Golf on Long Island

Coming Soon: Heritage Spy Ring GC, Long Island's first shot at the Sweetens Cove model

Looking out from a flat, elevated square marked with dusty footprints, Jimmi Conway points toward a slender oasis in an expanse of tire-tracked sand, the pings of a bustling construction site echoing in the background.  Four bunkers stand in line from left to right, their wavy edges framed by strips of green sod.

"I can see this becoming the signature hole," Conway says.  "Picture what this will look like when it's all grown in."

Off to the right are the bare bones of a tumbling fairway, though all that's recognizable to the unfamiliar eye, at the moment, are three more sodded bunkers leading the way to a future green.

This square, possibly sometime next year, will be one of nine tee boxes at Heritage Spy Ring Golf Club in Setauket, soon to be the newest public course on Long Island and arguably the most ambitious public-golf project since Harbor Links was built on a reclaimed Port Washington sand mine nearly a quarter-century ago.  The tee will start players on the 145-yard seventh, and the downhill fairway will be the closer, the dogleg par-5 ninth.  Conway expects the high quality and appeal of these holes will leave Spy Ring's visitors counting down the days -- or maybe minutes -- until their next go-around.

Spy Ring, part of the newest residential development from Commack-based Heatherwood Luxury Rentals, is tentatively scheduled to debut in the second half of 2023 on the grounds of the former Heatherwood Golf Course.  Named as an homage to the Culper Ring and the Setauket area's prominent role in covert ops during the American Revolution, it will be a full-length nine that can be stretched as long as 3,300 yards. 

For many of its nearly 60 years, Heatherwood filled a niche as Long Island's only 18-hole executive course.  The plan is for Spy Ring to also fill its own local niche -- that of a modern, fun-forward nine-hole destination on par with others that have attracted design enthusiasts and curious golfers to places like rural Tennessee and suburban Florida.  There, imaginative architects took spent or outdated golf courses and spun them into darlings of the public-golf world with bold features, strategic design and a streamlined building process.  Conway and Heatherwood president Christopher Capece think they've captured the same formula on the north shore of Suffolk County.

"This has a chance to be something special and unique for Long Island," Capece says.  "I think this is going to be up on the same level with Sweetens Cove."

Tyler Rae is the man behind Spy Ring's design.  Though young as far as golf architects go, Rae has a wealth of experience that includes work alongside Bill Coore and Ben Crenshaw (known locally for Friar's Head and East Hampton, of course), as well as Ron Prichard, Keith Foster and other acclaimed figures in the architecture field.  His resume is a laundry list of restorations and renovations of Golden Age courses, heavy on Donald Ross classics, with some Flynns, Raynors and Tillinghasts thrown in as well.  Spy Ring is one of his first solo designs, and he approached it with the heightened standards of Long Island golf in mind.

"Golf intellect is very high on Long Island," he says.  "You can't just come in with Mickey Mouse bunkers and flat greens and expect to have success.  Especially with a course like St. George's right down the street."

The enthusiasm for the project is hard to miss.  Conway, the longtime director and general manager at both Pine Hills in Manorville and the Heatherwood course, says working on Spy Ring has provided a jolt of energy.  Leading a walking tour on a sunny spring morning, Conway pauses to admire one of Rae's greenside bunkers at the par-3 fifth.  "Sometimes you walk around here and wish you could just spend the day with a bucket of balls," he says.  Capece stops on top of another perch to take in scenic views of rolling fairways and point out how the residences will blend into the course's background.  All in the group rave about Rae's use of open approaches, contoured greens and run-off areas.

For Rae, designing the golf course he envisioned and maneuvering it around the shared property was a challenge.  Initially he considered making the course a reversible nine, but that idea was scrapped over logistical concerns.  He opted to go with a clockwise routing that begins on the flattest part of the site, a "handshake," he describes, to ease players into the round.  Then Spy Ring "gets wild," beginning at #3, a straight, downhill par-5.  Conway says the third tee is "where the course really starts," kicking off a steady build of interest and excitement with each hole.

Pandemic-related delays turned out to benefit the construction process.  Rae and his team of builders had the time to personally shape every feature on the course to their exact specifications, so project costs remained low, a source of pride for the designer.  The crew also stripped off all the topsoil from the site, leaving behind nothing but sand.  ("Boy, it's going to be freakin' dry," Rae says with a laugh.)  The course will be seeded with turfgrass adapted for sandy, firm-and-fast golf, and a state-of-the-art irrigation system will keep everything in balance.  But golf balls will bound down fairways and roll over mounds, a rarity for Long Island publics.

"We set it up to be a turnkey firm-and-fast course," Rae says.  "Very easy to maintain."

On the greens, Rae's internal contouring and funneling leaves surfaces that will be fun without going over the top, unique but with enough restraint to make them appear as natural parts of the landscape.  The green on #6, he says, is inspired somewhat by Seth Raynor's famous punchbowl at Fishers Island.  The seventh has elements of a volcano par-3, a hole type often associated with Ross.

"There's a ton of variety in the greens, and plenty of pinnable space," he says.  "Each one can play really easy or really hard." 

To the experienced Long Island public player, Spy Ring might bring back memories of Gil Hanse's now-departed Tallgrass Golf Course in Shoreham, particularly the openness of the entire property and the creative introduction of elevation to a largely flat site (in Tallgrass's case, a former sod farm).  Some might look at the bunkering on the par-5 ninth and draw parallels to #13 on Bethpage Black, where a center trap is farther from the green than it appears from afar.

Whatever comparisons and thoughts players have in mind when they walk off that ninth hole, Rae simply hopes fun is at the forefront. 

"I want people to come off the course saying, 'I enjoyed those nine holes, and I can't wait to play them again.'"

[PICTURED -- TOP RIGHT: View from the par-3 seventh tee; TOP LEFT: The par-5 ninth tumbles downhill before turning left for the final approach; BOTTOM RIGHT: After a flat start, Spy Ring brings elevation change into the mix starting at the downhill par-5 third; BOTTOM LEFT: The last of three fairway traps is farther from the green than it appears on the par-5 ninth.  The green is located near the trees at center.]

Resurrecting long-lost Lido golf -- the Lido Springs Par-3 course

Turns out it's true.

Down in Lido Beach, a small oceanfront community that plays a giant role in golf history, there is an old, lost golf course, after all.  It's right next door to the present-day Lido Golf Course, and its features, drawn up by one of Long Island's most influential golf builders, remain almost fully intact.  One putting green is split by a knob in its back half, another sits with rimmed edges.  Raised tees, buried beneath a tangle of tree branches and weeds, rest amid overgrown hazards and muddy ponds, waiting to be found.

No, this isn't the glorious hallucination of the most ardent Lido Club enthusiast.  Plenty of golf historians have studied those hallowed grounds, and some have even walked the streets and Lido Beach dunes, knowing they'll never stumble across some trace of the famous pre-World War II masterpiece.  This other course, well, nobody's trying to find it.  And if they are, they better be toting bug spray.

