[This list was updated on November 7, 2023.]
We haven't even started trick-or-treating yet, but it's time to focus on Thanksgiving golf. That is, if you want to actually lock down a spot in what are usually very popular events.
Local players know Thanksgiving is essentially "last call" for Long Island golf season. Conditions might not be the greatest — hello frost delays, hand warmers and triple layers of heat gear — but it's a final hurrah before a turbulent golfing winter. Sometimes the golf gods send a warm 60-degree morning before it's time to cut the turkey.
Golf On Long Island will update the 2023 Thanksgiving slate of scrambles and shotgun starts as information is made available. All outings are designed to get you home at a reasonable time for family and football. Listed below are many of this year's special holiday events (all are on Thanksgiving, November 23, unless otherwise noted). These outings tend to sell out very quickly, so it's best to book early.
Brentwood Country Club has scheduled a shotgun start for 9:00 a.m. The $54 fee covers golf and cart. Call (631) 436-6060 to reserve a spot.
Cherry Creek is offering 18 holes on the Links Course with cart, range balls, hot breakfast, raffles and on-course contests for $79 per player. Shotgun tee time is 8:30 a.m. Call (631) 369-6500 to register.
Harbor Links will host its 17th annual holiday Turkey Shoot. Registration and breakfast begin at 8:00 a.m., followed by a 9:00 shotgun tee time. Golf, cart and breakfast are $70 for Town of North Hempstead residents; $80 for non-residents. Call (516) 767-4816 to sign up.
Middle Island Country Club has a shotgun start scheduled for 8:30 a.m. The $79 entry fee includes golf, cart and a hot breakfast buffet that opens at 7:30. Call (631) 924-3000 to reserve a spot.
Mill Pond (pictured) will host its 16th annual Thanksgiving Turkey Shootout. Format is four-person team scramble, and the $84 entry fee includes cart, range balls, hot breakfast and a drink. Tee time is 8:00 a.m. The event almost always sells out fast; book in person or by calling (631) 732-8249.
Pine Hills Golf & Country Club continues its tradition of hosting a holiday outing on Black Friday (November 24). This year's event includes cart, range, breakfast and prizes for $85. Shotgun start is 9:30 a.m. Call (631) 878-7103 or visit the pro shop to sign up.
Spring Lake Golf Club will host its annual Thanksgiving Day Shotgun, which includes breakfast and 18 holes. Tee time is 8:00 a.m. Cost is $78 per player. Call (631) 924-5115 for a spot.
Swan Lake's holiday outing begins with 7:00 a.m. breakfast and an 8:30 shotgun start. Beverages and BBQ will be available until 1:00. Entry fee is $65 and covers golf and cart only (food and drinks not included in fee). Call (631) 369-1818 to sign up.
Check back through November for updated information.
A large portion of the former Links at Shirley golf course has sat frozen in time for more than a decade, and last week it finally began its second life serving the community as a town park.
Patriots Preserve, a 100-acre Town of Brookhaven park, opened with a ribbon-cutting ceremony on October 9 that formally reintroduced local residents to the grounds that once housed the public Links at Shirley. The park features a playground, walking trails and a floating bridge over the 8-acre pond that previously was the golf course's central water hazard. Brookhaven Town spent $2 million on the new park and plans to invest another $4 million over the next 10 years on future construction and upgrades, according to Newsday.
"This is going to be one of the last great regional parks in the Town of Brookhaven," Brookhaven Supervisor Ed Romaine told Newsday.
Like many East End courses that were built to ride the late-'90s Tiger wave, the Links at Shirley had a brief, roller-coaster run with its own goal of setting a high bar for public golf on Long Island. Opened in 2000, the course — a full 18 plus a short nine-hole layout — turned what had been Shirley woodland along William Floyd Parkway into an immaculate layout with daring water holes, waste-area bunkering and private-club conditions. As a result, it also featured some of Long Island's highest green fees. When the boom slowed down, Shirley began to struggle amid whispers of an eventual sale and development.
In 2009 the course hosted a record number of rounds and the MGA Public Links Championship, but they weren't enough to stabilize the Links' future. In spring 2010 it posted a closed sign on the front gates and never reopened.
A residential development eventually took over the clubhouse area while the bulk of the course was left abandoned until construction began recently on Patriots Preserve.
The three municipal golf courses at Eisenhower Park will be aerated this month, beginning with the White and Blue courses.
