The 79-year-old walked. No cart, no caddie, no one carrying his bag. He slung his clubs over his shoulder, sprayed mosquito repellent on his ankles, greeted the pro shop attendant by first name, and stepped onto the course as he had done on thousands of other mornings across several decades. That day he suffered a heart attack mid-round, on the very course whose every tree root he knew.

No master plan records that detail. That is where I want to begin.

East Potomac Golf Links sits on a manmade strip of land in the Potomac River, in Washington D.C. Federal land. Managed by the National Park Service. As it stands: 36 holes, a mini-golf course, a driving range. To someone from Hai Phong like me, the idea of a "public golf course" is almost abstract — golf in Vietnam is mostly resorts or private clubs, green fees run into the hundreds of dollars, and riding a cart is the default.

Then came a proposal: tear it down, rebuild it as a single 18-hole course, more than 7,600 yards long.

"The empty stadiums of summer 2026 taught me to hear a match through a heartbeat, not through sound." The same applies here. To judge this proposal, you have to listen through the heartbeat of a man walking with his bag, not through the sound of fairway mowers at five in the morning.

Context: one course, or a portfolio?

Scale first, verdict second.

7,600 yards is an enormous number. Bethpage Black — host of the U.S. Open in 2026, 2026 and 2026, and the Ryder Cup in 2026 — measures roughly 7,400 to 7,500 yards depending on tee position. The course proposed for East Potomac would be longer than a layout capable of hosting a major.

The second point matters more: East Potomac is not currently "a course." It is a portfolio. 36 holes split across two loops, plus mini-golf, plus a driving range. Beginners have somewhere to go. Children have somewhere to go. Older players who want nine holes in the afternoon have somewhere to go. Tournament golfers have somewhere to go. The proposal turns that portfolio into a single course.

That structure reminds me of the 400m track in 2026. "The fall of 2026 didn't stop me — it redirected the whole lane." I believed that following the programme and optimising every metric would deliver results. But a system with only one lane has nothing to switch to when that lane breaks. A public golf course works the same way. It survives on redundancy of choice, not on a single highlight.

The original commentary in GOLF.com does not oppose improvement. It opposes improvement without asking anyone. The author offers two closing lines: ask the golfing public what it wants instead of telling golfers what they are going to get; and a shorter, heavier one — "It isn't his."

Bethpage is offered as the counter-example: a public system operating five courses, including one of major championship calibre. Meaning both can be held at once: the summit and the ground floor.

It sounds convincing. I will come back to exactly that point later, because the counter-example has holes of its own.

Analysis: five calculations nobody made

Calculation one — time.

The average recreational golfer in the United States drives the ball around 200 to 215 yards. On a 7,600-yard course, that player needs roughly 36 to 38 shots just to reach greens, before putting. Add ball searches, tee waits and green reading. A round like that is unlikely to finish under four hours and forty-five minutes; in practice it often reaches five.

Pace of play is not a side issue. It decides whether a public course lives or dies. An overloaded course loses players, and the first to leave are always the weaker ones — the largest customer group, the ones who pay steadily on Tuesday afternoons.

Calculation two — difficulty.

A course of around 7,600 yards would carry a course rating above 76 and a slope above 140. For a recreational golfer that is a fitness test rather than recreation. The commentary itself answers plainly who is served: sub-75 amateurs, club champions, tournament golfers.

A 7,600-yard course does not serve the public. It serves a tier that already has its own courses and wants a prettier one.

I have played a course in northern Vietnam measuring over 7,200 yards. The round ended in near darkness, not because I played slowly, but because the course was long and I did not hit it far enough. I played the last three holes in a state of simply wanting to leave. That is a feeling a public course must never create for its own customers.

Calculation three — the pipeline.

Mini-golf, the driving range and the second 18 holes are not "ancillary amenities." They are entry points. A child putting at mini-golf at nine can be a club member at 25. A retiree hitting driver on a Saturday range session can be a regular for nine holes on Wednesday. Cut those three entry points and keep one championship course, and the system still has a course — but loses its ability to regenerate players.

This is where I find the commentary right but not forceful enough. It argues for the access rights of current players. It does not say enough about future ones.

Calculation four — the business model.

The author identifies a real phenomenon: golfers happily paying heavily to play TPC Sawgrass, Pebble Beach or Pinehurst No. 2 "without a prayer of breaking 100." That is aspirational golf — playing to touch an icon, not to post a score.

But those three names are tourism assets. People fly in, sleep in hotels, buy shirts, take photographs, and leave. East Potomac is a local civic asset: people drive fifteen minutes, play, and go home for dinner. Importing a destination model into a course built for weekly repeat play is a category error — unless data proves tourism demand exists there. In the original piece, no such data appears.