No, this is the story of Lido Springs, a short-lived par-3 course that came and went, following dozens of other little-known area golf courses that also came, went and made a few memories along the way.  It was lit up for night play and pitched side attractions like mini golf and a game room -- not exactly the type of place commemorated in club histories or sepia-toned coffee-table books.  Yet there's some history worth exploring, and for now it holds a very unique distinction in Long Island golf history.  Lido Springs is likely the only instance of a long-gone local golf course sitting untouched, undeveloped, right out there among all of Long Island's hustle and bustle.

And thanks to modern technology, plus help from one of the key figures involved in next year's resurrection of that other lost Lido course, we can see Lido Springs today, down to the finest detail, as if unobstructed by 40 years of physical neglect.

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When Lido Springs opened in the summer of 1963, the big Robert Trent Jones layout next door -- today's municipal Lido course -- was just a few seasons old.  And it had been only two decades since the famed original, C.B. Macdonald's Lido Club, was repurposed for military use in the early years of World War II.  That renowned course was to the west.  Lido Springs, on the other hand, played along Lido's eastern flank, its nine short par-3s wedged into a little triangular parcel dotted with five ponds.

"New Golf Course Opens at Lido," read the headline in The Leader, a Freeport newspaper, on July 11.  "Golf pros of the Nassau County clubs, as well as many other luminaries of the golf world were present at the opening," the article said.

John Brennan, a writer who chronicled the development and construction of Long Island's golf courses for various publications in the 1950s and '60s, indicated in one of his "Off the Fairway" columns that the new Lido Springs was built as an annex to RTJ's neighboring 18.  "Lidoites feel the addition of the short course will help take some of the load from the big course, with some of the older men members ... being detoured to the par-three layout," he wrote prior to its opening.

Players could enjoy a round well after sundown thanks to the "newest and finest daylight illumination on Long Island," according to the Leader.  Advertisements that ran in Newsday highlighted night golf as a selling point, and the course, at least in its early years, was open until midnight.  Rounds after dark were a novelty, and many who played Lido Springs fondly recall them.  Some just remember swatting the gnats and mosquitoes.

"It was so well lit, you saw the ball all the way up in the air and down to the green," says Jeffrey Bernstein, who moved from Brooklyn to Atlantic Beach in 1966.  Summers for Bernstein included trips to the driving range on the south side of Lido Boulevard, and eventually nine holes at Lido Springs.  He would grab one or two clubs and a putter and bike with friends from one end of the barrier island to the other.  Sometimes they'd leave the bikes home and hitchhike to the course instead.

Other elements set Lido Springs apart from the typical pitch-and-putt course.  It was initially planned as a semi-private club with memberships, tee times and an on-site pro.  Most notably, the design of its nine short holes was credited to William Mitchell, the golf course designer whose frequent work in the 1960s and early 1970s altered Long Island's golf landscape the same way Macdonald, Seth Raynor, Devereux Emmet and others left their marks in the early 20th century.

By July 1963, Long Island's second golf building boom was already well underway, and Mitchell played a big part.  His course at Pine Hollow Country Club in 1955 was the first to be built in the region since the end of the Depression and ensuing war years.  When a dozen new courses opened locally in 1961 and 1962, Mitchell's hand was on at least two of them -- Old Westbury and Woodcrest.  Mitchell would come to be known as golf's "public defender" -- he felt strongly about designing courses public players could take pride in, with features that were fair to the average high-handicapper.  He was a proponent of executive-length courses for their smaller demand on time and land use, and his goal was to eventually build a women's golf course on Long Island.  (Plans had already been drawn when Mitchell passed away in the early '70s.)

It's hard to know exactly how much time and energy Mitchell invested in the Lido Springs layout (his 18-hole course at Noyac in Sag Harbor opened the same year), but it certainly incorporated many of his design principles.  Greens featured some interesting contours, though nothing too "gimmicky," as he described movement that could potentially penalize good shots and reward bad ones.  For the less-skilled player, bunkers were in full view, mostly fronting greens.  ("I don't like to hide a trap," he often said.)  A series of small ponds came into play on all but two or three holes.  As far as time and land use, the nine holes took up less than ten acres and likely no more than an hour to play.

"It was a real golf course, just scaled way down," says Rob Koff, a lifelong area resident who recalls many night rounds there, complete with burgers and fries at the snack bar.  "The greens were legitimate, and the fairway areas were kept in great shape."

"They took care of it," Bernstein says.  "It was in better condition than Lido next door." 

Beyond the initial grand opening, and some newspaper advertisements that ran through the '60s and '70s, there's not much else that officially documents the course's 20-year run, which ended with its abandonment sometime in the early '80s.  It's not mentioned in any profiles or retrospectives about Mitchell's design career, and there are no reports of its closure.  Yet signs of it are still as clear as day to anyone driving down Lido Boulevard or up the 12th fairway at the current Lido course.  The light poles that illuminated so many summer nights and brightened so many memories still stand tall and slightly crooked above the overgrowth.  One that towered over the ninth green is just steps from the boulevard, not far from the rusted remnants of a chain-link fence that separated the course from the parking lot.

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That's the fascinating thing about Lido Springs.  It's still there, waiting to be found.

All Peter Flory needed was an aerial photo and some public data to bring Lido Springs back to life.  Followers of Lido golf history might recognize the name -- Flory, a Chicago-area golfer who counts digitally reconstructing lost golf courses as a hobby -- is serving as an advisor for the Lido Club restoration at Sand Valley in Wisconsin.  He spent three years meticulously generating incredibly detailed renderings of the Lido Club by piecing together clues from aerial photos, ground-level images and written works, then posted them on Golf Club Atlas to be studied and scrutinized by fellow historians and designers.  His work drew the attention of Tom Doak, then Sand Valley's Mike Keiser, who used his images to pitch a restored Lido to prospective members.  That highly anticipated course is scheduled to open in 2023.

Resurrecting Lido Springs took Flory about two days.  An inquiry at the Long Beach Historical Society found its way to Flory, by now established as a trusted Lido Beach golf-architecture historian.  Using archived and current aerial images, he was able to quickly estimate and sketch the location of tees and greens, and publicly available LiDAR data allowed him to paint the picture.  The precise surface elevation data not only revealed that all but one green remain on the ground at Lido Springs, it also pulled up all of their ridges and slopes.  Once plugged into his golf-design software, the LiDAR exposed the surface as if it was bare ground with no overgrowth.  Flory used his judgment to flesh out rough and short grass around the holes, but the greens needed no manipulation. 

"The contours that you're seeing on the image are actually there on the ground," Flory says.

So we know now that the first hole was around 80 yards, give or take a few by tee placement, with a pond short left.  "There's a very cool pocket on the right side of the green," Flory says.  Only three of the holes went beyond 100 yards.  One of them, the fourth, had ponds long and right, and a front bunker with a raised lip.  The 121-yard ninth required a pond carry to a green with a back-half knob and raised shoulders.  By the looks of it, misfires there could easily find themselves lost onto Lido Boulevard.

With the three-dimensional model finished, Flory can make Lido Springs playable on a gaming PC, PlayStation, XBox and even some golf simulators.  It's something Flory did with his Lido Club renderings, complete with his digital self decked out in vintage golfwear, hickory clubs in hand.

As far as playing it again outside under the Lido Beach sun (or stars), technically it's not that far-fetched.  Anyone with a few million dollars handy and the stomach for a battle with the Town of Hempstead or Nassau County could conceivably resurrect the course in real life.  The property has been up for sale for years and is zoned to allow municipal recreation.

