Investigators examine century-old conspiracy involving sand traps hiding in plain sight
WASHINGTON, D.C. – President Donald Trump has become the central figure in a remarkable Washington mystery involving a 106-year-old golf course that apparently existed for more than a century without every member of the metropolitan press fully appreciating its presence.
East Potomac Golf Links Investigation Begins With a Geography Problem
The investigation began after public discussion of the president’s East Potomac renovation proposal produced a curious distinction between a park containing a golf course and a golf course contained within a park.
Federal investigators looking into the puzzle would have to deal with several disturbing facts. There are fairways. There are putting greens. There are sand traps. There are people carrying golf clubs, often wearing shorts inappropriate for their age, income or understanding of their own knees.
Most suspiciously, the property is called East Potomac Golf Links.
National Park Service Records Show the Course Opened in 1920
The original course opened in 1920. Its history is documented by the National Park Service, which also records the role Washington’s public golf courses played in the struggle against racial segregation, including a 1941 push to desegregate the city’s public courses.
The National Park Service description of East Potomac Park Golf Course identifies the property as a public golf course, which suggests that at least one federal agency had the information needed to solve the mystery without appointing a special prosecutor. The Cultural Landscape Foundation adds that the park sits on the National Register of Historic Places and that the course was laid out by architect Walter Travis between 1917 and 1923, which is an unusual amount of paperwork for something a person could supposedly miss from the sidewalk.
Nevertheless, Washington’s political atmosphere has made a simple geographical fact considerably more complicated.
The Word “Park” Does a Lot of Heavy Lifting in Washington
The first investigative difficulty concerns the word park.
In ordinary American usage, a park may contain many things, including playgrounds, football fields, baseball diamonds, tennis courts, swimming pools and occasionally a man sleeping beneath a newspaper. In Washington political journalism, the word works overtime. It sets an emotional scene, suggests an environmental controversy and gives readers a picture of a beloved green landscape before they reach the inconvenient detail that half the people in it are trying to hit small white balls into holes.
Marguerite Teasdale, a retired schoolteacher who has walked the Ohio Drive loop most mornings since 1994, said she has never once mistaken the park for a forest. “There’s a man out there with a pull cart and a thermos,” Teasdale said. “He’s not hiking.”
Why Trump’s Championship-Course Plan Is Hard to Investigate
The second difficulty concerns the meaning of renovation.
Trump has proposed turning the existing course into a championship-level facility built for major tournaments. He has called the course “virtually unplayable,” according to Reuters, and the president argues that the property needs substantial work, including attention to aging infrastructure and a deteriorating seawall. Opponents point out that a redesign on that scale could change the course’s traditionally affordable character and take over land that cyclists, runners and other park visitors currently use.
Those competing claims are concrete enough to investigate. But concrete questions are notoriously troublesome, because they can eventually produce concrete answers. Someone might establish the proposed green fees. Someone else might work out which paths stay open. A third person might calculate what it costs to keep the place public while upgrading it.
That sort of reporting is dangerous to a successful Washington controversy because it risks producing something close to an informed debate.
How Eight Interviews Become “An Entire City Is Furious”
An easier method is to interview a collection of unhappy residents and present them as evidence that Washington has spoken. Under this method, public opinion works a lot like golf itself: the fewer people involved, the easier it is to keep score.
A reporter can interview four golfers who dislike the proposal, three cyclists who fear losing a favorite route and one man who objects to anything involving Trump. The result is eight interviews, followed by the customary declaration that an entire city is furious.
If the reporter interviews one more person who disagrees, things get complicated, because there may now be two sides. That could require another paragraph. Possibly even a second headline.
Tree Removal and the Federal Court Fight Over East Potomac
The East Potomac debate also raises a serious environmental question. Hundreds of trees have already come down, and federal litigation has challenged the administration’s handling of that work. The Associated Press reported that U.S. District Judge Ana Reyes ordered a halt to tree cutting through October 26 and required three business days’ written notice before any irreparable change to the course.
The trees are real. The legal dispute is real. Concerns about historic recreational facilities are real. None of that requires anyone to forget that the golf course has been there for generations.
The Preliminary Finding: A Golf Course Hiding as a Golf Course
By late afternoon, investigators working the case would likely reach a stunning preliminary conclusion: the golf course was hiding in plain sight because it was a golf course.
Its camouflage consisted of grass, bunkers, flags, golf carts and thousands of golfers.
The investigation’s greatest remaining challenge would be working out how journalists managed to find eight people who disliked the renovation without finding the property’s history.
Trump could offer to provide directions, aerial photographs and a golf cart. In Washington, that would probably be read as an attempt to interfere with the investigation.
Five Humorous Observations
- They’re launching a federal investigation into how a golf course got into a park. I’ve lost a whole Costco and found it in under ten minutes. It was in the Costco.
- The golf course has a clubhouse, a driving range and eighteen flags. That’s not a mystery. That’s a golf course announcing itself, like a guy at a party with his name on a shirt.
- Eight people got interviewed and it’s an “entire city is furious.” I got eight people to agree on a restaurant once. We ate at Applebee’s and nobody ever mentioned it again.
- Golfers wear shorts that say “I have not seen my knees since the Clinton administration.” And the knees are there. They’re right there. They’ve been there the whole time, just like the golf course.
- The word “park” makes everybody picture a meadow with a deer in it. Meanwhile it’s a guy named Gary in a visor yelling “fore” at a seagull. That’s the park. That’s always been the park.
Editorial disclaimer: The golf course and the associated legal and public-access disputes are real. The political characters, bureaucratic adventures and comic dialogue are satirical treatments of those events, not reports of actual statements or proceedings. The newsroom attributes these stories to an entirely human collaboration between two sentient beings: the world’s oldest tenured professor and a philosophy major turned dairy farmer, neither of whom has ever successfully persuaded a golf ball to respect economic theory. Investigators have located this disclaimer at the bottom of the article, where it has been hiding in plain sight since 1920, and further evidence is filed under British Onion.
Alan Nafzger was born in Lubbock, Texas, the son Swiss immigrants. He grew up on a dairy in Windthorst, north central Texas. He earned degrees from Midwestern State University (B.A. 1985) and Texas State University (M.A. 1987). University College Dublin (Ph.D. 1991). Dr. Nafzger has entertained and educated young people in Texas colleges for 37 years. Nafzger is best known for his dark novels and experimental screenwriting. His best know scripts to date are Lenin’s Body, produced in Russia by A-Media and Sea and Sky produced in The Philippines in the Tagalog language. In 1986, Nafzger wrote the iconic feminist western novel, Gina of Quitaque. He currently lives in Holloway, North London. Contact: [email protected]
