# Congressional Blue Course: A Course Profile

Source: https://thecourserankings.com/blog/congressional-blue-course-profile/

[The Course Rankings](/)

Course Profiles / Maryland


A golfer walking a fairway. Photo: PattayaPatrol, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Ken Venturi won the 1964 U.S. Open here in brutal heat, close to collapse, in one of the most retold finishes in American golf. Rory McIlroy won the 2011 U.S. Open here at 16 under par, a record, looking like he was playing a different course from the rest of the field. Same ground in Bethesda, 12 miles northwest of the U.S. Capitol. Two Opens, forty seven years apart, that between them explain Congressional Blue about as well as any profile can: it can humble a field and it can be taken apart by a great player in full flight, and which version shows up depends on how it is set up and how the weather treats it.

The club opened May 23, 1924, founded so members of Congress could meet business leaders, with five U.S. Presidents among its founding life members and an original 18 by Devereux Emmet. Robert Trent Jones Sr. split the Emmet routing in 1957, creating the Blue from nine Emmet holes and a new nine. For most of its life, then, Congressional Blue was a layered course, championship famous and architecturally negotiated, the kind of place where every generation had moved a bunker or softened a green and the whole was less than the sum of its history.

## The Andrew Green transformation

That changed, decisively. Andrew Green's transformation closed the course for all of 2020, removed trees, widened fairways, rebuilt the greens and added nearly 50 acres of natural areas, and it won Golf Digest's Best Transformation in 2021. The rankings followed the work. Congressional Blue stands at No. 67 in Golf Digest's 100 Greatest in 2025-26, up from No. 91, and No. 1 in Maryland. A jump of 24 places for a course that had been famous for a century is not rankings noise. It is what happens when a club gives a talented architect the whole course, a full year, and permission to remove the trees everyone assumed were untouchable.

Wider fairways at a U.S. Open course can sound like surrender. Here it was the opposite. Opening up the playing corridors restored angles, and angles are what make a long course interesting instead of merely long. The natural areas, nearly 50 acres of them, gave the course a texture its old wall to wall turf never had.

The championship record around the transformation is deep either way: U.S. Opens in 1964, 1997 and 2011, a PGA Championship in 1976, a U.S. Senior Open in 1995, and the KPMG Women's PGA in 2022. The future listings are deeper still, with a PGA Championship in 2030 and a Ryder Cup in 2037 on the championship calendar. Clubs do not get awarded a Ryder Cup on history alone. They get it when the game's institutions believe the current course can carry the current game.

We rank it first in [the best golf courses in Bethesda](/blog/the-best-golf-courses-in-bethesda-md/) and at the top of [the 5 best golf courses in Maryland](/blog/the-5-best-golf-courses-in-maryland/), and for once the local verdict and the national one agree.

## Access and the concession

It is a private club in Bethesda, in Montgomery County, and access runs through membership and guests, full stop. Costs belong in the labeled estimate tier, and the practical truth is that Washington's corporate and political membership market puts this beyond any casual calculation anyway.

The concession is that a transformation this celebrated sets a trap. Congressional now has to live as both a members' course and a future Ryder Cup venue, and those two jobs pull in opposite directions, one toward playable width and happy members, the other toward the kind of setup that makes professionals sweat on television. Green gave it the width and the bones to try to do both. Whether any course can actually do both, across the 2030s, is the open question the next decade here will answer.

For a member, the daily version of that argument is simpler. A wider, firmer, more open Blue Course is a better walk and a better test than the narrow, tree choked version that championship golf had slowly produced here, and the 24 place climb in the national ranking is just the outside world noticing what the membership had already figured out in 2021.

Five presidents helped found it, Venturi survived it, McIlroy dismantled it, and Green rebuilt it. Congressional Blue has had more lives than most courses get. The current one is the best argument it has ever made.

**Reader responses are open.** Please cite a specific hole, a price, or a round you have played.