A group of regulars will camp this weekend on the 16th hole of Glenn Dale Golf Club. The course’s owner has been tearing up for weeks. And every golf cart was taken Friday, with throngs of golfers weaving through the course, determined to get in one last round.
For more than 60 years, the family-owned course has been a staple of this Prince George’s County community. Glenn Dale will be shuttered Monday, following years of financial woes like those that led to closures at other courses in the county.
“We thought it would be here forever,” said John Shields, the course’s soon-to-be former president. “We were wrong.”
Shields’s roots at Glenn Dale run deeper than the turf that covers its rolling hills. His father and uncle — identical twins — bought it in 1958, and Shields, 71, grew up on the property in an antebellum manor house built by Gabriel Duvall, an early Supreme Court justice. He and his brother and sister still live on the grounds, where they raised families.
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“This is all we know,” Shields said Friday, looking out from the clubhouse — the only home the family’s 15-year-old labradoodle Nacho has known — to the ninth hole. “It’s not a job. It’s a lifestyle. It’s everything.”
After not making a profit for 20 of the past 30 years, and losing more than $1 million in the past five years, Shields said his family had to make the hard decision to sell. On Monday, developer L.M. Sandler & Sons will take control of the 125-acre property, where it plans to build single-family homes and townhouses.
Zoning changes proposed by Prince George’s County Council Chairman Todd M. Turner (D-District 4), who represents the area that includes Glenn Dale, paved the way for the project. Turner, who has spent years working with Shields and neighbors in the area, said he is optimistic the development will be one “that the community can be supportive of.”
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“Unfortunately that means we’re closing an iconic member of the community,” said Turner, who plans to play his final round Saturday at Glenn Dale. “Golf is a tough business.”
'Pride till the end'
Shields took over the course after his father died in 1980. At the time, Prince George’s was a mostly white, working-class suburb and most golf courses in the area were segregated. Shields said that when minorities came to the course after he took control, some white golfers weren’t pleased.
“They would talk about you so you could hear it,” said Shields, who is white. “They would make you feel uncomfortable.”
Shields said he quickly worked to make Glenn Dale a place where everyone felt welcome. He asked people who expressed prejudice to leave and had to fire one employee, telling him: “It’s not the way that we’re going to be.”
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He said the club’s regulars now more closely mirror the diversity of Prince George’s, one of the wealthiest majority-African American jurisdictions in the country.
On Friday, Kevin Davis, who grew up in Prince George’s and has played at Glenn Dale for 20 years, reflected on the course’s history.
“There were places where people of my color couldn’t come,” said Davis, 62, who is black. “Now it’s people of all walks of life and colors. I look at the kids — and I see kids of all races. I’m just really sad to lose it.”
For years, it’s been a meeting place for citizens’ associations and political groups, although Shields said the club never took sides or charged fees for such gatherings. The bar at the end of the course, the Black Hole, hosted live bands, karaoke and poker games.
“We joke that it was kind of like our ‘Cheers,’ ” said Jason Beaulieu, a 48-year-old attorney who started playing the course with his father at age 10. “A place where everyone knows your name.”
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On Friday, Shields was preparing for the course’s Sunday goodbye party — where he expects as many as 1,000 guests — drafting severance packages for employees and making sure the course was running as smoothly as it had for years.
“Our motto is: ‘Pride till the end,’ ” he said.
A boom and bust on the green
Glenn Dale prospered in the 1980s amid a golf boom that saw a glut of courses built, often by municipal governments or within housing developments. Troy Beck, a PGA professional and the course’s golf director, who has worked there since the late 1980s, said hundreds of children came through Glenn Dale’s camps each summer, some later securing golf scholarships at top colleges.
“It doesn’t feel like work,” she said. “It’s a great vehicle for developing the whole child ... and turns them into ladies and gentlemen.”
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Boom led to bust, however — mirroring years of struggles faced by private courses across Maryland’s second-largest jurisdiction. When contemplating a sale in 2003, Shields told The Washington Post that the course had been in financial trouble for a decade, with revenue down 40 percent since 1990.
Glenn Dale wasn’t the only course stuck in the rough. Also in 2003, the Robin Dale Golf Club in Brandywine was put up for sale. Three years later, a sand and gravel company bought it and mined the land. Then in 2010, Marlborough and Lake Arbor country clubs closed, prompting the county council to commission a study about the state of Prince George’s golf courses.
The 2013 study by the Maryland-National Capital Park and Planning Commission featured photos of bleak conditions at Marlborough and Lake Arbor: Equipment dumped in the woods, a trashed clubhouse, a pool with standing water. It found that the problem in Prince George’s was fueled by an oversupply of golf courses due to overbuilding in the 1990s and early 2000s, combined with a decline in golfers.
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So, is golf dead?
“Camps are going down because you ask any 10-year-old, he says: ‘Why are we out here? It’s so hot. I have to walk,’ ” Beck said. “I can’t compete with air conditioning and phones.”
Jay Karen, chief executive of the National Golf Course Owners Association, said reports of golf’s demise have been exaggerated.
Between 1986 and 2006, the number of U.S. golf courses grew 44 percent to about 17,000. Since then, that number has decreased by 8 percent, but golf, an $84 billion industry, continues to find fresh linkspeople, with 2.6 million players stepping onto a green for the first time last year.
Whether a particular course can stay in business is more a function of local market forces than golf’s ability to endure, Karen said.
“An owner may say: ‘I’m working really hard for not a lot of money, but sitting on an $8 million asset,’ ” he said. “It doesn’t take rocket science to decide what to do.”
Shields declined to discuss the sale price of the course, and L.M. Sandler & Sons, the Virginia Beach-based developer, did not return requests for comment.
Shields said he will keep his home as part of the deal, even as his surroundings change. Inside the clubhouse, a typed letter from the Shields family to its customers is pinned on a wall, headed “Why We Are Closing.”
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“We do not want to close; it is out of necessity,” the letter reads. “This is not what we had envisioned; it was our hope to pass the business down to our employees and family. This is not just a place where you play golf, it has been our HOME for 60 years! ... Accept this decision or don’t; but, do not question or ask us to further defend our actions.”
Lowering the flag
Whatever golf’s future in Prince George’s, Glenn Dale won’t be a part of it. The course will close after a flag-lowering ceremony Sunday and final rounds Monday. Then, there will only be memories.
Gabby Miller, the University of Maryland’s 26-year-old junior golf coordinator, said she’s been going to Glenn Dale “ever since I could walk.” She attended Beck’s camps and came to consider her a “golf mom.”
“Golf is already a really tough sport, being a female, not having too many friends in my school playing,” she said. “It’s nice being at Glenn Dale where everyone accepted me.”
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Jim Pratt, 81, has been a Glenn Dale member for more than 50 years. He and his son were the only father-son champions in the history of the club, he said.
“It was just a wonderful place to have a good day,” Pratt said. “If you left there and you didn’t have a fun day, it was your fault.”
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