Bernstein thinks of the course every time he walks the fairway of the adjacent 12th hole at Lido.  Just a few paces away, on the other side of a fence, Bernstein once stood on a raised tee, looking across the entire Lido Springs course lit up in full view from one end to the other.

"You saw fathers and sons, groups of friends, kids with six-packs," he says.  "People from all walks of life out there just having a lot of fun."

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[PICTURED (click to enlarge): TOP -- Rendering of Lido Springs #1; MIDDLE -- Advertisements printed in Newsday in May and September 1966.  The course advertised in the paper throughout the '60s and '70s and typically promoted night golf; MIDDLE RIGHT -- Aerial photo of Lido Springs, the triangular property at center, as seen in 1966.  Lido Golf Course is to the left, and the Lido Beach Nike missile base is seen to the right; BOTTOM RIGHT -- The full Lido Springs routing, as interpreted using public LiDAR data.  All greens remain intact on the site except #2.  The rendering of #9 shows a bunkerless green with raised shoulders and a knob at back center.  Lido Boulevard was located directly behind the hole.]

The digital renderings published here are the intellectual property of Peter Flory.

For more reading on Lido golf history, see previous Golf On Long Island entries below:

• The Golfer's Journal podcast and magazine piece examine past, present and future of Lido-inspired golf
• Lido Golf Club, famed Macdonald masterpiece, to be recreated in Wisconsin
• A brief look back at the original Lido Golf Club in its "centennial" season
• Street Names: The Ghosts of Long Island Golf's Past, Part 2 (Lido Club)
• Original Lido Club featured on Golf Channel, golf history podcast
• Newsday slideshow features 11 places that were formerly golf courses
• Closer Look: Lido Golf Club #16

The Golfer's Journal podcast and magazine piece examine past, present and future of Lido-inspired golf

Lido Beach golf both past and present, as well as local, national and even international, is the subject of the most recent podcast just published this month by The Golfer's Journal and narrated by New York sports and golf writer Brett Cyrgalis.

If none of that seems to make much sense and the connection between South Shore muni golf and international golf design is a bit unclear, well, you have some interesting reading to do for Long Island golf history class.

The Golfer's Journal podcast focuses on the creation and disappearance of the short-lived Lido Golf Club -- considered to be one of the great architectural masterpieces in golf history -- and how it inspired three new Lidos, two of which are currently being built by renowned designers in Wisconsin and Thailand.  It is a companion piece to Cyrgalis's recent Journal feature entitled "The Hard Truth About Lido," in which the writer not only recalls many rounds played on today's local Lido but also describes in vivid detail a walk through the nearby Lido Beach dunes where the original C.B. Macdonald course stood for just two-plus decades.

Cyrgalis talks Lido golf on the podcast with Gil Hanse and Brian Schneider.  Hanse calls the original Lido a "mythical golf course, like Atlantis," one that he and Tom Doak often discussed when envisioning what they could possibly craft one day from a flat piece of land.  His soon-to-open Ballyshear Golf Links in Thailand is "a tribute" to Lido, he says, complete with its distinctive Macdonald template holes, and slight variations to the original's dimensions and routing. 

Meanwhile, at the Sand Valley Golf Resort in Wisconsin, Doak and Schneider of Renaissance Golf Design are in the midst of a full-scale Lido restoration.  With the help of photography and digital recreations of the course, Renaissance is duplicating every undulation of the original down to the yard.  "Macdonald is the architect of this project," Schneider says, "and we're trying as hard as we can to interpret his wishes and his design."  The course is scheduled to open in 2023.

And of course, there's Lido, the Town of Hempstead muni.  The course is a conundrum, and Cyrgalis explores it in greater detail in the magazine piece.  For every sunny recollection of waterside scenery along Reynolds Channel there is a local golfer's lament about overwhelming wind, muddy conditions or declining facilities.  Cyrgalis calls Lido "a joy in the winter" when the wind and hardened turf often make it play fast and firm like a true links, but admits that in the past "all I did was complain about goose shit and slow greens."  And though the Lido logo includes the year 1914 -- the start date of the original's construction -- there is no link between modern Lido and the "white whale" of golf course history. 

"It took a while before I cared enough to find out about the history," Cyrgalis writes.  "The sign out front reads '1914,' but that is a lie."

The Lido podcast is available for streaming and download on The Golfer's Journal website.  The magazine feature can be accessed with a Journal subscription.  For more reading on Lido, see previous Golf On Long Island entries below:

• Lido Golf Club, famed Macdonald masterpiece, to be recreated in Wisconsin
• A brief look back at the original Lido Golf Club in its "centennial" season
• Street Names: The Ghosts of Long Island Golf's Past, Part 2 (Lido Club)
• Original Lido Club featured on Golf Channel, golf history podcast
• Newsday slideshow features 11 places that were formerly golf courses
• Closer Look: Lido Golf Club #16

New book by Tillinghast biographer credits Burbeck as one of the "geniuses" behind Bethpage

Phil Young traces his love for the golf courses at Bethpage State Park to his early rounds as a teenager in the late 1960s, first on the Blue Course, then the famed Black.  Like plenty that came before him and many more after, he was first staggered by the Black while looking through the trees beside #3 green out toward the distant glacier bunker on #4.  (It was this same view that motivated the USGA's David Fay to fight for the Black Course to host a U.S. Open.)  From that moment, Young was not only an intense Bethpage Black enthusiast but also a devoted follower of course designer A.W. Tillinghast.

So when Golf Digest during the lead-up to the 2002 U.S. Open published a feature by senior writer Ron Whitten that reassigned Tillinghast's Bethpage Black design credit to unknown park superintendent Joseph Burbeck, it inspired instant debate and research in the growing golf course architecture field and upended what many Tillinghast disciples, including Young, believed to be true.

In his latest book, "Bethpage State Park and the Three Geniuses Who Created It," Young elevates Burbeck to lofty heights beside Tillinghast and Robert Moses as one of the indispensable founders of the enormous park, golf complex and Depression-era public works project.  Burbeck was responsible for the creation of the park, Young says, a "massive" task for someone who had to satisfy the powerful Moses and a panel of influential government officials.

"The fact that he could bring that building project to completion in two years, that alone puts him at the top of the top," Young says. 

The hardcover book -- Young's third release devoted to Bethpage and one of many chronicling Tillinghast's life and design career -- includes a chapter outlining Burbeck's many responsibilities in transforming the 1,300-acre Benjamin Yoakum estate in Farmingdale into a vast New York State-owned recreation hub.  Aside from answering to Moses and the Long Island State Parks Commission, Burbeck was tasked with, among other things, processing hundreds of federal relief workers, overseeing sports, course building and a caddy program, and supervising clubhouse construction and all park infrastructure.

"Burbeck had to run two offices," Young says.  "One to maintain the records for federal and state government, and another to run all operations for the park."

What the Tillinghast biographer and historian for the Tillinghast Association does not list among Burbeck's many accomplishments, still, are the designs of the Black, Blue and Red golf courses.  Design credits for those remain with Tillinghast.

