Eisenhower

Year Opened: 1969

Architect: Ed Ault

Web: www.eisenhowergolf.com

Phone: (410) 571-0973


It’s 5:40am on a morning in March and once again I am scraping snow and ice off the Corolla. It’s déjà vu all over again. Except it’s different. No red fox slyly meandering along in search of a humble repast, but there’s most likely no fox-worthy food to be had, lest this be a vinyl-siding eating creature…OK, I give…my conscience doth gnaw at me, the guilt and remembering which lie was tied to which untruth and… so I’ve gotta come clean - no red fox to be seen the last time, neither. The entire construct was essentially what is referred to in the industry as writer’s embellishment. Scholarly analysis, after much debate and round-the-clock ad-hoc committee symposia, may well deem it an example of an unreliable narrator. In layman’s terms - a big fat lie. Whatever. (I do so occasionally like to show off my command of current English slang)

In fact none of it was true. I didn’t scrape off the ice, I didn’t peruse the newspaper, I most certainly didn’t man up and head for the job, I didn’t daydream about golf, and I didn’t get hit by a sheet of ice (and if I had, the offending vehicle would not have had an NRA bumper sticker but a license plate more along the lines of MOMMYX3). What did happen was this: I got up for my morning smoke, writhing this way and that away and back again to light the cigarette in the swirling wind, took one sweeping glance at my neighbors industriously scraping away the ice off their cars (no, they weren’t sleeping… please, these are actual grown-ups -- with careers and mortgages and power sanders and life insurance and matching patio sets), texted my boss that I wasn’t coming in (something about a few ducks frozen stuck to my driveway..and yes of course I tried shooing them away with some hoisin sauce and a scallion brush, but even trapped in ice these were fierce fighting ducks and not your timorous climb-in-the-roasting pan and baste-me breed of duck) and headed back upstairs to idle away some time. Perhaps the only remotely verifiable truthful item was the Peruvian chicken emporium, but even that’s a few weeks from fruition since usurping the space of my now-defunct (and seemingly under-frequented) neighborhood Starbucks (what, so now I have to go to the other end of the strip mall for my venti coffee. Life is simply just not fair. And it’s not short.)

But this time I’m at work for real, for real,yo – yep flossin the slang-know again - well I am in my office (technically it’s a storeroom, but there is a desk and a phone and perhaps a stapler), not exactly working but checking out some blogs, some YouTube and last night’s NBA box scores while tweaking my fantasy line-ups and it does seem abnormally slow for the hotel today because of the snow, so my day is basically done and done. Another hard day of nothing much at all.

Is this a golf blog or the journal of an unrelentingly non-eventful existence?

So this golf course here, I have hardly any recollection of playing here. And no, oh droll ones, not because I was in some inebriated blackout state of mind. Certainly Aerosmith circa 1977. And 1978. And some other time, I forget which when…oh yeah, the 80’s.

I’ve been to Eisenhower twice and it’s really pretty astonishing that I have little to no memory of the venue. I do, however, recall who I was playing with last time out. There was my boy, of course. I also seem to recollect some lanky older gent who had come along with this lady who’s been patiently wooing my boy’s mom in some quasi-amorous fashion for the past few decades, but without much good fortune, no matter how much of the ol’ vino she’s plied her with over the years. OK, I’m getting an image of the tall gent now; I seem to remember him never hitting a wood, and I mean never, like he played the course in these 125 yard increments. The little lesbian lady, conversely, almost always hit a wood.

And yet the golf course itself refuses to surface in my memory stew. I’ve still got nothing and close to two years have passed since I began this particular blog bit and I’m struggling to conjure up the golf course (from many years ago) and also my particular state of mind two years ago and what I thought and felt then...

...this while I can’t for certainty recall if I took my happy pill this morning and most assuredly can’t tell you which re-run of which crime/law show that I’d already seen I re-visited last night – I just know I’m not crazy about not having dreams to remember.

Funny, I don’t feel happy though I’m not despondent, either, just my standard flat line emotional numbness. I guess another pill wouldn’t hurt. What’s the worst that can happen – a fleeting wisp of euphoria?

