The inaugural National Links Trust Championship is a Cool Golf Thing

Competition is where every avenue of golf intersects.

It is a game, after all. In order to truly be a game, there must be winners and losers.

Competitive golf is where students of the golf swing get to test the effectiveness of their swing theories, endless drills and training-aid sessions. It's where equipment geeks get to see just how well the latest technology works in a crucible. For architecture aficionados, it's a real-world application for their hours of study. For historians, it's a chance to glimpse some understanding of the greatest players of yesterday and today, if only on a smaller-scale stage. Whether it's a Sunday four-ball match with buddies or a professional major championship, it's where all of golf's roads ultimately lead.

With its many crossroads of squares, circles and ellipses, Washington, D.C. is the perfect place to realize this. In the fall of 2023, it will host the inaugural National Links Trust Championship, at historic East Potomac Golf Links.

In hosting this event, the body that oversees East Potomac, plus sister District courses Langston and Rock Creek, revives the spirit of the old U.S. Amateur Public Links, which ran from 1922 until the USGA wound it down in 2014. In 1923, Richard J. Walsh won the 1923 'PubLinks' at East Potomac.

With help from Anera Sports, which puts on several significant amateur and professional tournaments each year, the NLT's version of the PubLinks will be a little different, instituting a minimum age of 25 years old for its field while maintaining a core principle: private-club golfers may not enter. A series of qualifiers at nationally significant municipal courses will supply the contestants, who will battle it out September 30 and October 1 in our nation's capital.

Grab a range token and start grinding.

Cool Golf Things

March 22, 2019

If it's cool and it's a thing in golf, it might just be a Cool Golf Thing.