Golf on Long Island

Tallgrass CC moves to new web home

(UPDATE:  As of March 2010, Tallgrass can be found at its newest website, www.TallgrassGC.com.  See this post for more details.)

Due to some technical issues, the Tallgrass Country Club in Shoreham can now be found at its new web address -- www.tallgrasscountryclub.com. 

For more information, check out Golf On Long Island's course flyover of the Gil Hanse design.  Tallgrass was ranked by Golfweek as one of its "Best Courses You Can Play" in 2006 and 2007, and its 11th hole is part of Newsday's Long Island "Dream 18."

New website for Pine Hills CC, Heatherwood

Back in January, I noted here that the website for the Pine Hills Country Club in Manorville was out of service.  That's nothing uncommon during the offseason, and a staff member at the course assured me that Pine Hills is open every day of the year except Christmas.

Well, the offseason came and went, and so did a few weeks of spring golf weather, with no sign of a new site -- just the same "Site has been disabled" page that has greeted visitors since last season.  Another call to the course this week revealed that Pine Hills and the Heatherwood Golf Club can now be found at a new web address -- www.completegolf.biz.

Google searches and course directories still list the old URL, so be sure to take note of the new one.

Pine Hills is a long, challenging par-73 with water infringing on half of its holes.  Heatherwood is an executive par-60 in Centereach.

Flyover: Christopher Morley Park

[This flyover was updated on July 28, 2023.]

A west-to-east golf tour along the Long Island Expressway would culminate somewhere out in Manorville or Riverhead, at a lengthy course like Rock Hill or on the Island's only par-6, the 18th hole at Cherry Creek Links.  The first, western-most stop on such an Expressway golf tour in no way resembles either of those.  The Christopher Morley Park Golf Course in Roslyn is a pint-sized par-30 where the driver and fairway woods can all be left in the trunk. 

At 1,600 yards, Christopher Morley is the shortest of the nine-hole municipal golf courses in Nassau County.  Its three par-4s are generously measured at 227, 267 and 300 yards.  Morley is heavily wooded, its overhanging tree branches and underbrush ramping up the degree of difficulty on some shots.  It is a good course for beginners who won't mind stretching their limbs through bushes and branches to fetch their balls.  Experienced players can drop by Morley for some valuable short-game and mid-iron practice.

LAYOUT:
Morley begins with a 267-yard par-4 that turns left at its midpoint through a narrow clearing.  Considering the short distance and the inability to see the flag from the tee, it's easy to find the trees at the far end of the turn if you don't know where to aim.  Two parallel fairway bunkers point you in the right direction.  The second and fifth holes are similar in both length and style.  The 143-yard second is wooded down the right side, and its green falls off abruptly from its sides and back.  Two yards longer, #5 also features trees on the right as well as an out-of-bounds fence.

The third and fourth holes are much more spacious.  Three large bunkers stand guard on the 153-yard third, and the much shorter fourth offers no room to miss long.  Anything over the green will roll down onto a hardened strip of dirt and tree branches.

A hill serves as an obstruction on #6 and #7.  From the sixth tee, the green is out of view, hidden below the crest of the slope.  Accurate shots on this 152-yarder will depend on experience with proper aim, and potential par putts will be influenced significantly by the steep ridge on the left side of the green.  The 300-yard seventh plays up the hill to an elevated fairway.  Its green is backstopped by a fence, and approach shots sent into the weeds and leaves on the right are essentially OB.

The eighth hole calls for a short pitch to an oval-shaped green.  On Morley's closing hole, a 227-yard par-4 (that measures much closer to 200 yards), trees take up residence in the fairway and stretch comfortably over your line to the green. 

CONDITIONS:
The golf course at Christopher Morley Park resembles, well....a park.  The trees and shade make for a nice stroll.  Greens and tee boxes seem to blend into the background.  It's a very pleasant setting that, like many golf courses in northern Nassau County, was once part of an old Roslyn estate. 

Aside from the greens, which are mostly flat with very slight tilts, the rest of the grounds are more park than golf course.  Tee boxes and parts of the fairways look more receptive to picnic blankets than pitching wedges.  (Fittingly, some tees have picnic tables nearby for brief rests in the shade.) 

