Golf on Long Island

A half-century in East Rock: Nassau muni Bay Park in the midst of its 50th-anniversary season

It's a special season at Bay Park Golf Course, though you won't find any milestones announced on a banner billowing over the park entrance or stretched across the facade of the course's faceless, utilitarian brick clubhouse.  There are no anniversary logos printed on hats and polos, no leather-bound books to chronicle the course's half-century beside the bay in East Rockaway.  No turn-back-the-clock green-fee specials with yesteryear pricing, for sure.  And if even a small handful of local golfers are aware that Bay Park made its debut the same year as Joe Namath's guarantee and the Miracle Mets, it likely won't come up in conversation. 

What you can bank on though is a scanned Leisure Pass, a point in the direction of the first tee and another day of basic nine-hole golf with local youngsters, seniors and all the groups of novices in between.

Bay Park has quietly gone about its business serving Nassau golfers since 1969, making this its 50th-anniversary season.  Tucked away at the southern edge of a recently rejuvenated Bay Park complex that's just about unrecognizable to even the longest of longtime visitors, the golf course itself remains a familiar throwback, its hilltop first and second greens standing tall behind a chain-link fence, leading golfers toward the bay.

With the golf world slowly readjusting its focus more toward accessible public and municipal golf for all, there's a certain charm to functional Bay Park and its Nassau County Parks brethren at North Woodmere, Cantiague and Christopher Morley.  Bay Park is free of pizzazz.  There are no dramatic, stylishly shadowed photos of its greens, few travel more than a couple of minutes to play it, and those who do swing by don't record their visit with pristinely filtered social-media tales.  It's simply golf pared down to its core -- grandkids learning the game with grandfathers, little sister swinging alongside big brother, groups of young friends and groups of seniors, all playing nine holes over 1,900-plus mostly flat yards at the neighborhood golf course.

Bay Park opened for play in 1969 on the site of a former dump with green fees of $1.25 on weekdays and $2 on weekends.  The course's debut wasn't without some Long Island-style political drama -- in December 1968, it was announced that Bay Park's spring opening would be postponed due to budget cuts.  So that spring and summer, with the course already built and prepared for play, it sat empty except for a crew completing the clubhouse building and a single greenskeeper tending to the grass.  Meanwhile, local residents and community groups bombarded the office of Nassau County Executive Eugene Nickerson with complaints, per Newsday.

When a reworked budget "found" some money to cover operating costs, the golf course opened in late summer.  Unlike today's course, the 1969 version was equipped with light stanchions that would allow for night play.  "I used to hit those poles all the time," says William Kienke, who lived near the course on Rhame Avenue.  "Big wooden poles like the ones on the way to Jones Beach.  Great ricochet."

Another East Rockaway resident at the time recalls how it was impossible to track the flight of the ball once it went above the lights during nighttime rounds.  Night golf at Bay Park, however, was very short-lived -- due to issues with water pressure, soil moisture and wiring, the lights rarely worked as designed.  "The lights were terrible and didn't last too long," he says.  "After they took the lights down, they left the poles up for years, which made bad shots even worse."

The course has seen its highs and lows over the half century.  It opened near the tail end of the 1960s/early-1970s Long Island golf growth spurt that introduced dozens of modern public and private courses and nearly all of today's county municipal layouts.  Long Island began to shed courses through the 1980s, but once the Tiger Woods era boomed in the late '90s, Bay Park, like most other courses, was jammed.  As Tiger took the golf world by storm, waits to get on Bay Park's 299-yard opening par-4 were often measured in hours. 

Valley Stream native Matt Krantweiss played Bay Park in between two-a-day soccer practices nearby at Valley Stream South High School in the late summers of 1997 and 1998.  "After morning practices we'd go over to Bay Park to get nine holes in before we had to be back in the afternoon," he says.  "The wait was so long, with so many groups waiting to tee off on each hole, we rarely could finish nine holes."

In 2012, Hurricane Sandy took down trees on the course and littered it with debris from boats docked nearby, along with other courses on the south shore that were submerged by ocean and bay waters.

