick-tock ticker), I floundered shivering sprawled in the damp snow, prompting one kindly sort to ask if I was alright. And alright I was, O my droogs, right as rain, as it were, as I triumphantly pocketed the coins I’d recovered from my vehicle, scrambling up the stairs, mokry and frost-gnawed, paying little mind to the znak posted on my front door informing me that the State policia will be tossing me and my unhockable belongings out on the street erelong, making me a bezdomny homeless car-dwelling chelloveck.

I was able to get a brief day’s supply of booze and cancers, enough to get me through until afterlunch, and I had to be like real coy and watchful while driving in such a state as was mine, wanting as I did to avoid the stripey hole with its leering criminals and drooling prestoopniks ready to have their way with a luscious young malchick such as myself. So I drank quickly and with purpose, knowing (hoping) I was nearing the end of my time. But snuff it I did not, for I would not be here to tell what I have told.

This all took place a long time ago, almost a decade has passed, in fact, since I’d holed up in Laurel, MD to give the drinking life another shot. When I finally got myself taken to the ER, I asked the doc after he gave me the stethoscopal once-over, “what didst thou, on thy mind, have?” so he scribbled something on his clipboard and told me to quit drinking, like forever. So like clockwork (not orange), I began the lengthy road back to resurgence and recovery, a road that has had a few off-track mishaps but I’ve somehow been able to steer back (a bit wobbly, sure) to this new way.

It would be nice to mislead you and tell you that I chose Laurel because of its diversity (mostly it’s just plain old poor) or even that I’d taken an interest in following the ponies at historic Laurel Racetrack and would lose like a 100 lbs and fulfill my dreams of someday being a jockey and winning the Freakness or Angus Steaks or whatever, but the sad pathetic truth was that I’d fallen under the spell of a woman - a driven, type-A Julia Roberts look-alike with a profound streak of meanness and Me-ness. And so part of my recovery process has entailed avoiding all Julia Roberts movies, which really wasn't at all difficult, come to think of it.

What’s odd is that up until that time I’d had pretty pleasant memories of Laurel – some from computer classes I’d taken at one of those vocational IT institutes, but mostly at Patuxent Greens, which me and my boy discovered while we were still residing in Takoma Park. This golf course had a few things to recommend it back then: it was distinctly unlike anything else in our regular rotation: a flat, walkable piece of land with a bunch of ponds and lagoons. Also, it was close enough to Takoma Park to make it an easy jaunt, and not too burdensome on the wallet.

The club seems to be part of a small development but the housing is non-intrusive to the golfing experience. The white siding clubhouse is reminiscent of a yacht club, at least that’s what I, in my mind, imagine an inland yacht club might look like, knowing little as I do about boating in general and less so about the specific yacht club segment of the boating industry. So let's just stay with yacht club – perhaps its location overlooking the lagoon surrounding the 18th green helps foster this impression.

No need to arrive early since there’s no practice range but the bar/restaurant is a perfectly agreeable room with the requisite amenities, much as you’d expect at your typical yacht club, except without the brass-buttoned blue blazer with epaulets docksider set.

The first hole is a fairly scruffy S-shaped par 5, with nothing particularly to recommend it other than the challenging final approach to a small mounded green protected by a pair of bunkers fronting the putting surface. Patuxent Greens plays like a basic parkland layout until the various lagoons come into play – the 3rd hole is the first of many such holes: a short par 4 with water all the way up the right side and trees encroaching from the left. The sixth hole features a 75-yard deep waste bunker with a smattering of reeds jutting out, followed by probably the most attractive hole on the property – a lily-pond fronting the 150-yard par 3 with large tree limbs hanging over left of the green and a pair of bunkers in front of the single most dramatically sloping green. Things keep going strong on the dogleg right par 5 8th with a large tree getting in the way on your 2nd shot and then the front side closes nicely with the right-turning 9th, where you need to fit your tee shot in between the lagoons.

The key shots on the backside: the all-carry over agua par 3 eleventh, the lagoon which cuts across 50 yards short of the green on the otherwise non-descript par 5 14th and the club selection on the longish par 3 16th, which brings up some water issues long and right. And then we come to the 17th, by far the hardest hole on the course and also one of the least attractive. The tee shot is daunting – over a pond with marshy OB left and then a pond right of the green, which is tucked into a mucky lowland a bit left of the fairway. On a course which doesn’t get high marks for conditioning (the flat land and abundance of water give the whole place a swampy demeanor) the area in front of the 17th green is better suited for rice farming or mosquito breeding than it is for chipping.

The round ends with a fun shorty par 4, featuring a green with a few wispy birchsome trees jutting out into the lagoon (the green does the jutting, the trees - not so much) , so you’d better be on point with your approach or you’ll be hitting again.

Patuxent Greens was my first foray into the Myrtle Beach or Florida style of golf – very flat landscape with water as the primary obstacle and it’s a look I like when done well (Caledonia in North Myrtle or obviously Doral in Miami come to mind, but let’s be real, these are top-100 in-the-U.S.-type courses while Patuxent Greens is, well, not). That being said, it is still a pleasant place to play, even if the conditions are a little hinky. I have to think it’s about a 5.5.

1-3 Pretty Darn Poor. Bad layout, poor conditioning, few redeeming factors, crowded
4-5 Mediocre. Some redeeming qualities, a few decent holes
6-7 Decent A fun, challenging course that doesn’t awe or wow you
8-9 First-Rate Among the best in the region
10 Perfect The best golf experience imaginable

Obvious acknowledgments must be made to Anthony Burgess, who wrote "A Clockwork Orange" in 1963 and from whom I borrowed freely in spirit and context.