With so many trees come so many branches, so many of those porcupine balls that drop from above, and so many leaves and pine needles.  It's hard to come up with a nice, flat lie with all of it scattered around.  Plus, the shade makes for some barren or sparse patches where the sun struggles to reach.  

HOLE(S) TO REMEMBER:
Trying to reach the green from the tee on the 200ish-yard ninth is like a point guard trying to loft a running one-hander over a center in a pick-up basketball game.  You have to put some air under it, or it'll be swatted aside.  Trees block the path to the green, a sight not normally seen.  There used to be a large clearing behind the green, but a new tennis facility built in 2014 swallowed up a section of the course between #9 and the clubhouse.

AREA(S) TO AVOID:
Unless you put your ball over a fence or deep into the woods, you should be able to find wayward shots easily.  But save yourself the frustration of trying to pitch off pine needles and twigs.

FUN FACT:
When the course was built in the 1960s, #9 played as a longer dogleg hole that measured around 300 yards.  Five bunkers surrounded the green.  Within just a few years, most of the bunkers were filled in and the green was abandoned, replaced by a new green that remains today.  The original was likely taken out of the rotation because errant drives were flying into the adjacent tennis courts.  For years the old green was maintained and used, presumably, for practice.  As noted above, a large clearing between the old and new greens lasted until the new tennis facility was built in 2014.

NEARBY COURSES:
Harbor Links - Championship/Executive (5 miles)
Cantiague Park (8 miles)
Eisenhower Park - Red/White/Blue (8 miles)

CONTACT:
500 Searingtown Road, Roslyn 11576
(516) 571-8120 / 8119 (wait time)

Have thoughts and opinions on Christopher Morley Park?  Share them with other Golf On Long Island readers by posting in the comments section below.

American Legion Outing at Crab Meadow

The Crab Meadow Golf Club will host the 17th annual Northport American Legion Golf Outing next Monday, April 27.  The event begins at 9:00 with breakfast and a warm-up on the range before a shotgun start at 11:00. 

Entry fee for the outing is $150 per person and includes cart, range balls, all beverages and meals, as well as golf giveaways and prizes.  There will be a barbecue lunch during the event, followed by a cocktail hour and dinner.  Tee times are limited to 30 foursomes.  Call Jim Mahoney at (631) 261-6242, or Crab Meadow at (631) 757-8800, for details and registration.

The Long Island Press selected Crab Meadow as one of the top three public golf courses on the Island in its recent "Best Of Long Island" poll.  The eighth hole, a short par-5 with a lake guarding the green, is part of Newsday's Dream 18.

"America's Linksland: A Century of Long Island Golf" -- by William Quirin

Much will be made in the weeks leading up to the U.S. Open in June about Bethpage Black and its standing among the country's greatest courses, just as it was discussed in 2002, and again two years later when the Open was held at Shinnecock Hills.  But Bethpage and Shinnecock are just two pictures -- two very vivid pictures -- in the whole Long Island golf collage.  Long Island has a rich golf history that has made it one of the centers of the sport in this country.  Just open up Google Earth and fly over the Gold Coast and Five Towns areas of Nassau County, or look east over the Hamptons, to see golf's place in Long Island culture.  William Quirin, a Long Island resident, chronicles this history in "America's Linksland: A Century of Long Island Golf," a fantastic combination of history and photography that was published just prior to the 2002 U.S. Open. 

Though most of the Island's early golf history took place inside the gates of private clubs, there is still plenty to be said about the roots of the area's public golf.  As Quirin describes, Timber Point, today a 27-hole public facility owned by Suffolk County, was once one of the most exclusive and highly regarded private courses in the country.  Some of its original features still exist in modernized form, namely the famous "Gibraltar" hole.  Eisenhower Red was originally the centerpiece of the long-gone Salisbury Country Club, which in the 1920s came to be known as the "Sports Center of America" and featured five courses all within the confines of today's Eisenhower Park. 