Today, just about everything about the park has changed, including the access road that leads visitors down toward the course, though once on the fairways and greens, there's not much to tip off whether it's 1969 or 2019 -- save for the lack of light poles, of course.

For more on Bay Park, check out the course flyover.

Original Lido Club featured on Golf Channel, golf history podcast

Amid its wall-to-wall PGA Championship coverage at Bethpage Black earlier this week, the Golf Channel aired a short but fascinating six-minute feature on a lesser-known Long Island golf powerhouse, one that's long gone but certainly not forgotten by followers of golf history.

The segment covered the original Lido Club (1914-1942) with insight provided by Connor Lewis of the Society of Golf Historians and golf architect Jim Urbina, both of whom have extensively researched the C.B. Macdonald classic, a course considered by many during its brief peak to be among the greatest golf courses ever built.  Last year, Lewis walked the routing of the original club, tracing the locations of its famous holes that are now buried beneath Lido Beach homes and schools or part of Lido West Town Park.  Lewis even teed up a few shots on the site of the oceanfront par-3 eighth, now a public beach.  Lewis and Urbina walk through some of these locations in the segment.

Bringing all the black-and-white historical imagery to life are incredibly detailed computer renderings of the Lido produced by Peter Flory, a Michigan-based golfer with an appreciation for lost golf courses.  His work on the Lido has spanned hundreds of hours recreating the course using available photos, models and aerial images.  Much of his work to date has been published on the Golf Club Atlas discussion forum.

View the feature on the Golf Channel website.

This weekend, Lewis and Urbina went into deeper detail on Rod Morri's TalkinGolf History podcast:

In the podcast, Lewis, Urbina and Morri discuss the history of Lido as well as their exploration of the current site, efforts to recreate the course elsewhere, and the search for long-lost course photos taken by the family owners right before its WWII-era demise.

For additional info on the group's work, visit the Society of Golf Historians Twitter page.

And be sure to check out Golf On Long Island's previous coverage of the Lido Club:

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)
Newsday slideshow features 11 places that were formerly golf courses
Closer Look: Lido Golf Club #16

Also, the Lido Club is 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.

Bethpage Black in "fine shape" as PGA Championship approaches, plus aeration and non-Black updates

Golfers returning to Bethpage State Park for early-spring golf have been treated to some uncommon scenery as the PGA Championship, formerly of August, looms just weeks away in May.  For one, a look deep into the distance at the first green on the Red Course includes a view past roughly 300 yards of tents sitting atop the Red's opening fairway next to Black's 18th.  Over on the Green Course, the opening and closing fairways are barely visible beneath more structures.

All eyes will be on the Black Course come mid-May, of course, and thanks to a rather uneventful winter, conditions for the first northeast-in-spring PGA will be ideal, barring any surprises.  "The turf made it through the winter in fine shape," says Andrew Wilson, Bethpage's director of agronomy.  "We have sodded many typical wear areas on the Black Course and plugged out thousands of ball marks on the greens.  Now we are checking sand depths in bunkers and cleaning up debris all over the course."

Today the Black still looks a bit like a course in winter, though it should green up with leaves emerging on the trees by the time golfers are invited back for a brief two-week stint from April 13 to 28.  The course will be open for walk-ups only on an abbreviated daily schedule.  Needless to say, spots on tee will be in ultra-high demand.

Combined with the renovations made last winter -- most notably, modification of the bunker complex on #18 and a green extension on #11 -- the early-season nature of this year's PGA ensures the professionals will see a different course than the one they've challenged in summer conditions during past U.S. Opens and Barclays events.  Change will be evident from the very first shot -- a handful of elm trees were moved from the left to the right of #1 fairway last offseason with this year's PGA in mind.

Besides housing the many pavilions, merchandise shops and hospitality tents for the tournament, the other four courses at Bethpage are getting their own tweaks as well.  "On the Green Course, we rebuilt the bunker on #3 and cleared some of the woodline on #7 of vines and invasive species," Wilson says.  A new forward tee is going in on Red #5, which for now will be the main tee as PGA construction occupies the back-tee area.  Sand is being added to bunkers where needed around the complex.