I’m thinking of borrowing a page from the repertoire of my boy’s late sister, who had this uncanny flair for offering up her opinion – heartfelt, poignant, insightful - of movies she had never seen. Much like commentary features you get with DVDs these days – she would talk you through some pivotal scenes, reveal the conflicted relationship between the director and the lead actor, discuss alternate endings the scriptwriter envisioned – sure I know most of this she was getting from reading reviews in The New Yorker, The Village Voice and the NY Times, but still…you’d walk out of the cinaplex having actually seen the film, you’d give her a call, told her you’d just seen such and such and she’d start casually mentioning an aspect of the movie you might have missed, calling your attention to a curious choice the director made in some scene, citing an illusory allusion to some recent trend in cinematic theory - a subject you studied in college (at least in theory), all this while she was waitressing and sleeping off a hangover until her next shift… meanwhile all you’d have to offer in way of insight was you thought Jennifer Tilly was kind of hot. Sometimes I think her memory of films she’d pretended to see was almost as vivid as that of films she had seen and half-forgotten. One of the many things I miss with her passing.

But I can’t just make up a critique of a golf course I disremember, can I? But why not, I ask? I mean who’s reading this besides my boy and a family that’s tippy-toeing on eggshells (we’d better take the occasional peak at his blog and at least feign some kind of encouraging feedback or he might just submerge himself in his room with his boxed sets of Arrested Development, Curb Your Enthusiasm and The Wire, go off the deep end again and never come up for air. Thank god he still smokes, at least that gets him out of the house a few dozen times a day…) I mean, I make a claim that Tiger Woods isn’t cool and I get no response. Clearly my substantive and cohesive logic was difficult to penetrate and countermand, but in these here pages I stated that the best golfer ever, who won the U.S. Open on a broken leg(!!), is not cool. But winning Grand Slams isn’t enough so he goes and does this wedge juggling bit, behind his back, between his legs, catching the ball with his club and then lining a double to the gap but you want to know what I think is the most impressive thing Tiger does? He fucking stops his downswing when a camera clicks. That is insane. 120+ mph of coiled torque and he just slams on the brakes. I can’t stop myself on a 4 mph putter stroke when a bug lands on my ball. Speaking of Tiger, I cracked up at the commercial last week in honor of his return from injury – the one where two of the PGA’s nerdiest straight-arrows, Stewart Cink and Justin Leonard, along with brash bad boy Anthony Kim and one-hit wonder, Masters champion Trevor Immelman, are basking in the high life with Tiger gone. Seeing Justin Leonard smoking a stogie poolside with bikini babes replenishing his drinks like he’s Tony Montana just made me smile.

Clearly this was written before the break-up of Tiger’s marriage due to some serial straying outside the wedding bed for carnal fulfillment – this with a slew of cocktail waitresses, diner hostesses and porn starlets. Again, not cool. Tawdry, most assuredly. Clearly he’s a different breed of big cat – he’s a Cheetah (voiced with a Boston accent) and not a Tiger.

One thing in my favor as far as concocting a tenuous review is that Ed Ault, golf course architect unextraordinaire, designed Eisenhower, so I’m fairly certain I can fudge this by a mix & match connect the dots plug and play from the Aultian canon.

So…I turned fifty over the weekend almost 2 years ago. Or as the kids say, fiddy. In order to make the celebration of this distinct anniversary as painless as possible for my friends and family, I opted for the quietude of an NHL hockey game vs. the requisite hullabaloo of a surprise party. Let it be noted that this was not my first choice. Per usual, I thought not of myself but others. As always, my first thought was what would make the most sense for the ailing economy so using an admittedly rudimentary blueprint involving opportunity cost, outsourcing, supply chain, soft currency, leverage, laissez-faire, in-sourcing (cutting your own lawn, changing your oil) my first choice, which unfortunately became obvious after the fact, would have been this summer’s Billy Joel/Elton Joel concert at the new downtown ballpark. Oh this is can't miss stuff right here - a bunch of middle-aged JAPs, their hangdog husbands who recently got nailed trying to hook-up on Facebook with girls they used to bang in college, obviously a few drag queens camping it up and me, in my ass-less chaps. You're a Rocket Man and you're a Piano Man, oh yes you are.

Have you been to a sporting event recently? Ever since tickets went to triple-digits for a decent seat I’ve pretty much stopped going. Oh yeah, and when they cancelled the World Series. That didn’t help. Or when my boy and I went to a Wizards game a few years back and watched these multi-millionaires mailing it in, not even faking breaking a sweat. Now I’m not what you’d call a tireless worker – in that parable of the gallivanting grasshopper and the drudgesome toiling ant, Aesop overlooked my slothful self hibernating off in the story’s corner, not forward-thinking enough to realize work’s benefits and too dejected to gallivant – and I look like a rock-hauling Pyramid-building slave compared to the effort these cats put out. Even the trash-talking was turrible.

