When Bethpage Black opened, in 1936, many of the finest golf courses on Long Island had already been built. Shinnecock Hills (1891), Garden City Golf Club (1897) and National Golf Links (1911) all predated the Black by decades. By 1894, Maidstone had a rudimentary routing, with a full-blown course to come in 1924. The Creek Golf Club arrived in 1923. The Black was the fourth course in Bethpage State Park but it wasn’t the last. A fifth — the Yellow — opened in 1958.
This is a short list of long-in-the-tooth courses on Long Island. Not for nothing did the region become known as the most fertile golf ground in the United States.
In more recent times, new-course construction on Long Island has slowed from a torrent to a trickle. The unsurprising reason is rooted in Mark Twain’s golden rule of real estate investment: land is valuable because there’s only so much of it to go around. In 2006, a ribbon-cutting was held at Sebonack, a Jack Nicklaus-Tom Doak collaboration in the Shinnecock and National neighborhood. But since then, nada. No new Long Island courses.
Until now.
Just this summer, on a swath of pine barrens in East Quogue, a seaside hamlet in the town of Southhampton, play began on The Hills Golf Club. The Hills was built by the Discovery Land Company, a multinational golf and real estate development firm with properties in Hawaii, California, Mexico, the Caribbean, Portugal, Dubai and beyond. While each Discovery Land property comes in a different flavor, the defining tastes are similar. The clubs are high-end and private, with a luxury real-estate component. The amenities are swish. If you appreciate the modern-day proliferation of extravagant comfort stations — wagyu beef sliders, top-shelf tequila, those sorts of things — you can thank Discovery Land for kicking off the trend. The Hills has all of that, along with an 18-hole layout by Discovery Land’s go-to architect, Tom Fazio.
Golf courses are never created overnight. But even by slow-moving development standards, the Hills had an unusually long gestation. Plans for a course on the site had been kicked around for decades by various parties. At one point, a proposal was put forth with Phil Mickelson listed as the architect. In every iteration, the prospect of a course met with staunch local opposition. After getting involved more than a decade ago, Discovery Land lost some battles but it won the bigger fight.
On its website, the company describes The Hills, which has 110 private residences, as a “modern take on a classic Hamptons retreat” that provides “a seamless blend of luxury and tranquility.”
Tranquility. That’s something you won’t find this week at Bethpage Black.
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