The golf-loving President is expected to apply for membership at a club as he leaves office and stays in Washington while his youngest daughter finishes high school. The “smart money” is currently on his joining Woodmont CC in Rockville, Md., observers say, and Woodmont CEO/GM Brian Pizzimenti told one publication, “We’re glad to have offered [Obama] fun and relaxation.”
Speculation in the Washington, D.C. area is growing over which country club in the region President Barack Obama will choose to join as he prepares to leave office. The Obama family is committed to staying in the area at least until their youngest daughter, Sasha, finishes high school, and the golf-loving President, who has now played just shy of 300 rounds at courses around the world since taking office in 2008, is expected to ramp up his play once he’s no longer burdened with the 24/7 duties that come with working in the Oval Office.
Mike Allen of the Politico information organization recently wrote that “the smart money” is on Obama joining Woodmont Country Club in Rockville, Md. Founded by members of the Washington, D.C area’s German-Jewish community in 1913, the then-Town and Country Club moved to the site of the current National Library of Medicine in Bethesda, Md., after its membership grew too large for the District of Columbia, reports Forward, a publication of The Forward Association, Inc., which covers issues of interest to the American Jewish community.
The club was then named Woodmont CC in 1930 after a farm that used to sit on the land, Forward reports, and it was the only club before the 1950s in the D.C.-area that would accept Jewish members, By 1950, the club was pressured by the U.S. government to move to its current 460 acres in Rockville, so the National Institute of Health complex in Bethesda could be expanded.
Today, Forward reported, full members pay initiation fees of $80,000 to golf, swim, play tennis, dine and use other amenities at Woodmont. The publication noted that the club has won “Best Place for a Bar/Bat Mitzvah” in every readers’ poll conducted by Bethesda Magazine since 2011.
“We’d be honored to have the President at the club as a member,” Brian Pizzimenti, Woodmont’s CEO and General Manager told Forward. “We’re glad to have offered [Obama] fun and relaxation.”
Allen, the Politico writer, noted that other clubs in the D.C. area may be less attractive to the Obamas because of their histories of discrimination and more “snooty” cultures.
“How cool is it that the first African-American president of the United States may well be joining a country club originally established because Jews couldn’t get in anywhere else?” asked Ronald Halber, the Executive Director of the Jewish Community Relations Council of Greater Washington, D.C., told Forward.
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