Young makes his case over 80 pages that balance excerpts from newspapers and golf magazines with some personal anecdotes, all weaved between full-page photos and sketches.  Chapters chronicle the conception of the park (for which Moses earns his title of "genius"), descriptions of the courses and the "grand" golf exhibitions hosted in the 1930s and '40s.  The headliners, though, are the chapters devoted to Tillinghast's and Burbeck's intertwined roles during development of the golf courses and completion of the park as a whole.

Among the new evidence Young introduces here is a state employment card that lists the exact dates Tillinghast was on Bethpage grounds offering his services as "consulting architect."  The government document refutes previous claims, including in Whitten's piece, that Tillinghast signed onto the job for a maximum of 15 days.  In fact, he was paid for nearly double that time, and in Young's estimation, the dates line up with the routing, shaping and grow-in of golf courses built at a rapid pace by hundreds of relief workers.

Young also recounts a story first told in his 2004 book, "Golf's Finest Hour: The Open at Bethpage Black."  Just weeks ahead of the 2002 Open, professional golfer and NBC commentator Roger Maltbie stood on the Black's fifth green and made his own contribution to the debate.  "I can tell you one thing for certain," Maltbie declared.  "No one named Burbeck ever designed that hole."

Who did he say that to?  Phil Young, eyewitness to a foursome of Maltbie and three Bethpage regulars playing a taped round for part of the Open broadcast.

ORIGIN OF THE TILLY-BURBECK DEBATE

For nearly 70 years, three of the four "original" Bethpage courses were tied to Tillinghast without dispute.  The new park absorbed the existing Lenox Hills Golf Club, later the Green Course, in 1932, then added his Red, Blue and Black in 1935 and 1936.  A month shy of the highly anticipated, publicly hosted 2002 Open at Bethpage Black, Whitten turned that widely acknowledged history on its head with a finality that struck Young and other Tillinghast supporters.  "[Burbeck] did design Bethpage Black," Written wrote.  "The evidence always has been out there, if anyone had bothered to dig for it."

Whitten's revelation in Golf Digest hinged on the account of Joseph Burbeck Jr., who as a 4-year-old took part in the August 1935 clubhouse grand opening, his presence captured in photographs of a young boy unlocking the new structure with a ceremonial key.  The younger Burbeck told Whitten he recalled long days watching his father pore over blueprints and drafts in the family's home on the park grounds and visiting construction crews hard at work on the new courses.  His father's contributions had been overshadowed by a prominent figure who was barely on site, and so the name "Tillinghast" was not spoken in the Burbeck house, per mother's orders.

These memories formed the foundation of Whitten's argument, backed up by two supposedly smoking guns -- that the courses had already been laid out when Tillinghast was brought on as a 15-day consultant in December 1933, and that a 1959 "official history" published by the parks department says Bethpage's golf courses were "designed and constructed under the direction of Joseph H. Burbeck."

Of the two, the claim that design work had already been done prior to Tillinghast's arrival is the most significant, and would likely settle the debate once and for all.  But that claim is not adequately supported say Whitten's critics.  There is evidence that some pre-Tillinghast work might have been done on the Blue Course, but nobody knows precisely to what degree, and by whom.

Neither Tillinghast nor Burbeck were ever quoted with specific descriptions of what they performed or were hired to do on the golf courses.  Only Tillinghast comes close.  In 1937 he wrote, "It was my very good fortune to be selected by the Commission as its consultant course architect," then lauds Burbeck for his valuable support.  Similar statements appear elsewhere, all of which open the door to other questions that researchers have sought to answer.  What does "consultant" mean in the context of government-hired workers amid a global depression?  What does the design term "laid out" mean when relayed by a 1930s news writer?  Whose word carries more weight -- Tillinghast's, or a reporter speaking for Burbeck, as golf writer Lester Rice did in a 1937 feature?

And that's where the Tillinghast-Burbeck issue bogs down on a rough-covered slope shaped by hearsay, semantics and deconstructions of news reports and public-relations speak.  Quotes culled from articles, golf magazine features and promotional pieces, plus sketches, models and anything bearing Tilly penmanship, have formed for nearly two decades the collective Zapruder film of the golf course architecture field.  Both sides rely on historical evidence that by nature is open to interpretation.   

Will the debate be settled by the time Bethpage hosts the Ryder Cup in 2025?  "No," Young says.  There likely is no document hidden away somewhere that will provide closure.  (One set of design drawings supposedly exists in a government archive, though searches have turned up nothing.)  Even if drawings were found somewhere, chances are they wouldn't have Tillinghast's signature on them anyway, Young says, because that's not always how he worked. 

"This is all there is," according to Young.

BURBECK'S LEGACY

Over time Young's understanding of Burbeck's expansive role at Bethpage has led him to appreciate the longtime superintendent on a whole new level.  "The purpose of this book is to really show what Burbeck did," he says.

When Whitten's piece came out in 2002, Young quickly became the go-to source for a discussion and defense of Tillinghast.  He appeared on CNN, The Golf Channel and was approached by newspapers around the country.  After all, his book, "Golf for the People: Bethpage and the Black," had just been published earlier that spring.

Needless to say, the relationship between Young and Whitten has had a Koepka/DeChambeau vibe.  The two communicated briefly in the wake of Whitten's feature, but neither moved from their position.  Seven years later, Whitten reaffirmed his stance with a second Golf Digest piece in advance of the 2009 Open at Bethpage.  In it he references a 1936 New York Times article sent to him by a "Tillinghast proponent" -- Young -- that seemed to support him as the designer.  "Does that one item convince us that Tillinghast deserves primary credit for Bethpage Black?" Written wrote.  "Nope."  [Whitten did not answer a request for comment from Golf On Long Island.]

What Golf Digest did to Burbeck was a "major injustice," Young writes in his book.  "They ruined Burbeck's legacy.  He was never the 'villain' in this story until 2002."

Young's passion for both Tillinghast and Burbeck is evident in Three Geniuses.  So eager is the author, at times, to present his wealth of information that misidentified years or hole numbers occasionally sneak into the text.  But it doesn't detract from the research.

Though the case will still be open when the Ryder Cup tees off in 2025, perhaps something else will be done by then, something that Bethpage has already done for Tillinghast and Rees Jones.

"I hope the park comes up with a way to honor Burbeck," Young says.  Judging by his respect for Burbeck, it's likely Tillinghast would agree.

"Bethpage State Park and the Three Geniuses Who Created It" can be purchased online at the Golden Age Research website.

[PICTURED -- TOP: Joseph Burbeck; SECOND: A 1935 aerial of the Red, Blue and Black courses.  A polo match is in progress on what is currently Black's first hole.; THIRD: A.W. Tillinghast; FOURTH: Plaques dedicated to Tillinghast and Rees Jones near the Black's first tee.]

Bethpage Red open for 2021, Black to follow as crews finish projects around the course

Mother Nature washed out Opening Day at Bethpage Red with a soggy April Fools' joke that saturated the course, much like the cold and snow that Old Man Winter whipped up to lop off six weeks of offseason golf and maintenance work.  Bethpage Red instead reopened for the 2021 season yesterday under a stiff breeze, and the Black Course is on schedule to open April 15.