"Every dataset can lie; my job is to catch it in the act." Here what lies is not the data but its absence. A plan to transform a public asset at this scale, without a demand study, without play-volume forecasts, without pricing analysis — every attractive figure in the drawings is a hypothesis dressed as a conclusion.

Calculation five — community.

This one cannot go into a spreadsheet, which is exactly why it always loses inside one.

A public course runs on very small things: a pro shop attendant who remembers names, a bottle of mosquito repellent left at the counter for those who forgot theirs, a fixed fourball that has played Saturday mornings for fifteen years, an old man who walks because he wants to walk, not because he cannot afford a cart. That is social infrastructure, not a sports service.

A redesign into a championship course will not destroy those things by demolition. It destroys them by raising prices, changing operating rhythms, changing the customer base, and letting the old community drift away because it no longer feels it belongs. That process happens quietly, and no groundbreaking ceremony is ever held for it.

Having watched a course be "upgraded," I know the feeling. You are not evicted. You simply no longer recognise the place you used to play.

And the final calculation — the bill.

A 36-hole facility on federal land charging modest green fees almost certainly does not break even. Where does the shortfall get covered? A parks budget? Federal funds? Or an arrangement granting a private partner branding rights in exchange for infrastructure?

Nobody answers this in the original piece. Yet it decides everything. Because if the subsidy stream is drying up, then "preserve the status quo" is also a choice with a price — and that price is usually paid by cutting maintenance, letting the course degrade until there is nothing left worth defending.

Governance: federal land is not private land

This is where the commentary stands strongest.

East Potomac occupies federal land managed by the National Park Service. That means this is not a private owner's decision. Any change requires land-use authorisation and will almost certainly trigger public comment and environmental review.

"It isn't his" is not an exclamation. It is a legal and moral argument, and it carries weight.

One detail is easily missed: the site is a manmade island, with soft ground, on a river whose level rises and falls with the tide. The original piece uses a suggestive phrase — "dubious buoyancy." For anyone who follows waterfront infrastructure, that phrase is no joke. Any federal land-use review will have to answer questions about ground stability and flood risk. That is a long-term cost, not a technical footnote.

And this is where the proposal becomes absurd at a deeper level: it promises a major-calibre course on ground that the previous plan had already accepted as provisional. Prestige and subsoil are two different problems. Nobody is telling the public who pays for the second one.

Contrarian: Bethpage is not a fair comparison either

The author attacks the proposal's logic by exposing a comparison error: Pebble Beach is a destination, East Potomac is a local course, they are different categories. Correct. But then the author erects Bethpage as the benchmark, and that benchmark is just as skewed.

Bethpage is a system of courses inside a state park on Long Island, in a metropolitan area of more than seven million people, with a major championship history dating to the start of this century, and with revenue from intra-regional tourism and major events. East Potomac is a small federal parcel, publicly funded, in a city where the very idea of a cheap public course is treated by local government as a liability.

Comparing Bethpage to East Potomac is as lazy as comparing East Potomac to Pebble Beach. Both skip the hardest question: who pays the gap between a $25 green fee and the real operating cost of 36 holes?

That is where the author's "ask the public" formula hits its ceiling. Asking is easy. But the people who show up to a 7 p.m. consultation meeting are the ones with time, transport and a voice — not the players teeing off at six on Tuesday morning. Public consultation has its own sampling problem. Without designing a mechanism to reach the right group, "ask the public" just means asking the group that already spoke.

I have sat on the other side of this kind of argument. In 2026 I wrote a piece praising how Denmark broke the possession meta at the Euros, and an editor called it anti-scientific. That piece went on my personal blog and was read far more widely than anything I wrote for the station. The lesson was not "I was right." It was that when an argument sounds too smooth, there is usually a group of people left out of the arithmetic.

At East Potomac, the group left out of the arithmetic is the early-morning player, the walker, the child at the mini-golf. And the ground beneath the course.

Takeaway: the real question is on the invoice

If a $25 green fee cannot sustain 36 holes, who covers the rest?

The answer to that question determines the design — not the other way round. A 7,600-yard course is a sensible answer to a very specific question: how does this asset sustain itself from the highest-paying customer segment. It is the wrong answer to a different question: how do the most people get to play on the same piece of land.

The truth is that those two questions cannot both be answered with one set of drawings. Someone has to choose. And the chooser should be the payer — the public, not the signatory.

Vietnam has no public golf system to lose yet. But as domestic golf grows and peri-urban land starts being questioned, East Potomac's question will arrive here in another form: whose land is it, and who gets to decide who it serves.