After checking out the hockey game, played by two of your better pro teams, I cannot complain about the player’s efforts. They seemed to care. It’s just that I didn’t. I mean I pretended to care; I even wanted to care, just to feel like part of something bigger than me, to high-five strangers when Ovechkin scored, to groan when a ticky-tack penalty was called on the home team. But in the end, the Caps lost and it was like, OK, so what. It didn’t even come close to the emotional high I got after posting the top score on the sit-down Asteroids machine back in my college tavern, a feat which, sadly or not, rates kinda high in the pantheon of my life’s achievements.

What I didn’t expect was the buzzing in my ears like I’d just seen the Ramones in somebody’s one-car garage with a high-speed monster truck chase during a 5-alarm fire. It’s 2-1/2 hours of strobes and heavy metal, kids clacking Thunderstix, T-shirts firing out of rocket launchers, perpetual dance contests, PA announcers clamoring to make more NOISE (oh yeah, like that’s possible) and video screens around the arena updating and reloading commercials every 15 seconds. And then you got the dude behind us with the Viking horn. Man am I old.

Alright, let me muster some clever observation about this track. I sort of remember it’s out towards Annapolis, and there’s a sprawling shopping mall off the exit, then it’s a quick jog past a redneck roadhouse and the course is on the left. The drive curves up the hill, revealing a par 3 on the right and then the lot and the pedestrian clubhouse. Perfectly OK to get you in the mood to play an unmemorable round of golf. OK, let’s see if I can’t just use GoogleEarth to jog my memory – I mean I knew there were going to be mental adjustments with this sobriety deal but this is absurd. The whole point of me is that I can remember not only golf holes but particular shots me or my boys have hit on said holes years down the line. It’s a weird skill, granted, considering I have to replay voice mail messages like 3 times to jot down the phone number (partly because I think I’m experiencing some sort of age-related hearing loss deal – I would’ve welcomed a complete loss of hearing during the hockey cacophony - but its mostly that I just don’t really care about the message – usually it’s job-related or something essentially having little or nothing to do with, well…me). And I’m just about the worst when it comes to remembering punch lines to jokes. But something happened out there at Eisenhower and I’m more than a little suspicious that the tall gent and the little lesbian lady were up to something. Something so heinous that I mentally had to block out the entire experience, like Tommy, the Pinball Wizard. More likely I was suffering grievously from some post-pragmatic dress syndrome – like maybe my sweater-vest didn’t coordinate with the rest of my ensemble. Being the dapper dandy that I am, it’s completely possible that my already shaky mental state was precipitating a long-overdue stay at the nervous hospital… OK, OK, time to conjure up something and move on. See me. Feel me.

Compared to other courses of the municipal/county sort, Eisenhower has a better than expected practice facility. And by better than expected, let’s be clear – my expectations were these: I brought the Astroturf putting green along, just in case. A secluded driving range is set beyond a hedge past the putting green and while you do need to pony up for range balls, the starting fee is reasonable so it’s not that big a deal.

Poor drainage affects the conditioning of this layout, which can get quite sloppy. It is, however, not without its charms, like for instance, some of the greens occasionally have gasoline marks left from a leaky mower. A hilly parkland course, the distinguishing feature is the seven-acre lake on the backside.


This shouldn’t be a golf course I can unabashedly endorse but I do find some of the track, such as the opening stretch on the back side, somewhat engaging. The front side is hilly with some fairly strong par 4s, featuring blind tee shots, a meandering creek and yes, shocking but true for an Ed Ault layout, a couple of prominent fairway bunkers on the 3rd and 4th holes. The afore-mentioned lake makes an appearance early on the back nine but it’s not much of a factor, by which I mean, you don’t have to cross it, except for partially on your second shot on the short easy par 5 12th. The next hole, a long par 3 with water long and right and a devilishly sloping green, will make you think about club selection depending on the pin placement. Did I just use the phrase “devilishly sloping” to describe an Ed Ault green? I think I’d better call my sponsor.

Eighteen is another strongish par 4 uphill to a green protected by trees and a few bunkers. At least that’s what it looks like from the Google satellite, but now that I have GoogleEarth going I think I’ll wrap this up and check out Stewart Cink’s compound. I couldn’t find it but I did manage to stumble onto Boo Weekley’s crib – though I reckon John Daly’s got a time-share.