Despite those weeks of sitting snow, "the winter treated the courses fairly well," says Andrew Wilson, director of agronomy at Bethpage.  "No winter damage to the greens, which is always the major concern."

In fact, much of the work this winter focused on residual cleanup from last summer's Tropical Storm Isaias, which caused extensive tree damage around the park when it swept through in August.  Crews pruned or removed affected trees, including a large oak on Red #1.

Returning players will notice some minor changes on the Black Course when it opens this month.  The tall native grass surrounding the lobed greenside bunker on #2 has been replaced with bluegrass sod and will be mowed at regular rough height.  This change makes the area more manageable for players and staff, Wilson says, while also allowing for other irrigation tasks to be completed near #2 green and #3 tee.

Black Course superintendent Mike Hadley oversaw the expansion and resodding of walking paths around the course.  "Increasing width on the paths, particularly the holes with native grass from tee to fairway, was a request of the PGA of America that we can slowly accomplish over the next few seasons," Wilson says.  Bethpage Black is scheduled to host the Ryder Cup in 2025.

Less obvious to players are drainage improvements made on the #18 fairway bunkers, including the discovery of a jammed drainage pipe.  "A much-needed infrastructure project," Wilson says.

Elsewhere, a new back tee is open on the eighth hole of the Yellow Course, offering a new look on the drive at the short par-4.  "Adding a new back tee is a bit of a novelty for us," Wilson says.  "We've been adding forward tees the last few years, which have been popular with our shorter hitters."

The six lost weeks of winter scuttled plans for one additional tee project that would have been very noticeable to Red Course players.  Back in the fall Wilson posted a photo of a newly built forward tee on Red #13, a split-fairway par-4 with a large bunker complex in the center of the fairway.  Due to follow was a renovation of the main tee that would raise the box by several feet and offer players a slightly elevated glimpse of the diverging fairways.  As Red players know, many of the hole's features are hidden from the current tee.  But winter conditions took that project off the agenda, at least for now.

Wilson credits superintendents Hadley, Vincent Herzog, Erik Feldman, Eric Newell, Hamilton Lopes, Shawn Brownell, Ryan Murphy and their maintenance crews for doing the heavy lifting in prepping the courses while also battling the realities of the coronavirus era.  "Our staff was impacted, some quarantined, all while rounds were up last year," Wilson says.

"We hope to have less disruption this year and more opportunity to improve bunkers, tees and other parts of the courses."

View photos of the offseason and ongoing renovations by visiting Wilson's and Bethpage Golf's Twitter pages at @Greensideup17 and @BethpageGolf.

[Photos above courtesy of Andrew Wilson.]

Lido Golf Club, famed Macdonald masterpiece, to be recreated in Wisconsin

A replica of Long Island's very own Lido Golf Club is currently under construction with renowned designer Tom Doak at the helm, and will open to members and public guests sometime in 2023 near the Sand Valley Golf Resort in Wisconsin.

Why does the bustling Town of Hempstead municipal layout need a tribute course built halfway across the country, you ask?  Well, it doesn't.  The 1950s-era Robert Trent Jones course abutting Reynolds Channel that draws thousands of Long Islanders each year will remain unique to the barrier island and Lido Beach.

Doak's course near the Sand Valley resort will bring back to life the original Lido Club, the famed C.B. Macdonald course that was built from sandy scratch near the end of World War I, vanished in the early days of World War II, and now lives on in the hearts and minds of golf architecture and history enthusiasts. 

Old Lido -- whose only living remnant is the majestic Lido Towers condo complex that dominates the beach skyline -- has such a following among golf writers and historians that years of chatter about restoration somewhere, anywhere, have breathed the project into existence in central Wisconsin.  The Fried Egg covered the details of the project earlier this week, including a podcast with Doak on both the new course and the original.

So how did Lido jump from the pages of internet forum fodder, grainy photos and newspaper clippings onto the ground in a scenic spot next door to one of America's modern destination golf resorts?  It took more than the course's historical charm and romance.  First, Lido was considered by several writers of the early 1900s to be one of the finest American courses ever built, so its recreation, Doak says in the Fried Egg podcast, was worthy of consideration on its strategic merits. 

But much of the legwork and inspiration came from an unlikely source.  Peter Flory, a Chicago-area golfer with a deep interest in lost golf courses and a fluency in virtual-golf software, took those archived photos and clippings and got to work -- hundreds of hours worth.  Previously, Flory told Golf On Long Island in 2018, he had dabbled in recreating lost courses in his area at Olympia Fields and Mill Road Farm. 

Lido, though, offered a different challenge.  Over the course of the next two-plus years, Flory posted incredibly detailed renderings of all 18 Lido holes on the Golf Club Atlas forums, where golf historians and designers, including Doak, discussed and scrutinized his virtual fairways, hazards and greens.  Using aerials, models, ground-level snapshots and news descriptions, Flory was able to digitally resurrect Lido's slopes and undulations, in some cases using details like shadow lengths and angles in old photos to estimate the precise dimensions of mounds, bunkers and other features.

[PICTURED RIGHT: A 1933 Brooklyn Daily Eagle sketch of Macdonald's #4 "Channel" hole, one of the course's most notable designs -- and the inspiration for today's double-fairway 16th.]

Flory's work drew the attention of Michael and Chris Keiser of Sand Valley, who used the digital imagery to gauge interest from future members.  When it opens in 2023, The Lido -- renderings and descriptions available on its newly launched website -- will be open to members and resort guests.

Back here on Long Island, the Lido muni lives on just to the east of its famous predecessor.  The original Lido spread from channel to ocean on land that is now occupied by Long Beach High School and residential streets.  For more historical context, take a look at these past Golf On Long Island features:

• A brief look back at the original Lido Golf Club in its "centennial" season
• Street Names: The Ghosts of Long Island Golf's Past, Part 2 (Lido Club)
• Original Lido Club featured on Golf Channel, golf history podcast
• Newsday slideshow features 11 places that were formerly golf courses
• Closer Look: Lido Golf Club #16

The Lido Club is also prominently featured in the photo-history book "Images of America: Long Island Golf" by GOLI's Phil Carlucci.  Follow the preceding link for more info or click the book image at the top of the page.

Crab Meadow renamed to honor former Huntington supervisor

The Crab Meadow Golf Course in Northport will be renamed for Robert J. Flynn, the former Huntington supervisor whose work in acquiring parkland paved the way for the town's two municipal golf courses, according to a press release. 

The Huntington Town Board unanimously approved the rededication of the 18-hole course, which will now be formally known as Robert J. Flynn Crab Meadow Golf Course.  Flynn's tenure as town supervisor from 1959 to 1965 included the creation of Suffolk County's first municipal parks system and led to the creation of the public Crab Meadow and Dix Hills Park golf courses.

In a 2016 profile, Jeff Neuman of The Met Golfer said Crab Meadow's launch during the early-1960s course-building boom was a result of Flynn's "forward thinking."

