FARMINGDALE, N.Y. — You could feel Mike and Gary winding up for the punchline.
Before the ball landed neatly in the center of the fairway at Bethpage Red. Before it shot high and straight into the air. Before the club even struck the ball.
And so when the punchline finally arrived, I wasn’t sure whether to be excited or relieved.
“Do ya know what I’d call you for that?” Mike asked.
I could guess.
“I’d call you a f—ing sandbagger!”
I have played golf at Bethpage for most of my life, which means I have met hundreds of Mikes and Garys. I have felt the iron grip of their handshake. I have experienced their brusque, no-nonsense mannerisms. And I have experienced their ancient tradition of endearment: Withering trash-talk.
But as it turns out, I have never played golf with anybody like Mike Pomerico and Gary Cohan, the two men with whom I shared an afternoon foursome at Bethpage Red earlier this year. Because Mike and Gary are not just Bethpage lifers, they are part of a secret club that exists just underneath the surface of Bethpage’s packed tee sheets — a club of regular Joes who are serious sticks, and who call Bethpage their golfing home and mean it.
You see, three decades ago, a group of Mikes and Garys realized they wanted the community of a private golf club without any of the pretension, so they formed a club of their own. The goal was to bring together a group of like-minded Bethpage diehards, people (like them) who cared much more about golf’s virtues as a competition than about the status endowed by a club crest. They would go where they were welcome — which was good news, because they were welcome at Bethpage State Park, where most of them already played. Eventually, and perhaps unsurprisingly, they wound up with the exact collection of folks you might find on any random Tuesday on the Black Course: Doctors and firemen, lawyers and policemen, transit workers and accountants. A name was the only problem remaining, so they settled on a simple one: The Nassau Players Club.
Technically speaking, the Nassau Players Club has no home. It is a “club without borders,” meaning it has no territorial rights. But spend a few minutes with Mike or Gary inside the Bethpage Clubhouse and you’ll soon realize that definition is a fallacy. Their home is right here at the Black Course, where regular tee times and events have been staged for the better part of the last three decades — and where everybody who’s somebody knows their name.
“Would you like the usual?” A server inside the clubhouse asks, as if on cue, a few minutes before our tee time.
“No, not today,” Mike responds.
Mike, a larger-than-life ex-cop with a rib-cutting sense of humor, is the president of the NPC. He works a part-time gig at a local country club, but most of his golf life exists here at Bethpage, where it seems he is loved and feared in equal parts. His swing is long, slow and confident, and he plays our round from a cart with a militant respect for pace-of-play. He fills the time between shots with laughter, skewering jokes, and self-deprecation. When he hears I have given shots in a bragging rights match with our fourth, he barely hides his disdain.
“We don’t do strokes,” he says, shooting me a grin.
Mike keeps the trains on time for the Nassau Players Club, which includes hosting a regular suite of events at Bethpage.
“Ninety percent of our golf is played here at Bethpage,” he said. “Whether it’s at the Green or the Blue or the Black, it doesn’t matter, we play where we can.”
All members are serious players, though serious has many definitions. Some are tournament-level golfers, many are like Mike: single-digit players with a bad case of the golf bug. The common thread is a love for golf, for competition, and for the community that exists at the intersection.
“It’s a group of guys, about a hundred guys from all walks of life,” Mike says. “Retired cops. Retired firemen. Active cops, active firemen. Business people, accountants, garbagemen. You just have to love and have a passion to play golf.”
It does not take a sociologist to recognize the countercultural tones in the club’s origin story, but Mike insists the Players Club isn’t pushing back against country club culture, elitism, or anybody, really. In Mike’s estimation, the Nassau Players have only ever sought to build community, and have no tolerance for those seeking to tear down anyone else — a point evidenced by the club’s terse, five-rule “code of conduct.”
The Nassau Players Club Code of Conduct prohibits the following behavior by its members:
– Any other action in golf or in their personal life, which could discredit the club or its membership
– Willful, repetitive violations of the rules of golf and handicap procedures
– Signing “Nassau Players” for food, drink, merchandise or services at a private course
– Attempting to use the facilities of a private club under false pretenses
– Actions deemed seriously offensive to the other members such as excessive displays of temper, failure to repay debts incurred on or off the golf course
For Mike, Gary, and the remainder of the 100 or so who consider themselves part of the Nassau Players, the responsibility is much deeper than a Bethpage-themed bag tag. It is about being part of the fabric of one of the best municipal courses in golf, and upholding a tradition of ordinary people taking part in something truly extraordinary. Most days, that takes the form of golf at its purest: equal, honest, sincere. Some days, it’s just a place to share some laughs with a stranger.
As our round on the Red neared its conclusion — and the trash-talk melted into genuine kindness, the way it so often does on the Black — I wondered what serving in the secret fraternal order of Bethpage had taught my two playing partners about golf.
As soon as I asked the question, I felt that familiar hum of anticipation in the air. Someone was winding up to deliver another haymaker. Then Gary spoke.
“I grew up here in Bethpage. I used to play here all the time and I didn’t know about Nassau Players,” he said, pausing.
“It’s all about camaraderie playing Bethpage. This place is great. It’s home.”
That, it turned out, was a punchline all its own.