Amid the rest of the PGA prep, the non-Black courses are scheduled for spring aeration later this month.  The Red Course will be first to go on April 30, followed by Blue on May 1, Yellow on May 2 and Green on May 3.

Players can expect to be reminded of the PGA's presence throughout most of the 2019 season.  The Black is slated to resume normal operations on May 25, though Wilson says it will take several months for all the structures to come down and for the courses to be restored to familiar conditions.  Current temporary tees will remain in place for a while on #1 of the Red, Green and Blue courses, plus Green #18.  Yellow will continue to play as a modified nine-hole course skipping around to avoid tourney construction.

"Our crew will work as hard as we can to produce conditions our golfers appreciate," Wilson says.

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

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

Town of Oyster Bay Golf Course set to ring in its 30th-anniversary season

It was still far short of sunrise in the early-morning hours of April 18, 1989, yet a line of cars stretched near the gates of what had long been a leafy, bucolic private estate at Jericho Turnpike and Southwoods Road in Woodbury.  Inside those cars, dozens of local golfers sat waiting to secure a spot on tee at the first Long Island golf course built in a decade.

Once the sun brightened the sky over northern Nassau, the Town of Oyster Bay Golf Course officially joined the Long Island golf landscape, welcomed by hundreds of golfers -- nearly 300, per a Newsday recap the following day -- who gave the Tom Fazio design rave reviews.  This year is the municipal course's 30th anniversary.  Opening day is Tuesday, April 2.

This year's golfers will find some subtle differences around the course from when they last left it in the fall.  Cart paths have been added or repaved throughout the course, and dozens of trees were trimmed or removed to open up areas of play. 

"The goal of the trimming project was to make the course more player-friendly, less difficult for the average player and to provide more sunlight exposure on the course to achieve better grass growth," according to Oyster Bay town supervisor Joseph Saladino.  "The Town also purchased new golf carts and implemented a plan to purchase ten new golf carts annually to replenish the fleet.  Additional projects planned for the near future include improving tee boxes and bunkers, and refining areas near and around the course's water features."

Saladino said all improvement projects are being performed under the expertise of the course's new greenskeeper, Greg Kolodinsky, and new consultant Steve Matuza.

Despite heavy play, its name designer and a variety of truly impressive holes, Oyster Bay carries on in relative anonymity among outsiders, rarely spoken of in conversations about Long Island's best publics.  Perhaps it's due to past restrictions on advance tee times and what used to be a convoluted tangle of green fees and membership rates that ultimately made a trip to Woodbury cost-prohibitive for the curious one- or two-time visitor.  Or maybe its location just five miles north of one of the most recognizable public golf facilities in the nation at Bethpage leaves it overshadowed.  Town government seems eager to draw a more rightful amount of attention to its course -- Newsday reported in March that the town will run advertisements in New York Mets game programs at Citi Field during the 2019 season.  And for the first time in the course's history, tee times can now be booked online and are available for both members (30 days in advance) and non-members (seven days).

Those who do know the course are aware of its hilly, challenging layout that includes one of Long Island's most daunting par-4s.  The fourth doglegs to a blind landing area on the right before marching dead uphill to an obscured, triple-tiered green (pictured left).  The hill itself is covered in rough-length grass and features a long, snaking bunker.  Later, the 16th makes a harder dogleg turn to the right, this time leaving golfers with a full, unobstructed view on the approach, which features an elevated green cut into a rolling hillside (pictured below).  Oyster Bay's par-3s all feature either dramatically sloped greens, notable elevation changes or intrusive bunkering, if not some combination of the three.   

Part of what made the debut of the Oyster Bay course so highly anticipated 30 years ago was the era in which it came to be.  Locally, the 1980s was associated only with course closures, not openings.  The historic Links Club in Roslyn, an exclusive 1919 C.B. Macdonald course, was sold that decade with development of condos in the plans.  The failed, celebrity-boasting "superclub" experiment at Muttontown's Charter Oaks in the late 1960s ended quietly in 1982 as a course called Fox Run.  The course-building resurgence of the 1960s and early '70s -- which introduced many of Long Island's current municipal facilities -- had slowed by the time Swan Lake Golf Course arrived in Manorville in 1979.  In the years that followed, the climate was simply not conducive to golf development.  Even a decade later, Oyster Bay's early success was viewed merely as a one-off.  In his recap of Oyster Bay's opening day, Newsday's Mark Herrmann cautioned that Long Island's shiny new course was "perhaps its last for a long time."  Of course, few could have predicted the Tiger-fueled building craze that would arrive soon after.