"Flynn believed in protecting open space as part of a strong parks system, and he led the fight for a bond act passed in 1962 that funded the purchase of 700 acres of land for town parks large and small. ... Crab Meadow is bordered to the north and west by wetlands that might have been filled and sold for development in those pre-EPA days had the town not gotten involved." -- Jeff Neuman, The Met Golfer, Nov/Dec 2016

Crab Meadow opened to the public in 1965, the design work of William Mitchell, who's credited with many of Suffolk County's municipal golf courses and considered golf's "public defender."  The history of golf on or near the Crab Meadow property actually dates farther back to the early 1920s, when famed designer Devereux Emmet built the short-lived Northport Country Club beside the wetlands and Sound.

For more on Crab Meadow, check out the course flyover.

Street Names: The Ghosts of Long Island Golf's Past, Part 5 -- Riverhead Country Club

Street names can give clues about a community's past.  That's especially true with golf courses.  When Long Island streets are tagged with golf-related terms, it often means that buried beneath sidewalks and front lawns are the remains of a long-forgotten (or fondly remembered) course.

This series of posts will look back at courses that have been gone for decades, some close to a century, and whose presence is only marked by what developers scratched on road maps and signs.  To see other courses in the "Street Names: The Ghosts of Long Island Golf's Past" series, click the links at the bottom of the post.

******

Many points of interest contend for the attention of the Long Island admirer on a drive heading east from downtown Riverhead.  First up are the shops and riverside cafes in the business district, the Long Island Aquarium, then a short jaunt to the northeast before reaching the produce stands, wineries and spacious farms and fields of the North Fork.

Along that curving road between county seat and Wine Country are two attractions that few beyond followers of golf and local history would consider eye-catching -- one is a street sign marking Fairway Avenue and the other, just a block ahead, a vintage-looking Elks Lodge.

Roads named for fairways, of course, are often a tell.  Chances are, whether named as some variation of Fairway Drive or Fairway Road, the signpost marks the site of a long-gone golf course.  Here, where Route 25 turns toward Aquebogue, once stood the Riverhead Country Club golf course, its clubhouse still in existence as the aforementioned Elks Lodge.

Riverhead Country Club came to be in 1921.  The golf course was built over farmland on both sides of Route 25 with a driving range behind the clubhouse.  Newspaper accounts of the course's opening didn't hold back on the type of grandiosity standard for golf writing of that era.  Riverhead was "declared by some experts to be one of the handsomest and best on Long Island," according to the Brooklyn Daily Eagle, and "was formally opened ... by social functions more brilliant than anything ever before held in this town."

The Eagle continued: "The very face of nature was changed to produce the course.  An expanse of swamps, unsightly hedgerows and waste land have been molded into a scenic panorama that makes even passing motorists stop and take a second look."

Covering a modest 82 acres according to news and historical accounts, Riverhead's golf course was likely similar in build to a modern-day executive course.  Or perhaps it was a bit longer, packing in as much yardage as possible at the expense of safe boundaries between holes.  In the club's inaugural season, a member of the East End's well-known Griffing family took an errant shot right to the kisser, his bloody lips and loosened teeth chalked up to the overwhelming popularity of the nine-hole course (it was expanded to 18 in season two).

The club stood out as a prominent social and recreational venue through the boom of the 1920s, but the music stopped and the tee shots were eventually grounded as the malaise of the 1930s set in.  A 1940 news article on a local group's bid to resurrect the course indicates the property had "not been used in any way for several years."  For the next few seasons it saw intermittent play, though not enough for the club to remain solvent.

In 1946, the clubhouse and surrounding land was purchased by the American Legion, which then sold the larger parcel on the west side of Route 25 the following year for the development of homes for military members and veterans.  This small community was called "Riverhead Greens" -- and is still known locally as The Greens -- in honor of the golf course buried underneath.

The Riverhead Elks purchased the clubhouse in the 1950s, and the historic lodge is now closing in on its 100th anniversary.

[PICTURED: Riverhead Country Club postcard, circa 1920s; courtesy Gail Evans]

SEE OTHER STREET-NAME POSTS:
Part 1: Cedar Point/Meadowlawn/Westwood -- North Woodmere
Part 2: The Lido Club -- Lido Beach
Part 3: Valley Stream Country Club -- Valley Stream
Part 4: Sayville Golf Club -- Sayville

A New Decade of Long Island Golf, Part 3 -- Finding a new voice for courses as marketing evolves in the age of social media

[Follow the links to Part 1 of "A New Decade of Long Island Golf," which covered the main themes of the 2010s and what to expect in the 2020s, and Part 2 on developing local players as time runs low and millennials plan to leave Long Island.]

When followers of local golf scroll over Long Island courses on Instagram, whether it's a snap of a distant green in front of a classic clubhouse, or a stylized, music-backed clip of an early-morning drive up the entrance road, there's a good chance it's from @LongIslandGolfLinks.  Patrick Prague, the 26-year-old behind the Instagram handle, showcases nothing but Long Island golf courses with personal photos and videos of layouts ranging from $7 walk-ups like the Cedar Beach Pitch & Putt to top-tier private clubs like The Creek and Friar's Head.  For those interested in content beyond the visuals, Prague typically provides brief design descriptions and historical details.  Every post connects him with more and more local golfers, and his combination of photography, action shots, videos and background info has attracted a strong following since Prague launched the account in summer 2018.

"Most people just love seeing different Long Island courses on display and shown off to the public," Prague says.  "It gives outsiders an inside look at some of the awesome courses you can find on the Island."

It's also led to meet-ups on area courses with other Instagram posters who, like Prague, record their golf travels on and occasionally off the Island.  Some have played the social-media game well enough to promote and sell their own merchandise.  There's talk, Prague says, of putting together an outing at a local course with others in the online community.

"If golf courses took time to make their social media relevant and engaging then I think it could lead to more people playing," Prague says.  "On the flip side, if the social media isn't well run or unappealing, it's a negative."

COURSES REMAIN QUIET AS MARKETING EVOLVES...

Prague and others who've taken to online social platforms represent a modern wave of golf media, joining some of the more traditional and established resources to offer players a well-rounded view of the local golf landscape.  On in-season weekends you can peruse courses on Instagram while tuned in to Ann Liguori or Anthony Scorcia, whose longtime Sports Innerview and Scorcia On Par radio shows often feature figures of local golf.  Before leaving Newsday last fall after 36 years with the paper, Mark Herrmann covered public courses and the people who run them in his popular Golf Beat column.  Metropolitan Golf Association's The Met Golfer, which recently profiled The Golf Club at Middle Bay, devotes much of its space to clubs and courses in the region.

But it's the courses themselves that struggle to effectively get word out about where Long Island golfers can play and what those destinations offer.  With a couple of exceptions, Long Island's public golf courses have been slow or uninterested in finding ways to promote themselves to the local golfing population, even in an era where, as Prague has shown, appealing content and the followers that come with it -- at least some of them future course customers, most likely -- can be just quick clicks and scrolls away.

Looking back, it took much of the last decade for area courses to simply update or modernize their websites.  Only in recent seasons have a handful of courses started utilizing Facebook to communicate pertinent information like aeration dates and rate specials, offer real-time updates on weather delays and closures, or highlight junior golf and instructional programs.  Others use Facebook to instead promote their more lucrative wedding and catering businesses.  In total, of the 50-plus public golf facilities on the Island, less than half are represented by an active, golf-focused Facebook page.  Barely a dozen feature active Instagram accounts.