I guess it’s about a 3.5, maybe a 4. The par 4s have some heft, there are a couple of short par 5s to help your score, a few adequate par 3s and there you have it, a basic golf course. It’s a decent place to chop it around if you are in the mood for cheap and live really really nearby, but let’s be clear, it’s simply unrememberable. I realize if you’ve played close to a thousand rounds of golf some just aren’t going leave an impression. You think Justin Leonard remembers every Heather, Amber and Tiffani that’s stalking him in the hotel lobby bar as he leaves a trail of broken hearts around the country.

Falls Road

Year Opened: 1961

Architect: Ed Ault

Web: www.montgomerycountygolf.com/FR_home.html

Phone: (301) 299-5156

Considering its setting in the midst of some of the wealthiest folks in the country, there used to be an almost in-your-face lowbrow feel to this course: the corrugated roof “pro shop”, the muddy path heading to the equipment shed, the vacant snack bar attached to the pro shop. We would come here quite a bit in the early 90s, mostly because…I guess we were masochists – certainly not because the golf course was hard (it most definitely wasn’t) but due to the aggravatingly slow pace of play. Our spirits (never exactly in a state of grace) would plummet when we’d find ourselves behind a gaggle of visor-wearing soccer moms (perhaps they were moms of soccer moms or wanna-be soccer moms or soccer momdom had passed them by – all I know is they drove mini-vans, thought Reagan was a genial populist bloke and spent more time comparing foyers and granite counter-tops than actually playing golf). Sometimes we’d really get lucky and the bratty kids would join mom in the fun. Yikes. It reminded me of an Ionesco play – repetitive, absurd and too fucking long. They’d hit off the tee and then all four would slowly saunter to the first ball, gather round, maybe balance their checkbook or participate in a ten-minute panel discussion on that week's episode of "Desperate Housewives", watch their partner hit a 20 yard grounder, spend a minute or two consoling her and then off the four would go to the next ball, though a mulligan per hole was certainly an almost mandatory part of the drill.

This used to be a mediocre offering. A big hilly field with some tees, some trees and some flags. Too many hacks, too slow, very little to look forward to, though admittedly there were a few holes on the backside that warranted a look-see.

Now then, fast forward 15 years. I’d heard that there had been significant upgrades in the course and despite my better judgment, I decided to check it out. And you know what, improvements had been made. The clubhouse is sunny, airy and pleasant and they even offer micro-brewed beer – great, where was that gimmick back when me and my boy would be detoxing while waiting to get off?

The entire front side has been re-routed and decorative wheat grasses have been planted, and while the changes have definitely enhanced the playability and aesthetics, pace of play remains a problem. When I returned, there was a dearth of soccer moms (I guess the Container Store was running a sale) but you still had the hack factor and the grasses lining the first and second holes were prime searching-for-lost-balls real estate. Oh, and they will search, like clueless kids at a scavenger hunt. The original Ed Ault routing started off where the current driving range is located and at least had a respectable green site at the top of the hill, followed by a featureless par 5 and then back to back drive-and-pitch 285-yard par 4s on the northern edge of the property. Ault’s son’s firm, Ault & Clark, did a respectable job of altering the routing – blowing up the two weak par 4 shorties and replacing them with an OK 3-par (#3) and the best hole on the front side – the serpentine par 5 fourth, which utilizes the rolling topography adeptly and features a large oak tree which poses some problems for the big boppers who decide to have a go at the green in two. The rest of us can pop it over a gully to the fairway right of the tree, leaving a pretty testy approach to the recessed green well below the fairway. Mostly what Ed’s boy has done is bring some fairway bunkering into the mix, a concept the old man just wasn’t comfortable with.

The hardest hole is unquestionably the twelfth, a narrow long par 4 with a substantially raised green sloping from a mound on the right. As you stand on the tee, on your left you see some seriously hooked-up property, with swimming pools, tennis courts, gazebos, like that. 13 through the retooled 18th are the strength of the course, but again, by this time you’ve been out there 5 hours, tired of yet again looking at the visored crew reloading on the tee after a weak slice grounder into the woods. There’s a lake on the short par 5 sixteenth which requires a minimal carry of the tee with some new fairway bunkers planted into the hillside left but beyond that there isn’t much to say, though the completely new finishing hole utilizes fairway cross- bunkering in a strategic thoughtful manner, something unseen back in Ed Ault’s day – well, it was seen, just not by him or his obvious mentoring influence, Robert Trent Jones.

It used to be a 2.5 but after the renovations it’s about like Needwood – a 4.5.