Adding to the excitement was the history of the grounds.  Like many other post-1950s golf courses on Long Island -- especially those around Nassau's "Gold Coast" -- Oyster Bay's fairways and greens sprung from a repurposed private estate.  "Woodlands" was built in 1918 and designed by noted architect William Adams Delano.  In 1928 it was sold to industrialist, philanthropist and politician Andrew Mellon, who gifted the 121-acre estate to his daughter, Ailsa, as a wedding present.  Ailsa, a philanthropist described by the New York Times in her 1969 obituary as the "richest woman in the U.S.," married diplomat David Bruce and remained there until her death.  Oyster Bay Town bought the Bruce estate in 1979.  According to Newsday, supervisor Joseph Colby -- whose name was added to the course in 2013 -- first visualized using the grounds for golf during a visit to Woodlands.

Players don't venture into the estate house -- now a wedding and event venue called The Mansion at Oyster Bay -- during their visits, though they do get a brief taste of old estate life late in their round.  The par-3 12th tees off directly in front of an elegant brick patio at the rear of the mansion.  The tiny 117-yard hole is not as easy as it seems, with a bunker in front and a green that slopes to a hidden rear water hazard, plus the chance of cocktail-hour guests watching over the shot.

The Town of Oyster Bay Golf Course also includes the Lucas Golf Center, which operates the driving range, pro shop and private instruction and is already open for the season.  

For more on Oyster Bay, visit the Golf On Long Island course flyover.

Origins: The Golf Club at Middle Bay

Golf On Long Island's "Origins" series explores the history and development of those local golf courses whose backstory is a bit more unique than most.  Stay tuned for more as the season progresses.

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Ralph Trost, chronicler of local golf history for the early-20th-century Brooklyn Daily Eagle, summed up the "epidemic of golf-course building" in the late stages of the Roaring Twenties and the dawn of the Depression era like this:

"One day you see a farm, a wood or meadowland.  A few days afterward a sign pops up announcing a new golf course and before long that sign is gone and in its stead one sees acres of plowed land, the rounded forms of greens rising from the flatness."

Golf courses exploded during the booming 1920s, but clubs that waited until late in the decade or into the '30s to post those signs ahead of new layouts found themselves cornered by financial crisis right from the opening drive.  Some persevered, though most were short-lived.  One of the rare "success" stories remains in Oceanside. 

The Golf Club at Middle Bay knows plenty about perseverance.  At the beginning of this current decade, it was a 55-year-old private club.  Two years later Hurricane Sandy arrived, inflicting millions of dollars worth of damage to the grounds, clubhouse and equipment, and the club made the decision to close in the face of bankruptcy.  Within months, a former member resurrected the club as the semi-private, publicly accessible South Bay Country Club.  After only one season, issues with the lease led to another brief closure, a new operator and a new identity as The Golf Club at Middle Bay.

But rewind to the early 1930s, when Trost's description of the course-building rush served as the lede to a story about yet another new course, this one called the Oceanside Golf & Country Club, opened in 1931 on both sides of Waukena Avenue at its intersection with Skillman.  The course had actually been in the works since 1929, mere months before the stock-market crash.  John Duncan Dunn designed it, and despite its proximity to the bay, there was only one water hole on the course, and its hazard was artificial.

"This new course is essentially inland in character," Trost described during an April 1931 tour.  "No back-breaking carries, no awe-inspiring water holes like ... at Lido.  But there'll be wind.  And coolness.  And trouble.  Depend upon that."

