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.

Pohick Bay

Year Opened: 1982

Architect: George Cobb

Web: www.nvrpa.org/parks/pohickbaygolf/?pg=golfcourse.html

Phone: (703) 339-8585


I first ventured here with the Dawgs, my boy’s old golfing crew, back in my formative golf years. They reminisced and joked around while I sat quietly and pensively over on a picnic bench, trying to level out after getting my drink on the night before. One dude, who had a country club background growing up, had a sweet smooth swing, clearly polished by substantial time spent with his club pro. What he didn’t have is a complete set of clubs. I don’t remember the details, if he’d come in out of town or what; what I do remember is that as a fellow southpaw he used my clubs – and lemme tell you, they were a little off-put being hit in the sweet spot so often. So mostly I remember kinda being this dude’s caddie.

Pohick Bay’s terrain is heavily forested (it’s in a regional park along the Potomac River near Lorton) and fairly hilly. Play moves along in a reasonable manner once you get going since there are no fairway bunkers at all and no water hazards until late on the back nine.

George Cobb, a fairly prolific course designer in the Southeast US, has a pretty cool accomplishment on his epitaph – he teamed with Clifford Roberts (co-founder of Augusta National with Bobby Jones) to build the charming par-3 course in 1959, site of the well-known par 3 tourney the Wednesday before the Masters. And how do I know it’s charming? Well, actually, truth be told, because I played it. Now you wouldn’t think , what little you know of me, that I’d be the sort of fellow who hobnobs with corporate honchos or the United States power elite (though I do know someone who recently saw Jane Curtin on the streets of NY), and back in the early 80s I attached a lapel microphone to Loni Anderson’s dress strap (that was a bit of a show) and I was once in the urinal adjacent to Dean Martin, who was slurring “Everybody Loves Somebody Sometimes”…oh yeah, and Dennis Eckersley once gave me the snub at an airport car rental joint. I thought as a fellow recovering alcoholic we’d find more of a connection, maybe share our thoughts on the 2nd Step. What a dick. I should’ve done the Kirk Gibson one-handed limp-off home-run imitation off Eckersley in the car rental lobby - that would’ve showed him. So I had to be honest with myself, I didn’t move in the social circles of Augusta-types. I smoked a lot so maybe I could work that admittedly distant connection with the Southern plantation Big Tobacco tycoons but I couldn’t quite visualize the way from buying cigarettes at 7-11 to garnering a seat at the Philip Morris boardroom. So let’s see, I’d never broken 85 so I probably wasn’t going to play my way into Augusta. And I didn’t(don't) know anyone. Augusta doesn’t allow women so I couldn’t even use the Ukrainian gigolo kept-man angle as an unrealistic possibility (I can only imagine the nightmarish dames that would go to Augusta if they could – think Anne Coulter or the Julia Roberts character in “Charlie Wilson’s War” (to quote Anthony Lane, film critic from The New Yorker: “the pro-Pakistani Texan hostess (how many of those do you know?)”), or the Donald in drag, sporting a sundress). Plus I’m not exactly gigolo material – I haven’t done more than a couple dozen sit-ups in a decade’s time (I'm more of a Chairmaster work-out devotee), I’m bald and sort of scowly-jowly, not into navy blue blazers at all, I don’t make a great whiskey sour and I most certainly can’t quote Scripture. So it looked like I’d have to go the servile routine – put all that humiliating hotel experience to use. Alright then. I could caddy, no? Wrong again. The Southern crackers that run Augusta use only black caddies – “Boy, hand me the 5-iron and hold dis here ceegar” “Yessum, boss”. Else what could I do? Bingo. I would master the art of the pimento- cheese sandwich and that would be my ticket into Augusta. Bam! And you know what? They didn’t take long to master. I loaded up my pimento cheese mix, a jar of mayo, a few loaves of white bread and I started the long trek to Augusta, Georgia. Outside the club I set-up shop, putting to work all my marketing acumen: I opened up the rear of the hatchback, put on some Charlie Daniels CDs with the Confederate flag fluttering haughtily off the radio antenna, and made up a cardboard sign, “Klan Special: Hoods Bleached & Ironed with Purchase of 3 Sandwiches”. Guess what? I didn’t get even a nibble. Oh, the New Tolerant South. Former Masters champion Fuzzy Zoeller, in his trademark aviator shades, did slow down as he passed, merrily whistling "Dixie".

OK, ok, so I never played the par-3 course. But I read somewhere that it’s quite charming.

So not surprisingly, Pohick features a strong set of par 3s, especially the long uphill fifth and the lakeside downhill 15th. While the tee shots are fairly straightforward, Pohick gets some marks for its greens, which are decidedly more interesting than the run-of-mill fare you find at other munis, with lots of contouring, swales and distinct tiers. About half of the holes here are doglegs so even though the tee shots don’t have much going on, you’ll need to at least reach the corner of the dogleg so you’ll have a clear look at the well-bunkered putting surfaces.

Even though they are out of character with the rest of the course, the 13th through 15th, which wrap around and over a central lake, offer the most thrills (and possibilities for some big scores), especially the par 5 thirteenth, where the lake needs to be carried on your second shot to have a short approach to the tricky uphill angled green. The 14th is a semi-blind lay-up short of the water, followed by a short-iron approach over the lake to a green tucked into the hillside.

As I made my way around with the country club dude, I found out that the 3-iron (which I had heretofore used pretty much exclusively as a punch out club from under tree limbs) could indeed be hit properly with a real golf swing. In fact all of my clubs could be hit with a real golf swing. And here I thought it was the clubs. I guess it was the old golf adage, it’s not the arrows, it’s the Indian. I mean Native American. No, hell with it, I'm sticking with Indian. What, no good? Ok, fine, how about it's not the chopsticks, it's the Chinaman? Also no good? Damn. Well, I'm kinda stuck here, I've gotta tell you. Anyhoo, as far as the 3-iron goes, it and its long-iron kinfolk were on the verge of extinction - thankfully the boys in the lab were hunkered down and drawing up the plans for the prototype hybrid-iron, 21st century panacea of the weekend golfer.

As far as Pohick Bay goes, it’s a perfectly adequate municipal track, but its location for us Maryland golfers (you had to deal with the absurd traffic from the 8-year Mixing Bowl project in Springfield) makes it a less than desirable destination. In fact, I have returned here exactly once – it was definitely a casualty of the proliferation of course-building in the mid-to-late 90s.

I’ll give it a solid 5.5.