Aeration on those two courses will begin this coming Monday, October 16, and last through the week. The Red Course will be aerated the week of Monday, October 23.
Players should expect partial closings on the three courses throughout their respective aeration weeks.
For the latest updates, call the Eisenhower Park golf office directly at (516) 572-0327.
Few writers, if any, did more to chronicle the growth and development of Long Island and New York-area golf courses than journalist Ralph Trost. Writing for several New York newspapers, Trost published hundreds of articles and columns on the sport of golf and the local grounds – public and private – on which it was played. His work, which spanned the 1920s boom period through the post-WWII/1950s course die-off, covered nearly every golf course that existed on Long Island during that time.
One course that Trost wrote about in more depth and frequency than most others was the original Lido Club, and with good reason. C.B. Macdonald's Lido was considered one of the best golf courses on the planet during its brief run from 1917 to 1942.
Sometime in the 1930s, most likely, Trost published a pamphlet entitled, "A World Travelled Sports Writer Plays Lido: An Unbiased and Candid Opinion of Lido Golf Course." In it he compares Lido to olives and clam chowder – items that are "a bit jolting at first," but leave you wanting more once you've acquired a taste.
A copy of the pamphlet was sent to Golf On Long Island by a member of the Seiden family. The Seidens owned the Lido Club from 1938 through its World War II-era demise, the losing postwar battle to recover the land and golf course, and the eventual construction of the current Robert Trent Jones course on adjacent ground in the 1950s. It's not clear exactly when the pamphlet was published or where it was distributed.
The following is an unedited transcript of Trost's review of the Lido Club, likely written sometime in the 1930s.
+ + + + + +
A World Travelled Sports Writer Plays Lido
An Unbiased and Candid Opinion of Lido Golf Course
By Ralph Trost
Nationally Known Golf Authority and Sports Writer
A Robin Hood … in reverse
That’s this reporter’s best description of Lido, the course that gives in abundance to the skilled what it takes in super-abundance from the unwise golfers.
Lido, I’ve heard said, is like olives, Scotch whiskey—or New England clam chowder. All are a bit jolting at first but then a fellow acquires a taste. Of Lido, I’m certain, all he wants is more.
Looking back over the years I’ve witnessed golf played at Lido, I’ll admit that at first glance Lido looked a bit weird. Not a tree loomed against the sky. Nothing broke what seemed a monotony of unrelieved stretches and the course itself rolled like a rumpled pancake sprinkled with sand instead of sugar. And that, sir, is the same impression striking the golfer who visits the famed British courses at Sandwich, St. Andrews, Troon, Princes or Westward Ho! and Deal. Why Deal and Lido, insofar as general atmosphere is concerned, are as alike as two peas in a pod.
Just a golf course built upon land that isn’t much good for anything else. That’s the first reaction at Lido. It’s a broad, even if unthinking, compliment to Lido. Lido is not “natural.” It was made that way. At the cost of almost $2,000,000 by a group of millionaire sportsmen who had both the inclination and the courage to buy the best.
Having once built a perfect course, those millionaires built another down at Southampton closer to their summer homes.
Lido, one learns, represents not superb scenery of the sort that prints best in pictures. Lido’s riches are not evident things to be dangled before the eyes like diamond pendants. Rather are they like a Rembrandt or a Goya; things which must be studied to be understood and such, in the end, are the true treasures.
Lido is a most precise test of real golf ability. It was built with meticulosity, not thrown up helter-skelter. It is a persistent challenge to those who want to play golf and not play at it. It is a course only as hard as the golfer makes it and it can be most difficult for those who would try to bully it when what should be done is cajole it. Lido will give — not to a slugger but to a golfer.
If one dare suggest that Lido might be played in the 90s by a woman golfer whose ability with wood-headed clubs includes nothing greater than a carry of 125 yards, the suggestion would be scoffed. But it has been proved true. Lido is not a slugger’s course and to prove it this reporter obtained the services of a woman golfer whose play had been confined to a public course where bunkers existed in name only, and the 5600 yards assigned to the 18 holes on the score card dwindled to a mere 4900 yards under a tape.
There was one understanding in connection with her round. She was to attempt to play her shots where directed. She did her own swinging, her own putting. The reporter took care of the wagers which ranged from a bet she would beat 115, all the way down to an even $5.00 that she’d break 100. Her usually golf-wise parent bet against her attaining such scores even though it was he, at the time, who had established the Lido course record in a championship tournament.
