SOUTHAMPTON, N.Y. — If you had taken the Long Island Rail Road from Midtown Manhattan to the U.S. Open on Friday morning, it would have taken you about 2 hours and 30 minutes to get to the pop-up Shinnecock Hills Station. If you had driven or grabbed an Uber, it would have been harder to estimate your commute time, because of the notorious unpredictability of the Long Island Expressway paired with the snarl that has been choking the Montauk Highway in the area around the club. Biking the roughly 90 miles? Google Maps reports that haul would have taken you about 8 hours.
Leaving aside skateboard and pogo stick, there was at least one more means of transport that could have zipped you out to Shinnecock: chopper. That’s how my colleague, Darren Riehl, and I commuted to the U.S. Open on Friday, courtesy of the helicopter passenger service company Blade. Our bird: a single-engine Bell 407 with room for two pilots and five passengers. Flight time to the South Fork: a glorious, road-rageless 40 minutes.
This luxury doesn’t come cheap: $1,480 for a one-way ticket, or roughly the cost of five grounds passes for the second round, with about 150 bucks left over for snacks and merch. But, man, is it a way to travel. Darren and I arrived at Blade’s West 30th St. heliport-cum-lounge, hard against the Hudson River, at about 7:45 a.m. No lines. No TSA. No worries. I was on the 8 a.m. flight; Darren was one flight behind me, on the 8:15. After a quick espresso (gratis!) at the bar that overlooks the tarmac, I was summoned to the lounge exit, where my four fellow U.S. Open-goers and I were walked out to our chariot, its blades already in motion.
The next few actions happened quickly: seat belts snapped, door closed and sealed, phones pulled from pockets with cameras at the ready. Liftoff. Five feet, 10, 50, 100. Within seconds, all of Hudson Yards was before us and the Hudson River below us. Still climbing, we headed north, a large swath of Midtown now in view. Empire State Building. Chrysler. The 1,550-foot Central Park Tower. Then came Central Park itself, a 51-block-long expanse of greenness. Then the House That Ruth Built (well, the new-age version of it, anyway), before we began easing east toward the Long Island Sound.
A few minutes later, more sights. Out the window to my left (my back was to the pilot): the stunning beachfront and sprawling estates of Long Island’s Gold Coast, where Gatsby used to run wild. To my right, Westchester County, New York, and, just east of that, Connecticut.
The view also made for exceptional golf-course watching. Sands Point, a Tillinghast course that dates to 1928, was down there. So was Glen Cove and Huntington, the sandy sprawls of The Creek — and about a dozen other golf spreads I spotted, some in backyards.
Soon we were moving southbound over the Montauk Highway (a reminder of the grueling commute that could have been!). The charming nine-hole layout at the Quogue Field Club came into view followed by the beachside manses of the Hamptons. Shinnecock Bay came next. And then began our descent toward a grassy patch on Shinnecock Indian Nation land, just south of the golf course, where another helipad and lounge awaited.