The Depression and World War II delivered death blows to many of the Island's most prominent golf courses, and some that managed to survive were finished off later by the region's population boom.  New post-war families needed fresh roads to take them out into suburbia, and many of those roads were paved over fairways and through greens.  Ironically, the facility that will draw endless praise around the golf world come U.S. Open time, Bethpage, was born as a public works project during the Depression.

Golfers with an appreciation of local history will love the book.  Published in advance of the 2002 Open, its devotion to Bethpage Black (and the park's other courses) is timely once again.  Quirin presents a hole-by-hole overview of the Black, accompanied by the photography of L.C. Lambrecht, as well as the words of designer A.W. Tillinghast.

Bethpage Black open to the public

Bethpage will be the center of the golf universe in a little more than two months, and until then, local and visiting amateurs can get a taste of the Black course before it shuts down for U.S. Open preparations.  The Black reopened yesterday for its abbreviated spring season, which will come to a close on May 31.  For the next seven weeks golfers will have the opportunity to play once -- and only once -- on the course that will host the sport's U.S. national championship from June 18-21.

The first group on tee will go out at 8:00 each morning during the short season, the last group at 1 p.m.  All player information will be retained in a database to ensure that nobody challenges the Black more than their one permitted round.  Mark Herrmann detailed the reservation and planning process in his Newsday column last week:

The first six slots each day will be given to walk-ups, which generally means people who have spent the night in their cars. At a random time each night, park supervisors will distribute bracelets to confirm places in line. The final 24 tee times every day will be filled through the call-in reservation system. Starting at 4:30 every morning, a ranger will compile a waiting list to replace cancellations or no-shows.

Adjacent holes on the Black's neighboring courses will be modified in the spring to make room for the Open layout.  The Red course, which begins and ends next door to the Black's 18th hole, will have its first and 18th holes shortened to par-3s, and the par-5 fifth will become a par-4.   The opening hole on the Green course, a downhill par-4 that borders the Black's #1 on the right, will also be converted to a par-3.

Flyover: Peninsula Golf Club

[This flyover was updated on November 1, 2020.]

The Peninsula Golf Club is a full-length nine-hole course with straight fairways and large greenside traps.  Tucked inside a residential community south of Merrick Road in Massapequa, Peninsula has the feel of a neighborhood park.  It is a par-37 (two par-5s, one par-3) of 3,346 yards from the back tees, 3,108 from the middle.  Like its neighbor eight miles to the west in Merrick, Peninsula is a few steps up from the shorter and less hazardous County courses on the South Shore, like Bay Park and North Woodmere.  The distinctive feature here is the bunkering -- all of Peninsula's greens are guarded by deep grass pits that contain slivers of sand traps, some more severe than others.

LAYOUT:
Peninsula's two par-5s, similar in length and layout, line up next to each other, one greeting you at the start of the round and the other sending you on your way.  The first hole measures 434 yards from the middle tees, the ninth 436.  Both holes are influenced by the same bunker in the left rough, and each sports a second trap at the far end of the fairway. 

The only difference between the two is that bad shots are a bit more troubling on #9, where the outer course fence runs up the entire right side and a mammoth trap protects the green's right.  A large tree twisting up from the center of the trap has the potential to render some shots unplayable.

The second hole is a long par-4 with a green sloped back to front.  The tilt of the green can be a source of frustration if you're trying to navigate it from either of the two large traps that await mid-irons gone astray.  Holes 3 and 4 barely crack 300 yards, but the degree of difficulty is much greater on #3.  Approach shots here can be the trickiest on the course thanks to a narrow green that's closely protected on its right by the course boundary.  The fifth is a 377-yard par-4 that doesn't allow for overclubbing on its approach -- anything long will find the cart path or, worse, the perimeter fence.

The sixth hole briefly interrupts Peninsula's string of par-4s.  It is the only par-3 on the course, a 151-yarder with some mounding on all sides of the target.  Seven and eight play on the other side of a local street.  Mounding around the long, narrow green on the 364-yard seventh can make for awkward lies, especially left, though you can easily find frustration in the contoured right rough as well.