On Twitter, the casual golfer has a unique forum to freely interact with golf designers, architects, superintendents, historians, media and professionals.  Few local courses join them.  Players of all types, skill sets and levels of renown chronicle their rounds and travels on Instagram.  Both platforms offer unprecedented insight and visuals into public, private and professional golf, on the course and behind the scenes.  Golf content is everywhere, and there are modern-day conversations happening around the clock that many Long Island golf courses are simply not part of.  The silence is difficult to understand.

"Honestly, I've wondered about [marketing] for years.  My only guess is that most public golf courses here are owned by older people who don't get it," says one former general manager.  "The majority of owners have the mindset that there are only so many options and golfers will come regardless."

A few courses have indeed taken advantage of social media -- typically Facebook -- to promote some of their unique offerings.  At Sunken Meadow, head pro Judy Alvarez initiated a women's boot camp and a "Chicks, Chip & Sip" series that pairs wine and cocktails with instruction.  ("All the sessions sold out," Alvarez says.)  Leagues have grown during her two years at the Kings Park muni.  Notice is sent out on the Sunken Meadow Facebook page and in monthly e-mail newsletters.

Alvarez says the plan for the 2020 season is to bolster the park's social-media presence, with focus on Instagram, on top of her efforts to bring more women and veterans into the sport.

In addition to their annual course improvements, the owners of Sandy Pond in Riverhead promoted and staged events like glow-in-the-dark night golf during recent summers.  Bethpage, of course, underwent a full digital rebrand in 2018.  The park's social media now focus almost entirely on its junior golf academy.

Island's End has used Facebook and Instagram to publicize its semi-private membership tier for young adults under 40 -- a welcome attempt to attract millennial golfers.  (Only Island's End and The Vineyards openly advertise a young-adult-focused membership option.)  And courses like Cherry Creek and Swan Lake -- the latter of which recently posted a small collection of rare photos of the course's 1979 opening (right) -- have made attempts to increase engagement with followers so far this offseason.

But the majority of local courses sit out the social-media game, or marketing in general.

John Glozek, Jr., longtime publisher of Hicksville-based Golfing Magazine, thinks courses have been slow to promote themselves because, historically, there was no need.  When the magazine debuted 30 years ago, golf courses were full.  "They didn't have to do a thing and waits for a tee time were insane," Glozek says.  "When things started going bad [after the economy tanked in 2008], the courses weren't generating enough to promote or market themselves.  So they didn't."

Kristen Jarnagin is currently planning a September trip to the Ryder Cup in Wisconsin to promote the 2024 tournament, which will be held here at Bethpage Black.  One thing the president and CEO of Discover Long Island is not doing is fielding calls from local golf courses looking for exposure that the region's official tourism promotion agency might be able to provide.

"We hear from breweries, wineries, aquaculture and agriculture all the time," Jarnagin says.  "As soon as we hear from golf courses, we'd certainly be happy to work with them.  There's definitely a void there we'd be happy to fill."

...AND NEW AUDIENCES EMERGE

Before Sweetens Cove in Tennessee became one of last decade's biggest public-golf success stories, it was simply a newly redesigned, rebranded nine-hole course struggling to find its footing.  The course launched Twitter and Instagram pages, and by shining a spotlight on itself and its combination of modern, innovative design and fresh perspective on public golf, it began to draw wandering eyes. 

"The golf course really blew up on social media," co-designer Rob Collins told Sports Illustrated, which profiled Sweetens in November.  The SI piece highlights a few Sweetens Cove visitors who traveled across multiple state lines after hearing about the course on a podcast and getting swept up in the hype on Twitter and golf websites.

"Sweetens Cove is also attracting young golfers when overall participation is down 20% since 2006," the SI profile reads.  "I credit millennials with saving the golf course," Collins told SI.

Sweetens and other modernized publics have also succeeded by tapping into another key golf demographic.  Followers of golf architecture and history have slowly carried discussions of long-lost golf grounds and debates about course setup and design attribution into the mainstream in recent years. 

Look no further than last year's PGA Championship at Bethpage.  During its coverage leading up to the tourney, Golf Channel aired a feature in which Connor Lewis of the Society of Golf Historians and golf architect Jim Urbina walked the Lido Beach dunes to navigate the long-lost routing of the original Lido Club.  Computer renderings of the century-old Lido holes were provided by Peter Flory, a Michigan-based golfer who's published his work -- a hobby totaling hundreds of hours on Lido alone -- on the Golf Club Atlas discussion forums where current designers, historians and others in the industry admire and pick through the ultra-fine details.

Just a few weeks later, Long Island's only new course of the 2010s, a little, largely unknown pitch-and-putt traversing the dunes just next door at Nickerson Beach, was featured by The Fried Egg -- a prominent architecture and design website -- as a symbol of all that's right about entry-level golf in the 21st century.

Nickerson Dunes opened in 2015 with zero fanfare -- it was seemingly announced into existence by a Nassau County press release.  Despite its tiny stature and anonymous identity, that bump from The Fried Egg generated some buzz, the kind that, although small, eludes most of its local golf counterparts.

"I have friends upstate who told me they plan to take a trip down to play Bethpage and Nickerson Dunes," says Matt Krantweiss, 38, who grew up close by in Valley Stream.  "I asked why they'd travel here to play a pitch-and-putt.  They said they saw Nickerson on Twitter and that it looks really cool."

Krantweiss is baffled that so few local courses show off their signature holes, give players looks at different approach shots, or offer insider tips on where to aim a blind tee shot or where to miss on a tough par-3.

"I'm not going to play a course because they posted an Arnold Palmer quote or a blooper video," Krantweiss says.  "But I'll definitely be interested if they break down an old Tillinghast or Emmet hole that I can play, or show me the new bunkers or remodeled greens they're building.  If any course focused its efforts on material like that, it would be heads and shoulders above the rest.  But it's as if they don't want the exposure."

Mark Fedeli, a frequent Long Island golfer who works in marketing, also finds himself "profoundly conflicted" when it comes to local courses.

"There are a lot of courses that seem like they could benefit from a change in philosophy, that lack identity or don't seem terribly interested in evolving," Fedeli says. 

Of one Long Island course with a particularly unique design and background, as far as marketing and visibility, "It might as well not exist," Fedeli says.  "Maybe the owners are perfectly content.  Maybe they don't care about promoting their story.  If they're fine with that, that stinks."

"It's hard to survey the entire landscape and not feel like there's a lot of wasted potential," he says.

-------------------

Barring any obstacles, Topgolf will soon arrive in Suffolk County, and a case can be made that the still-unbuilt Long Island link in the driving range and leisure chain -- currently boasting 60+ locations and more than 250,000 Instagram followers -- already has more hype than many established local courses.  Will the new, young player with an interest in taking up golf as a consistent activity spend his or her free time at a golf course they've never heard of and never heard from, or will they instead head for the place that keeps showing up on their Twitter and Instagram feeds, with food, beer and celebrities swatting drives? 

And if Topgolf is the choice, who will convert those players, if anyone, into green-fee-paying golfers?

Part 4 of "A New Decade of Long Island Golf," which will cover the growth and focus on junior golf, will run later this spring.

