Burning Tree Golf Club

Detailed description of Burning Tree Golf Club

Burning Tree Golf Club is an all male, Private Golf Club, their course is an 18 hole golf course located in Bethesda, Maryland.

The club opened in 1923 after, the story goes, a male foursome from the Chevy Chase Country Club was stuck behind a slow-playing group of female golfers. The course was designed by Alister MacKenzie.

Burning Tree, located a short distance from the nation's capitol has long catered to those in positions of political power. Presidents were extended honorary membership and many accepted: Franklin Roosevelt, Eisenhower, Kennedy, Lyndon Johnson and later Richard Nixon, Gerald Ford and George Herbert Walker Bush (along with his impressive 11-handicap). Supreme Court Chief Justice Warren Burger played at Burning Tree, as did House Speaker Tip O'Neill. William Randolph Hearst was a member, too. Even on a December Sunday afternoon in 1941, (East Coast Time), after Edward R. Murrow was informed on the 10th tee that the Japanese had bombed Pearl Harbor, the veteran journalist played on.

Burning Tree, is an all-male Club, the classic old-boy, blue-blood men's club. The initiation fee is $75,000 and membership -- capped around 600, including honorariums and golfers past their playing days -- is by invitation only. The membership list never has been made public. 

The course plays to a maximum 18-hole distance of 6,400 yards and a par of 71. The signature hole is #18, a 412-yard, par 4, requiring a tee shot over a pond to an elevated fairway, then an approach shot to a small green protected by bunkers.