Poolesville

Year Opened: 1959

Architect: Edmund B. Ault

Phone: (301) 428-8143

Web: www.montgomerycountygolf.com/PV_home.html

Me and my boy had ourselves an off day so he suggested a mini-road trip out to Poolesville. I could see by his packing a cooler with some cold ones and the remnants of last night’s Absolut (c’mon, there’s like a jigger or two left – let’s just kill that and stop off for another fifth) that he wasn’t kidding around about the distance out there. This course is off in the western lands of Montgomery County, about 45 minutes from the Beltway, closer to Leesburg, Virginia than it is to Rockville. The drive down River Road is pleasant enough -- past vaunted Congressional Country Club and the much-panned TPC at Avenel (to the point that they’re basically blowing it up and rebuilding it) and the mansions of Potomac and then the area becomes distinctly rural as you approach Poolesville. When I come out here I get the sense of a club, not exactly deal-making corporate-raider captain-of-industry Macallan single-malt scotch and Cohiba Cubans but pick-up truck huntin’ ‘n’ fishin’ git ‘er done BBQ and beer. It always amazes me that not even an hour outside the Nation’s Capital you feel like you could be in Appalachia: old washing machines, rusted car-casses and heaps of old tires strewn about on the dusty front lawn, all kinds of dilapidated sheds and ragamuffin kids and three-legged hound dawgs scrabbling about on the property. It’s eerie. To me, anyway. But Poolesville itself has a decent salt-of-the-earth feel, kind of a “Cheers” golf course, with lots of regulars, like a neighborhood bar. My boy, back in the bad old days, used to come here because of the full-service bar; in fact it wasn’t a problem waiting for the first tee because you could get yourself liquored-up but quick at the friendly, though obviously rednecky clubhouse bar.

What practice? Gimme an Absolut and a Bud and a dog and it’s all good. Of course we haven’t been back since we got the booze monkey of our backs; it might just be a good idea to stay away.

What I remember from this course, and I must have played it about ten times or so back in the early 90’s, is that it played long. Of course when you ground it off the tee, miniature golf seems long. The land is flat and there are some trees lining the fairways, but sparsely. There’s lots of action playing from neighboring fairways. Back in the days of the Concorde, about 3 pm or so, you could check out (and hear) this space-age plane landing across the river at Dulles Airport. Other than that, it’s a pretty laid-back place.

After spending an hour in the clubhouse bar getting loose and limber, as it were, the idea of teeing off in front of a line of carts can be humbling. Heck, just standing without weaving and wobbling was a trick. The first hole is a dogleg right over a small creek and a stand of trees on the right. You can go over the trees without a problem with a big left to right ball. This is a wide-open hole on a wide-open course.

Hardest hole: the second hole is a real 600-yard par 5, straight –ahead, no-nonsense, though the green has a bit of bunkering. After that it’s all a bit blurry. There is a decent-length par 3 over water, hole #8, that used to create all kinds of difficulties for me. Then hole 11 was a nice dogleg right par 5 with a pond on the right (which is definitely in play, especially if you try to cut the corner on the dogleg), a bucolic stand of trees beyond the pond and then a creek crossing in front of a nice uphill green. Hole 16 is a rolling par 4 with a cornfield left and the pond right, which needs to be avoided from tee to green. It’s a pretty hole. It helps that the pond has a natural look and is tree-lined and filled with geese sauntering in the water. I’m perfectly fine with geese in the water (no really, I am), it’s when they take their business out on the golf course that we’ve got some problems. I thought we had a deal with the geese – we don’t go in the water and they don’t shit on the greens, though I sort of violated that unspoken pact when I flung some recalcitrant club into the lake, definitely the first time I’d worked that particular cliché of golf frustration.

I guess I must’ve been really out of sorts when I wrote the Northwest Park review because in retrospect it’s hard to imagine I didn’t mention the name of the architect, Ed Ault, the John Grisham of local golf course architects (sure you’ll turn the page but it won’t exactly nourish your soul), whose bland, monotonous handiwork is visible throughout the DC area. Anyways, he designed this one, too. You can always tell you’re playing an Ed Ault course when you step on the tee and find exactly nothing exhilarating about the experience. His greens are typically large without a hint of undulation, protected by a bunker left and a bunker right. Fortunately, his son, Brian Ault, teamed with Tom Clark, has created some rather enjoyable thought-provoking courses over the last dozen years or so.

Like I’ve said, I haven’t been back here in years, and with the recent golf course development in Maryland, I doubt I will return. It’s too far out of the way with too little to intrigue. And if I’m going to fall off the wagon, I’d rather it be somewhere other than Poolesville. Still, it has its place. If nothing else, the folks that live out there seem to enjoy it quite a bit and that’s fine by me. Another 4.