As feared, Lido awed the girl at first and a nine had to be penciled on the score card when she holed out on the first. Yes, a nine where, of all places on Lido, no nine should ever bloom. But then she played under direction, with the idea of wheedling out a score and not bullying the course into submission.
I can vividly recall her driving carefully down the right edge of the 11th fairway as she steered a safe course to a five on the second hole. With no favoring wind, and a shakiness hanging over from that nine on the first, no effort was made to carry the cliff on a straight route down the second. The third hole called for a full spoon shot but her course was to play a safe mashie-iron shot, dependence being put upon a chip shot. The chip was perfectly played and lo, down went a five foot putt for a par three.
No hole played provided a simpler looking six than the fourth. Her drive across the first lagoon was purposely played for the fairway at the left. Her second, an iron, was popped along toward the neck from whence it was simpler playing a third shot across the second water. Another iron put the ball on the green and two putts obtained a six.
Hole after hole was played in a similar manner. Wild gambling was banned. A hurried second on the 9th did plant her ball deep in trouble on the left and an eight blossomed where a five looked so simple. But, all told the score was about what had been anticipated. The card read:
PAR 4 4 3 5 4 5 5 3 4 — 37
PLAYER 9 5 3 6 5 6 6 3 8 — 51
And gambling golf was done with. She played the inner nine in 48 to beat the 100 mark. The high spots on the nine were her drive down the 10th which was hit for the first, not the 10th fairway, her hugging the right of the 11th fairway all the way, her tacking first right and then left down the 15th, her playing short on the 16th and, off the 18th tee, driving at the broad handkerchief of fairway on the left.
She had one burst of good fortune and that came at the 13th, of all holes, where, with a chance for a par four presented, the second shot was half-topped, the ball rolling into a bunker back of the green. From there she most fortunately got down in two to save at least one shot as swiftly as she had thrown away shots on the first and ninth.
Lack of trajectory, and many safe shots, had piled up an eight on the 575 yard 17th. That killed all hope of an easy 95 and presented the chance for gambling with a wood second on the 18th. That shot, curved off into one of the shallow bunkers, laid the foundation for an ugly seven. But the 100 score was beaten and all wagers won.
This, remember, all happened to a woman golfer who played from the red markers, not the women’s tees. It does, I believe, prove my point and that Lido, tough as it can be made for the big hitters who go well back on the blue tees, is a truly reasonable golf course for those who want to play golf. For ordinary walking and club-swinging, the writer suggests a beach or polo field.
There were but two good putts holed, at the 3rd and 13th. And three taken on the 18th made a putt total of 35 which no good player counts as better than normal. The round, all told, was ordinary except in one phase. It did break 100 and that, as perusal of week-end score sheets anywhere proves, is better than average. However, the score was about what the reporter thought it would be — a score within reach of some 90% of all golfdom but not attained by more than half that. That is, if all putts are holed.
Lido is no flatterer. But one does get what he or she deserves. And whether the player be strong or weak, each stroke played is a precise golf shot and not just a fling at the ball.
Since the World War days there has been a demand for golf courses of the type that are extremely difficult for the best players but flattering to the poor. Courses of this type have no carries to be made from the tee, no bunkers to catch weakly hit or poorly judged seconds. This variety has little more than length from its elevated tees to its closely bunkered greens. The result is that ordinary golfers drive with abandon; hit second shots without aim or true consideration and do not begin the actual playing of golf until within reach of the greens.
Little by little these courses are being revamped to fit true golf. Tees are being moved forward so that the greens will be within reach of the shots ordinary golfers should play. The result is higher scores but more golf shots.
So too is another idea dying, the one which demanded “scenery” and hills. Beautiful things, trees. But they have no place in golf. Any golf follower who has seen the way trees have ruined fairly good shots from one man’s clubs while acting as billiard cushions for the wild shots of another, knows that trees are golf’s most unfair hazard; a hazard wholly undependable and warranted only as safety measures to direct, never penalize, play.
Hills too, are losing their flavor. Not entirely because so many players haven’t the heart condition permitting long, steep uphill grinds and sudden down grades, but because golf is becoming wise to the fact that the game requires only gentle rises and slight slopes to introduce the variety of shots in the game.
