These weeks, between golf’s two great championships, are lovely, despite the sog-fest upon us now. In these long summer days, Wimbledon is on in the morning, its grass at the T getting browner by the day. In this year of World Cup fútbol, there’s almost always something to watch. The U.S. Senior Open is played annually in this fast month, its fields loaded with familiar names. (Ernie, Paddy, Vijay, Davis, this year at Scioto, the Columbus course where young Jackie Nicklaus first broke par.) Across the Lower 48, in these weeks after Father’s Day, the yellowish light of afternoon summons you to the course murmuring this: Quick nine?
Or 10. I nod here to the routing of the village-owned course in Bellport, in Suffolk County, on the South Shore of Long Island. The Bellport loops go 1 through 8, a collection of good holes without a showstopper. The more common late-day move there is the second loop, nine to the house, with its various whiffs of the bay. I have played those holes while fading into sleep more than a few times. Smell and memory have had a long and good marriage. Don’t they?
I grew up in Patchogue, one town west of Bellport, a baseball town (ballfields everywhere) and a ferry town (the Davis Park Ferry shuttling beach people to Fire Island and back). In high school and college, I logged many fast summer rounds at Bellport with my friend Larry Lodi, who broke 80 regularly with a strong right-hand grip and in various guitar god T-shirts. (Peter Frampton, etc.) We dug clams in the Great South Bay, sold them dockside, ate fast suppers at our respective homes, then raced the 5 miles to the Bellport course, our last putts slowed by rising dew. Larry’s car (by which I mean his mother’s Buick) had an FM radio with the Bee Gees (it seemed) always playing on WBLI. Forgive me, I’m drifting. In the summer of ’78, or one of those Ford or Carter summers, floats with Hispanic themes made their first appearance in Patchogue’s annual July 4th parade. The floats were colorful, proud, fun, overdue. Bellport doesn’t have a July 4th parade but it does have a longstanding Independence Day street fair called “Artists on the Lane” — pleasant enough though low on funk.
Come summer, I’m drawn to Patchogue, to Bellport, to the courses and beaches of Suffolk County. I’m drawn home. The U.S. Open at Shinnecock Hills last month was a gift, as were the Opens there in 1986 and ’95, in 2004 and ’18. On Wednesday night, this year at Shinnecock, I slipped out of the press tent at maybe half past six and was still able to get in 10 holes at Bellport before sunset. The bay holes there are like a North Star for me.
A fortnight or so later, on July 4th, I was back in Bellport. It was a scorcher there, as it was across Long Island, as it was across the country. My wife, Christine, and I made a listless walk down Bellport Lane, peeking sluggishly at the various artist booths, lingering at length in the museum-barn owned by the Bellport Historical Society. It had air conditioning.
In mid-afternoon, to continue this sluggish theme from a sluggish day, we made a listless drive east on Sunrise Highway, in search of cooler temperatures. As we approached Shinnecock Hills, I realized for the first time that its Stanford White clubhouse, though high on a hill, was no longer visible from the highway. Kind of annoying. I had never noticed how tall and thick a stand of barrier trees, between Sunrise Highway and the club, had become.
During the Open, there were members hanging on the clubhouse porch, some of them in club blazers, clinging to tradition and yesteryear. You could almost picture Thurston Howell III, Ascot-wearing Wall Street (get this) millionaire from “Gilligan’s Island,” smiling in his approval. BTW, what was Thurston thinking, signing up for that three-hour cruise-ship tour, along with his bride, Lovey Howell? Maybe they were looking for relief from a sluggish day, as Christine and I were on Independence Day 250. The Howells boarded the S.S. Minnow, which promptly got blown off-course by a tropical storm and CBS had another sit-com hit. I played Bellport the other day with a light-footed gent named Marcel who was wearing a floppy bucket hat he could have borrowed from Gilligan. Somewhere, Gilligan was smiling, too.
