Another list of top public golf courses, another chance for Bethpage State Park's marquee layout to shine. Bethpage Black is featured near the top of the latest course ranking, this time GOLF.com/GOLF Magazine's 2024-2025 list of Top 100 Courses You Can Play, though for once the Black Course is forced to step back and cede some of the elite-tier spotlight to another course with Long Island roots. Well...sort of.
GOLF posted its Top 100 last month, rating America's best public golf courses (and publicly accessible private clubs) from Pebble Beach at #1 to Wine Valley (#100) in Washington. Bethpage Black and Red, New York State's only representatives on the list, came in at #5 and #65.
The Black Course cracking the top five of a national ranking is noteworthy, especially when it's slotted directly in front of headliners like Kiawah Island, TPC Sawgrass and Bandon Dunes. But it's the course ahead of the Black at #4 that's of unique local interest. The Lido — the Tom Doak reincarnation of the long-lost Long Island club — has been a hit since it opened at Sand Valley in Wisconsin in 2023. (GOLF ranked Lido #68 in its Top 100 World list during its debut season.) The course is nearly a down-to-the-inch replica of the vaunted C.B. Macdonald club in Lido Beach once considered among the greatest American golf courses. For a brief period from the Black's opening in 1936 to Lido's demise in 1942, the two courses were active at the same time, separated by just 20 miles.
Of the two existing Long Island courses on the list, GOLF writes: "The Black enjoys one of the great routings, highlighted by the masterful way Tillinghast placed the fairways and greens from the second hole in a valley all the way through the dogleg left ninth. The par-5 fourth and its iconic cross-bunkering is a world-beater."
The Red Course "more than holds its own, albeit with much less fanfare than its fellow Tillinghast design. There’s no warning sign at the first tee like at the Black, the rough is friendlier and the bunkers less dramatic (except for the fistful that split the fairway on the par-4 13th). But locals know none of that makes the Red a pushover."