The reporter whose work takes him to golf courses all over the country finds that other courses change frequently, Lido seldom. Lido needs no changing with each alteration in golf balls, with each improvement in clubs. Lido’s charm is not sheer length, it’s subtlety. Lido is a course for strong minds — not strong backs.
When the final putt drops at the 2023 Ryder Cup in Rome on Sunday, Bethpage State Park will officially be on the clock. Two years and counting until the next Ryder Cup will be awarded on Long Island at the "People's Country Club."
New York State is expecting approximately 225,000 fans from around the globe to converge on Bethpage State Park in September 2025, and when they arrive they'll find an "unprecedented" infrastructure setup that dwarfs what was in place for past tournaments at the park. The facilities will be 40% larger than the 2019 PGA Championship, according to a state press release.
The announcement comes as state commissioners Erik Kulleseid of NYS Parks and Hope Knight of Empire State Development lead a New York delegation to meet with PGA of America representatives and officially receive the Ryder Cup hand-off in Rome this weekend. "Bethpage Black is considered one of the top golf courses in the world and our Parks team is already working on preparations to showcase ‘The People's Country Club' when the golf world's spotlight shines on our state park in two years," said Kulleseid.
Upon completion of this week's tournament, New York State will begin sponsorship and marketing efforts for the 2025 event. Regional organizations like Discover Long Island will also begin promotional campaigns dedicated to attracting national and international fans to the area for the tournament. The PGA of America expects the 2025 Ryder Cup to generate an economic impact of nearly $150 million across Long Island and the Greater Metropolitan New York area.
Bethpage Black is no stranger to hosting big golf events. In addition to the 2019 PGA, the Black Course hosted the U.S. Open Championships in 2002 and 2009. It will become only the second New York golf course to host a Ryder Cup (Oak Hill Country Club, 1995).
The New York State municipal golf course at Robert Moses State Park is hosting a Pitch & Putt Tournament on its 18-hole course next Sunday, October 1. Spots will be held for the first 72 golfers who register.
The tournament tees off at 10:00 a.m. Breakfast and check-in begins at 9:00 and a post-round lunch with awards and giveaways is scheduled for 12:30 p.m. There are prizes for team low gross, men's and women's low scores and closest to the pin.
Entry fee is $40 per person, $160 per foursome. Call the park recreation office at (631) 321-3510 to register.
Robert Moses State Park's golf course is one of three barrier-beach pitch-and-putts on the south shore (Nickerson Beach, Cedar Beach). It is located in a secluded area at the western end of the park with 18 holes ranging from 60 to 110 yards.
Late summer means angled afternoon sunlight, earlier twilight hours and posted aeration schedules. And Bethpage State Park is typically among the quickest to announce its seasonal maintenance dates.
Bethpage will have much of its course aeration done before fall officially arrives. First to close for conditioning will be the Blue Course, which will briefly shut down next week.
Here is the full aeration schedule for the park's five golf courses:
Be sure to call the Bethpage golf office at (516) 249-0700 for the latest info on course availability.
Golf On Long Island's Phil Carlucci will lead a lecture on the 130-year history of Long Island golf next Thursday, August 10 at Harbor Links in Port Washington. The event is part of the Roslyn Landmark Society lecture series and celebrates the 25th anniversary of Harbor Links.
North Hempstead town engineer Jill Guiney and town historian Ross Lumpkin will also be on hand to discuss the development and legacy of Harbor Links, which was built in the late 1990s inside what had long been an industrial sand mine. Renowned architect Michael Hurdzan was hired by the town to design the course following his work revitalizing a similar mining site at Widow's Walk near Boston.
The event is free to attend. Register at the Roslyn Landmark Society website to reserve a spot.
Signed copies of Carlucci's book, Images of America: Long Island Golf, will be available for purchase at the event. Since the book's publication in 2015, Carlucci has led discussions on Long Island golf history at museums, golf courses and historical societies in Oyster Bay, Huntington, Great Neck, West Sayville, Valley Stream and other areas.
To the untrained eye, or rather, the eye of anyone who is not a golf-course designer, the big, barren sand mines of Port Washington were exactly as they appeared – big, barren sand mines.
To Michael Hurdzan and his design team, the excavated pits that drove industry along Long Island Sound for more than a century might as well have been sun-splashed Caribbean beaches, where sand funnels between toes and imaginations run wild with vibrant visions of the future. These pits were the gritty stuff a designer's dreams are made of.
