Congressional Country Club: Gold Course

The companion course to Congressional's famed Blue, the Gold has a layered architectural lineage that traces back to Devereux Emmet's original 1924 routing. Robert Trent Jones Sr. reorganized it in 1962, George and Tom Fazio added nine holes in 1977, and Arthur Hills led a full redesign in 2000. Two of the stoutest holes on the modern card, the 1st and 18th, remain Emmet originals.

Congressional Country Club opened in Bethesda, Maryland on May 23, 1924, with a nine-hole course designed by Devereux Emmet. Emmet, a Long Island-born architect associated with the Charles Blair Macdonald school of design, extended the course to 18 holes in the early 1930s. That original 18 served the club for decades and became the root system of both the Blue and Gold courses that exist today. In 1957 a portion of Emmet's routing was split off to form part of a separate nine at the club.

In 1962 Robert Trent Jones Sr. was commissioned to expand Congressional to 36 holes; he reorganized the existing holes and added new ones to create distinct Blue and Gold courses. A number of the Gold Course's strongest holes, including the first and eighteenth, are widely believed to be surviving Emmet holes, making the Gold one of the relatively few courses where Emmet's work can still be played. The Gold continued to evolve. In 1977 George Fazio and his nephew Tom Fazio designed the final nine holes of the Gold Course, adding a third nine to the facility in parallel with other work at the club.

The most recent full redesign came in 2000, when Arthur Hills reshaped the Gold Course to give it its own architectural identity distinct from the Blue. Today the Gold Course plays to a par of 71 at roughly 6,844 yards. The Blue Course remains the club's championship stage and has hosted three U.S. Opens (1964, 1997, 2011), the 2022 KPMG Women's PGA Championship, and the 2017 PGA Tour's Quicken Loans National; the 2019-2021 Andrew Green restoration prepared the Blue for the 2022 PGA Championship.

The Gold stands as Congressional's second course, rooted in Emmet's original work and built up through successive generations of American architects.