A New Decade of Long Island Golf, Part 2 -- Developing lifelong players as time runs low and Long Islanders leave

[For Part 1 of "A New Decade of Long Island Golf," covering some of the main themes of local golf in the 2010s and looking ahead to the 2020s, click here.]

John Borkes opens his back door to a sweeping waterfront view near Freeport's Nautical Mile, and when he plays golf, he's typically right nearby, looking out over the surf from The Golf Club at Middle Bay.  

"I'd love to go around playing different courses, but ultimately I wind up at Middle Bay because it's close to home," Borkes says.  "It's a nice course and it's convenient -- usually I don't have time to go farther and play 18."

Five times a week, Jeff Byer commutes from home in Brooklyn to work in Massapequa Park, and he often adds a sixth trip on the Belt Parkway for 18 holes on the Island.  Ask him and he'll tell you his home course is Bethpage Red, but when time is tight and he can't take another tussle with the Belt, Byer will stay inside the borough at Marine Park. 

"I want time to warm up, get loose, hit some irons.  Go to the practice green and get a feel for my putter," Byer says.  "It's part of the full experience."

While their golf priorities vary, Borkes and Byer have one important thing in common -- they both recently celebrated 30th birthdays, putting them comfortably within the confines of the oft-discussed millennial generation, a group of young adults that will have plenty to say about where Long Island golf stands when the 2020s melt away into 2030.

This past summer, Newsday announced the results of an expansive "nextLI" survey that found two-thirds of Long Island's young adults expect to move off the Island within the next five years, citing the region's high cost of living.  New York State as a whole, according to the U.S. Census Bureau, lost more than 75,000 residents from July 2018 to July 2019, the largest population decline of any state in that time period.

And last month, a study by the Nassau County comptroller's office revealed that the number of Long Island residents between the ages of 20 and 44 has dropped by nearly 10 percent since 2000.

"The Baby Boomers are aging out, and that leaves the millennial generation to pick up the slack and replace rounds," says one Suffolk-based course manager.  "If even half of that 67 percent [in the Newsday report] moves away, public golf courses and private clubs will be in a bad place."

According to the National Golf Foundation, which tracks participation, golfers age 65 and over played an average of 36 rounds in 2018.  Millennials between age 18 and 34, however, played just 11.6 rounds, "a likely byproduct," per NGF, "of increased demands on their time and involvement with a variety of other activities."

"INCREASED DEMANDS ON THEIR TIME"

Time commitment has emerged as perhaps the biggest barrier preventing new players from dipping their toes into the sport and many existing ones from maintaining their preferred frequency of play.  Six-hour blocks of free time -- long the bedrock of a casual, golf-heavy lifestyle -- have given way to shorter, fragmented spurts of activity scattered around non-traditional work schedules, kids' activities and a host of other family obligations. 

"Time is pretty much everyone's main factor, with work and family playing a big part," says Scott Fowler, 37, who plays most of his golf at public courses in western Suffolk.  "If I have to, I'll go out and pay for a round knowing I can only get 12 or 13 holes in."

It's part of the reason modernized nine-hole courses are in vogue nationally, and on a local level as well.  Long Island's only newly built course of the 2010s was the Nickerson Dunes Pitch & Putt, which earned a little bit of golf press with its uncommon design.  Two longtime nine-holers at Sandy Pond and Cedars were rejuvenated last decade by extensive repairs and renovations.  Around the country, refurbished courses like the Winter Park muni in Florida and Sweetens Cove in rural Tennessee are hits that draw golfers from states away.  

Meanwhile, Jack Nicklaus is on record in support of 12-hole rounds.  And the USGA's ongoing "Play 9" campaign centers on the "time-friendly, unwind-friendly" nature of the nine-hole round.  In one Play 9 promo, a bearded, denim-jacketed man on the go -- the unofficial mascot of the millennial crowd -- looks at his watch as the narrator ponders, "Golf and life...how do you fit one into the other?"

The issue is certainly not a new one.  ("The situation is getting worse instead of better, and there seems to be no solution," reads one 1951 Newsday column on slow play.)  In 2011, longtime Newsday golf writer Mark Herrmann covered the sport's time constraints and its possible remedies.  "Golf is expensive and it takes a lot of time," said Steve Smith, then the executive director of the Long Island Golf Association.  "There are reasons why young people don't take up the game and why people stop playing."

"It takes too much time to play golf," former Bethpage pro Joe Rehor told Newsday.  "I see it with my son-in-law.  He's got two kids at home and he can't play golf.  He's got [youth] lacrosse, he's got concerts, he's got this and that.  He's got no time for golf.  If you want to introduce new players to the game, you can't make it so time-consuming."

Fast-forward nine years and time-friendliness has taken on greater urgency, as course closings continue to heavily outpace openings, and the massive boom of mobile technology has shortened attention spans and conditioned people, especially younger ones, to streamline more of their daily routine, including time spent on recreation.  Rapid growth of technology has already changed the way people search for rounds of golf via GolfNow and other tee-time apps.  It's likely just a matter of time before technology changes the way people view the act of playing golf itself.  Once you've grown accustomed to having any conceivable task no farther away than your fingertips, pacing around for 15 minutes on a backed-up par-3 in the middle of a five-hour round feels even more like time poorly spent.

"While time has always been a consideration with golf, I think it makes the game less appetizing to potential players as our society evolves," says Jon Sherman, creator of Practical Golf, a Long Island-based game-improvement website and newsletter.  "How much time are golfers willing to endure?"

Much of the resistance to outside-the-box solutions revolves around the sport's traditions.  Ideas like 12-hole rounds are dismissed by some as gimmicks destined to fail; others consider them too radical for a local public course to explore on its own without proof of success.

"It's hard to be the first to experiment with something new, there's so much uncertainty," says Andrew Wilson, Bethpage's director of agronomy.  "If statistics say most people want to play 18, is it worth focusing on six holes or nine holes?"

Ryan Stewart, 31, is at peace with the length of play and willing to endure the five-hour-plus round if it means getting in a full 18.  "Anything less than 18 holes is just not enough for me.  The only time I play less than 18 is after work when I run out of daylight," says Stewart, who admits the recent arrival of twins might alter his perception of golf's time crunch.

"I don’t see additions of 12- or six-hole rounds fixing the time problem on the 18-hole courses," he adds.  "We have plenty of nine-hole courses around here but I rarely ever see a wait."

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So with time at a premium, priorities shifting away from half-days at the course and the pool of prospective players shrinking locally, it would seem imperative that Long Island's public golf courses stake their claim to what remains of young adults' time and attention, and fight to turn them from hesitant prospective golfers to potential lifelong players and customers.  Perhaps come up with mutually beneficial ways to get them into the clubhouse, onto the course and headed home in two or three hours rather than five or six.  Especially now, when businesses can brainstorm fresh ideas at little to no cost and deliver them right where young adults spend much of their time -- on their phones, perusing social media.

But while Long Island restaurants, farm stands, coffee shops, breweries and breakfast joints have figured out ways to build and captivate audiences -- in some cases thousands of followers deep -- with eye-catching photos and video clips, Long Island golf courses have largely sat hidden away in self-imposed online anonymity.

Check back next week for Part 3 of "A New Decade of Long Island Golf," which will address local golf's marketing and self-promotion in the social-media era.