"We looked and thought, 'This is awesome,'" Hurdzan recalls of his initial experience in the mines beside Hempstead Harbor, nearly 25 years to the day that his Harbor Links Golf Course debuted at the bottom of one of those quarries. "We didn't have to worry about things like taking down trees. The land was already destroyed. We were going to put it back together."
The par-72 Championship Course at Harbor Links opened near the end of July 1998 and was followed later that year by the nine-hole Executive Course.
Hurdzan left Long Island and the residents of the Town of North Hempstead with a challenging golf course that stands out as one of the region's most unique golfing options. Tees and greens hover on plateaus built along the tall, once-sandy bluff left over from the property's mining days. Fairways curl around rejuvenated wetlands. Rocky features are more American Southwest than North Shore. (One hole is aptly named "Arizona.") And it's a case study in using a golf course to reverse an environmental calamity. Hurdzan is known for creating eco-friendly golf courses, and Harbor Links almost immediately became a member of Audubon International's Signature Program.
"Harbor Links is special," says Hurdzan, who ranks the course in his top 25 of personal course designs, no small claim for someone credited with several hundred original designs and remodels. Nationally, he says, "it's an undiscovered gem."
It was Hurdzan's previous work at a Massachusetts golf course called Widow's Walk that served as the inspiration for Harbor Links. There, on a similarly destroyed, stripped-bare mining site near Massachusetts Bay, Hurdzan and a team of environmentalists collaborated on a design and built what he calls the first "environmental demonstration" golf course in the world.
Widow's Walk drew the attention of May Newburger, North Hempstead's town supervisor, who had a nearly identical problem on her hands in Port Washington. The sandy canyons and the rusting waste dumped in the old Morewood property were an eyesore, and an expensive one at that. The town purchased the property years prior, but plans to build an incinerator or other industrial and recreational developments had already been scrapped. Newburger was determined to use the land for the public good, and she knew Hurdzan had a knack for turning a property around through golf.
"She thought if it could be done at Widow's Walk, it could be done at Harbor Links," Hurdzan says. He credits Newburger as the figure most responsible for bringing the course to the property. "She was a persuasive person and a very smart politician." (Part of Hempstead Harbor was renamed "May Newburger Cove" in 2017.)
On the grounds, it took 60,000 cubic yards of compost and a stabilization of the eroded bluffs to make a sustainable golf course possible. In the town halls and offices, it took cooperation between multiple departments and the golf-design team to ensure the project stayed on track without delays. The 18-hole course, with its native grasses, wildlife habitats and 50 acres of wetlands, was complete in a little over a year. "We made champagne out of that lemon, not lemonade," Newburger told the New York Times.
Unique landscape aside, Harbor Links is known for its three double-fairway holes, including one – the par-5 sixth – that is considered by many the course's signature hole. It tees off from elevated grounds along the bluff, with players forced to decide between a risky shortcut to a high-side fairway and a safer but longer route down the valley. The green sits up on a plateau. The preceding par-4 fifth asks golfers the same question. Stay low with safety or go for the daring target up top? Hurdzan used these designs to find both golf and construction solutions.
"We worked with the contours on the site and made the different levels work for the double-fairway holes," he says. "In the process we minimized the earth-moving and solved a golf problem at the same time."
The bluff, always in the background and sometimes part of play, gives the course the feel of an amphitheater, something that Hurdzan wanted to "celebrate." On the back nine, two holes curve around its base, followed by the par-5 16th, where downhill drives tee off from a set of tiers built into the hillside. Earlier, sandy mounds remain near the 13th tee ("The Dunes") as a tribute to the site's industrial past.
Not much has changed about the course since it opened a quarter century ago, other than a new set of elevated tees on the par-3 17th. Time has transformed the sandy bluff into a high hill covered in trees and foliage. First-time players likely have no idea they are playing 18 at the bottom of a sand mine.
Hurdzan is proud he was able to give town and Long Island residents such an asset, and he recalls fondly the cooperative effort between his group and local government.
"I didn't even mind the Long Island traffic to get there," Hurdzan says.
[PICTURED: TOP RIGHT – #4 green with the once-sandy bluff in the background; ABOVE LEFT – Hempstead Harbor's sand mines as seen in the 1920s/1930s. The Harbor Links site is at top center. (Photo courtesy Ian Zwerdling); ABOVE RIGHT – The par-4 10th and double-fairway 13th, with the bluff and sand mounds in the distance.]