Back to the real world. There’s a winding public road, Tuckahoe Road, that bisects the Shinnecock Hills course. It was closed all through the U.S. Open but now it was open again and I pointed our green Mini (160,000 miles and going strong) to it. There were golfers at play on the course, caddies trailing them. Several massive U.S. Open tents were still up but coming down and there were dozens of sweltering workers in construction bibs working in the rising heat of this national holiday. On the other side of the Atlantic, you could imagine, tents and grandstands going up at Royal Birkdale for the British Open. The first round is on July 16. Scottie Scheffler will return the trophy to the R&A before that. You only get it for a year. Well, what don’t we borrow, when you get right down to it?
The bay holes at Bellport are like a North Star for me.
Christine and I did a drive-by tour of the adjacent courses, the courses of the Southampton Golf Club, the Sebonack Golf Club, the National Golf Links of America. Sebonack’s developer, Michael Pascucci, bought the 300-acre property from the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers Local No. 3, and Bob Rubin, owner of another course in the vicinity, The Bridge, used to float another name in Sebonack’s direction, The Local, to set it apart from its neighbor, The National, and to acknowledge its IBEW roots. Bob is a Francophile among other things and can’t resist a double entendre. (The Local — so good.) I showed Christine the fabulous entry columns at Sebonack and announced grandly, “The Macdonald Gates.” “Wait,” Christine said. “I thought the Macdonald Gates were at The National?” The things she has picked up on, fortyish years in.
We drove by the actual Macdonald Gates and to the public beach that runs parallel to N.G.L.’s spectacular uphill 18th hole, a short par-5 called Home. Home — so good. Charles Blair Macdonald, when designing The National often considered golf in Scotland as he considered the course, and in the auld country Home is a common name for finishing holes and a handsome coda on their cute little scorecards. (Check out Elie, Brora, Prestwick.) I stumbled recently onto these sturdy sentences and I include them here for you CBMacD buffs out there, from a short 1928 New Yorker piece about Macdonald and his N.G.L. course: “As it turned out, half of the course was copied from historic holes abroad and half created out of Macdonald’s own fancy. He thus became the pioneer golf-course architect in this country.”
The bayfront beach in front of the course — please note: it is not lifeguarded — is named for Thomas Rewinski, a former N.G.L. greenkeeper. I’ve known that name forever. When I was a kid, the South Fork of the East End of Long Island still had many prominent families with Polish surnames, families that owned potato farms and thriving small businesses, Carl Yastrzemski’s family among them. I’m sure, on the right day and in the right conditions, the Rewinski beach is wonderful, but on our day there Christine and I struggled to navigate its rocks, could find no breeze and swam in water that was too still and eerily warm. We baked for 20 minutes and left.
An ice cream stop was the preamble to a dusk visit to an ocean beach called Sagg Main, where the bodysurfing conditions were superb. The ocean water was appropriately cold, and the beach air was warm without being hot. Oh the joy. I finished reading a long profile of the writer Colson Whitehead in The New Yorker. Our day was finally coming together.
From the beach, Christine and I drove to Sag Harbor for dinner, to a mom-and-pop Italian restaurant we like there. On our way to it we drove by a wee inland course in Bridgehampton. I can tell you almost nothing about it except that it has nine holes, it looks old and no right-minded golfer would dare to sneak on it. We parked near a church on the outskirts of Sag Harbor’s downtown.
Colson Whitehead, I had just read, spent his childhood summers in Sag Harbor with his family. A lot of the New Yorker piece dwells on that, Whitehead as an affluent Black summer kid in a town with few Black people in it, biking around town with his brother, making the scene, in their own way. Our waiter at Il Capuccino, a local young man studying urban planning at Vassar, knew a lot about Colson Whitehead. Good food, good times, no dessert course. We left the restaurant at 9:15 p.m, with Sag Harbor’s fireworks, over Sag Harbor’s harbor, announced for 9:30. Christine and I were married a short ferry-ride away, on Shelter Island.
We started walking downhill, bound for the harbor, and were surprised to immediately see the first firework low in the sky, 15 minutes ahead of schedule. For the next 45 minutes, we took in the light show, concluding with (per custom) a shoot-the-works blast that often brings to mind for me Francis Scott Key’s ode to “red glare” and the Grucci family of Bellport, the first family of American fireworks. In 1983, while visiting my parents for Thanksgiving, I covered a fatal factory blast at the Grucci factory in Bellport for the Boston Globe.