HOLE(S) TO REMEMBER:
With its arrow-straight fairways, Peninsula lacks a truly distinctive hole.  It does have one unique shot, however.  The approach on #3 is one of the diciest shots on the course because it demands a tight squeeze onto a narrow green. 

Long drivers can cut down the difficulty of the shot by leaving themselves with only a short pitch on this 309-yard par-4, but for those short off the tee (or playing from the 331-yard back tees), there is no good spot to miss with the short irons.  The green is slightly elevated and runs away diagonally from the fairway.  It slopes down off the left side toward the cart path, and the front is guarded by a cross-shaped bunker.  On the right, a wooden rail fence pinches in close to the green.  Any approach lost to that side is out of bounds.  The green is deep and narrow -- even if you pass the test on the approach, you could still be facing a challenging lag putt.

AREA(S) TO AVOID:
Right-side bunkers on #2 and #9 are Peninsula's most treacherous.  Trees block the center of both.  The trap on #9 is mostly grass, but the tree is much bulkier, and overhanging branches can disrupt any thoughts of getting your ball way up in the air.  Sand rings around a grass island in the bunker on #2, and generally, sand saves are harder to execute when trees and bushes block your view of the stick.

OTHER NOTES:
As of April 2018, the course now accepts online reservations.  Tee times can be made up to three weeks in advance.

NEARBY COURSES:
Bergen Point (6 miles)
Merrick Road Park (8 miles)
Bethpage - Blue/Black/Green/Red/Yellow (8 miles)

SIMILAR COURSES:
Merrick Road Park
Timber Point - White Course
Spring Lake - Sandpiper Course

WHERE TO GRAB A BITE AND A BEER:
Don't let the residential surroundings fool you -- there is a wealth of dining options close by.  Head in any direction but south to find food or drink.  To the west, one shopping center houses Zim Zari, a Cali-Mex taco joint, and Mercato Kitchen and Cocktails, among a half-dozen other options.  Another minute or two and you'll find two area cornerstones -- Smokin' Al's for BBQ and the classic All-American Hamburgers roadside stand.  Go east for McCann's Pub and Grill, or for a beloved standout in the heart of Massapequa Park, it's hard to top The Good Life.

CONTACT:
50 Nassau Road, Massapequa 11758
(516) 798-9776
peninsulagolfny.com

SEE ALSO:
Peninsula Golf Club rolls out new website, tee times and revamped cafe for 2018

Have thoughts and opinions on Peninsula?  Share them with other Golf On Long Island readers by posting in the comments section below.

Easter Sunday Outing at Crab Meadow

The Crab Meadow Golf Club in Northport will host an Easter Sunday Shotgun Outing this weekend, April 12.  Players can warm up on the range and enjoy a continental breakfast before the first ball leaves the tee around 8:00.  With luck, the holiday morning will include nice weather, strong play and enough time to make it home before company arrives.  Early forecasts are calling for temperatures in the high 50s with sunny skies.

Entry fee for the outing is $50 per person and includes cart, range balls and breakfast.  Call Crab Meadow at (631) 757-8800 for details and registration.

The Long Island Press selected Crab Meadow as one of the top three public golf courses on the Island in its recent "Best Of Long Island" poll.  The eighth hole, a short par-5 with a lake guarding the green, is part of Newsday's Dream 18.

Middle Island extends winter rates through April 15

Thanks to some springtime maintenance, golfers at the Middle Island Country Club can take advantage of winter rates up to and beyond the Masters.  After previously extending its offseason discount through the end of March, Middle Island will now offer winter rates on Spruce, Dogwood and Oak through April 15 as payback for this week's course aeration.

For two more weeks, an 18-hole round is $30 anytime Monday through Friday and $45 on weekends.  Nine hole rates are $20/$25.  Carts are $5 for nine holes and $10 for 18.

Middle Island has undergone gradual renovations under new club management in recent years.  Late last season, Golf On Long Island detailed the remodeled Spruce Course, which now features an "island" green on its redesigned seventh hole.  The Dogwood nine is set for a makeover of its own this year.