Why Bethpage is American golf’s best value (and not the Black!)
Bethpage Red is one of Long Island's most beloved (and secret) golf bargains.
Gary Kellner/Getty Images
There is a great deal of performative concern about peace in professional golf, but I’m here to tell you it’s a lost cause.
Even if professional golf ends its great war, it will not find peace. Real peace in professional golf requires more than a handshake agreement and a flowery press conference. It requires a divorce from an enemy much greater than a sovereign wealth fund; an enemy so entrenched within the pro game that its participants have begun to view it as an ally.
If pro golf wanted to find peace, if it earnestly wished to solve the problems that have sent TV viewership plummeting and cynicism skyrocketing, there is a place to see how it looks. It is tucked eight miles south of the Long Island Expressway, behind bike trails and great oak trees, a place where the only business is tee times and the only enemy is nightfall.
Once, I visited this place hoping to learn something essential about golf. I found it before I even reached the tee box.
Soon it became my golfing home, and before long, the center of my golfing soul.
This is the story of how I found myself at Bethpage, the best deal in golf.
***
Golf’s greatness has many meanings, but money is not one of them. The truly good things about golf can be bought no more than happiness, true love, or genuine achievement — and this, my friends, is very good.
The truth is that golf is not a sport or a game so much as it is an expression of the human experience. This makes golf, depending upon your worldview, either a single, meaningless dot on an axis stretching from the Big Bang to the end of time, or nothing less than the essence of our existence.
I happen to fall in the second camp, which is how I became a golf writer despite the violent rage I feel whenever I am asked to care about the $10 million some corporation or sovereign wealth fund is going to pay an already-obscenely wealthy golfer for finishing first in a made-up sponsorship competition. I believe that golf reflects life, plus or minus a few bizarre rules, and that is a lesson I first learned at Bethpage.
As a Long Island kid with little access to the fabulous golf fortunes that surrounded me, I stumbled into golf at Bethpage, a state-owned-and-operated muni with five golf courses in a South Shore town called Farmingdale. My first visit came when I was 12 years old, not yet in middle school, as a fan at the 2009 U.S. Open. That tournament, as with most other “big” tournaments hosted at Bethpage, belonged to the Black Course, a mighty, 7,000-plus-yard A.W. Tillinghast course that is to golf what a service job is to life: hard f—ing work.
Thankfully, in both cases, toil yields valuable perspective, and Bethpage enlightened my golfing soul from the first whiff. I was entranced by it all: fescue that sprouted unusually near the fairway and grew to chest-high; towering grandstands stuffed to the gills with the faces of the golf proletariat class; and, most of all, the knowledge that I, too, could walk the same fairways, hit the same golf shots, and, if I got lucky, record the same score.
But that wasn’t the only tantalizing possibility as I wandered the Black. The other opportunity lay empty in the rain on that Friday, sagging underneath the weight of a tremendous hospitality tent.
It was the Red Course — second-fiddle to the Black Course — and it looked … great. In time I’d learn it was great — great enough to find itself on our brand-new ranking of the best courses in golf for $100 or less, and great enough to be my favorite value in the entire sport.
And how do I know?
I know because I have seen the Red when the sun is setting in April and rising in September. I’ve seen it when the conditioning is good — bouncy, firm and (relatively) fast — and I’ve seen it when the fourth tee box is still mostly mud. I have seen it too many times to count, which means I now see it everywhere — in the bend of the trees on a walk through the woods, in the familiar undulations of my favorite Manhattan running trail, and in the tiny details of every other golf course that has come after it.
What makes the Red great is not that it is a proper golfing test, but it is that too. It owns the hardest opening hole in golf (a massive, near-500-yard par-4 into an elevated green pictured above), a wonderful collection of thought-provoking par-3s and 4s, and a series of thorny but scorable par-5s — all of it routed through natural bunkers and strategic tee shots and a first-rate education in risk-reward. At close to 6,700 yards from the blue tees, the Red is a grown man’s course, but at a gettable par-70, it owns a surprising number of locals’ career-best scores, this author included.
It is not perfect, but ask any Bethpage local and they’ll tell you it’s better than that. A round on the Red is more sensible than the Yellow, walkable than the Blue, scorable than the Green and (one prays) enjoyable than the Black.
Bethpage’s Goldilocks course might not yet be a top-100 track in the U.S., but I have maintained for years that it could find itself there with a few million in sprucing and restoring. While I’m blithely biased, it speaks volumes that anyone would entertain that honor for a course of the Red’s economics and esteem.
Thankfully for the few of us still capable of wrangling a tee time, the Red is in no danger of top 100 fame anytime soon, largely for reasons of economics and esteem. The Red doesn’t need funding; it is booked solid for 200+ days per year, and on the remaining 165, it is either 95 percent full or covered with snow. It also doesn’t need the praise; among locals it is the most beloved Bethpage course, and it isn’t close.
The reason for this status is simple: it’s a bargain. During a recent round on the Red, a friendly playing partner named Justin shared his anguish at a forthcoming move from New York back to his native California.
“I’m not ready to pay out-of-state rates here again,” he said with a rueful smile.
At a walking rate of $43 for in-state residents on most days, and close to double that for out-of-staters, I didn’t blame him.
***
I don’t have to scroll through my contacts list for long to find names of those who have shaped my golfing life at Bethpage.
In addition to Justin, the soon-to-be California native, there’s Tim, the member at a friendly club in Rockville Centre who invited me as a member-guest partner. And Bill, the sheet-metal specialist from Malverne who gifted me a custom-made bottle-opener on the 18th green. And John, the 20-handicap whose five-hour death match with his brother-in-law might have pushed him to the brink of bankruptcy. And no fewer than a dozen other players whose shared memories have faded into the recesses of my mind, but whose spirits have nonetheless electrified my own.
For these reasons, I make sure to carry at least $10 in change before any round on the Red. In nearly every instance, my foursome has been filled with serious players, serious personalities or serious stories — all ample reasons, I have found, for a pint.
America’s best golf courses for $100 or less: Where memorability meets affordability
Partners like these have shaped my appreciation for Bethpage as my teenage years have bled into adulthood, and as my appreciation for golf has shifted from a competitive pursuit to a philosophical one. It is harder to obsess over the fledgling state of your game when you are overwhelmed by the kindness of the honest-to-god stranger willing your ball toward safe passage. It is harder to care about a score when it is not a derivative of worth but rather a reflection of a few hours fully removed from it. It is harder to be bothered by the greed of professional golf when surrounded by the abundance of those who play it recreationally.
Bethpage is not a bargain because of the golf course, the price, or the setting. It is a bargain because of the feeling.
At Bethpage, I am at peace.
You can reach the author at james.colgan@golf.com.
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