A few minutes after the last spark of the Sag Harbor’s show last blast evaporated, a thousand cellphones went buzzing at once, with an emergency notification from the National Weather Service:
SEVERE THUNDERSTORM WARNING in effect for this area.
DESTRUCTIVE 80 mph winds.
Take shelter in a sturdy building, away from windows.
Flying debris may be deadly to those caught without shelter.
All along Sag Harbor’s crowded sidewalks, there was a sense of urgency, as this storm moved in and the air got heavy, bordering on panic but short of it. We could hear the fierce wind in the trees above us and could see heavy raindrops landing on the roof of the Mini as we entered it. Sag Harbor’s narrow streets were almost overwhelmed by the fleeing cars, some of them twice the size of ours. Christine wondered aloud if we should just stay put, not that that seemed particularly safe. We were in an area crowded with mature trees. We had to go somewhere and headed out. Christine asked Waze to direct us to the SpringHill Suites, our weekend home on the outskirts of Bellport. Room 109. We’ve been in it before.
The Mini plowed through pools of water that were at least a half-foot deep and maybe double that. You needed some speed to get through them. I kept repeating the same question to Christine: “Next turn, please.” We’re on this road for 1.5 miles. We’re on this road for 2 miles. Bear left at the next sharp turn. Twigs and branches were falling all around us. The rain and wind were fierce. Passing vehicles sprayed us like we were in the early stages of a car wash, our windshield momentarily opaque. Waze was rerouting us every half-mile or so, out of informed and sudden necessity. These back South Fork roads, more rural than suburban, were pitch black even when the sky turned an ominous gray, filled with the angry glare of an electrical storm. We were on roads I had never seen in my life. In a manner of speaking, we were blown off course. There was no safe place to stop even if we had wanted to. My skin was clammy.
There was no safe place to stop even if we had wanted to. My skin was clammy.
All I wanted to do was to get to Sunrise Highway, where there would be safe places to pull over, strip malls with overhangs and the like. At one point we were a few hundred yards from the highway but couldn’t get to it, as a downed tree crossed our road. One car after another made a three-point turn. The alternate route, or routes, took forever. Waze was in control and there was no choice but to keep the faith. We drove by the entrance to The Bridge, or so I sensed. We were driving blind. With a kind of blind faith, I should say.
Eventually, amazingly, Waze led us to a road that offered a clear shot to Sunrise Highway: Tuckahoe Road, right through the Shinnecock Hills Golf Club course. In the afternoon, on that same road, the clubhouse was on our left, and there were people here and there, golfers and caddies and workers. Now the old clubhouse was on our right and it was a ghost town, dark and lonely on the top of its hill. But comforting, too: I knew it. You could wait out a storm there if you had to. Nobody would deny you that, even after the fact. The opposite, if anything. Glad to hear you’re safe and sound. Easy to imagine that. Golf and golfers are good that way. We’re a kind of clan, really. I have found that often.
The windshield wipers were keeping up, pretty much, and I offered silent praise to our trusty green Mini, surely with less urgency than Washington did when riding Nelson, his beloved wartime horse, though the comparison did cross my mind, knowing all the while it was a wild reach.
We made it to Sunrise Highway and the driving was fine. We made it back to our room. A 50-minute drive took an hour and 50. My clubs were in the boot, along with a damp bathing suit.
Flying debris may be deadly. There’s a sentence that gets your attention. The National Weather Service should take a bow here. Waze, too. While I’m at it, I tip my hat to my bride here. (Here and always, really.) I often bring back golf caps from my little trips, to this course or that tournament, lightweight white ones you can put in the wash, and Christine wears them all summer long, right through Labor Day, sticking her ponytail through the protractor-shaped keyhole above the adjustable strap in the back and with a style (I would like to say) all her own.
We got lucky. Flying debris fell around us but not on us. We made it back to the SpringHill Suites and the night manager at the front desk was holding down the fort on a wild night, a wild conclusion to 7/4/250. Midnight was closing in. We were in, the curtains drawn, the TV on. For the night, 109 was Home.
Michael Bamberger welcomes your comments at Michael.Bamberger@Golf.com.