And so Oceanside set out on its quest -- one that proved fatal for many new clubs of the era -- to provide golf for its members while powering through the Depression, which would be followed soon after, of course, by World War II and the subsequent rush on land development.  The club hosted the 1938 Metropolitan PGA, and at least a few times bounced between public course and private facility.  Its original pro left after a decade to fight in the War, then immediately returned to his post after being wounded and serving four years overseas.  There were ownership changes and requisite mid-1940s chatter about home building on the site.  The layout had enough notoriety among Long Island courses that Pee Wee Reese and some Brooklyn Dodger teammates headed to Oceanside for a round after a 1950 rainout at Ebbets Field. 

Amazingly, despite the general turmoil of the day, there were some rumblings about constructing a new extension of the course closer to the bay.  Trost, two decades after his preview of Oceanside, reported in the Eagle that the new layout would go by the name Golfbay, to be designed by Alfred Tull. 

Meanwhile there were other more ominous rumblings regarding a threat that would ultimately take out Oceanside's neighbor in Baldwin, then part of Oceanside itself -- schools.  New neighborhoods require new schools, and the rise of post-WWII suburbs meant open season on open space.  By 1951 the Oceanside School District set its sights on the golf course and carried the support of local taxpayers.  The following year, Baldwin's Willowbrook Club (formerly Milburn) on Grand Avenue was bulldozed to make way for Baldwin High School, and Oceanside would soon lose the same fight.  Thirty-five acres of the course north of Waukena were lopped off, soon to become the grounds of Oceanside High.

Still, Oceanside trudged forward.  "Rather than throwing in the sponge when Oceanside High School takes its 35-acre bite," wrote Newsday's Bill Searby, "[the club] will continue to operate on a limited basis for the rest of [the 1952] season and plans to reopen as a better-than-ever country club in '53."

Gone were the first six holes (and about half its members to Engineers CC in Roslyn, per Newsday), but the club made use of its remaining 12, all while preparing to build southward over the expansive marshland that separated the course from the bay.  "The chore" of building on filled-in marsh "is a mountainous one," Searby wrote, but confidence in the revamped course -- to be called Middle Bay -- was high.  Trost returned in 1954 to give yet another preview during the course's grow-in phase.

"The new course ... will be rugged and strictly seaside," Trost wrote.  "The wind will be the dictator, really controlling par, yardage and the type of shots."  He concluded, "Altogether Middle Bay won't look a bit like Oceanside.  The name change is fitting."

Middle Bay, designed by Alfred Tull, opened in full as a private club in 1955.  Tull touched up the new holes over the first several seasons, making modifications as irrigation and saltwater spray required.  It remained private until 2012 when Sandy struck.

Golfers who play Middle Bay today often take note of the contrast between the open bayfront holes and the tighter, tree-lined fairways away from the water.  The latter, those parkland-style holes, are distant remnants of Oceanside, albeit altered over time.

Modifications and alterations continue at today's Middle Bay.  Each season since its post-Sandy rebirth, the course slowly brought back its driving range, added a cafe and installed new paths and bulkheads.  Earlier this year it leveled its 1960s-era clubhouse, and a new one is expected to open sometime in 2020.

[PICTURED -- TOP RIGHT: A newspaper sketch of the clubhouse prior to Oceanside's 1931 opening; MIDDLE RIGHT: Oceanside survived the tumultuous 1930s and sought new members, as seen in this 1941 Newsday ad; MIDDLE LEFT: A 1952 ad, not long before the course was partially consumed by Oceanside High; BOTTOM RIGHT: A present-day shot of The Golf Club at Middle Bay's signature par-3, looking over the water toward Point Lookout.]

OTHER POSTS IN THE "ORIGINS" SERIES:
Wind Watch Golf & Country Club -- May 2018

Street Names: The Ghosts of Long Island Golf's Past, Part 4 -- Sayville Golf 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.

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Like the previous entry in this street-name series, a relatively unknown course ill-prepared to pull its way through the Depression era left its mark on the local map with a Fairway Drive.  The only difference between the Valley Stream Country Club and this feature's Sayville Golf Club is that the Sayville neighborhood that replaced the golf grounds is left with two Fairways instead of one.

Sayville Golf Club debuted in 1903 during an era of course-building that served members of new and established country clubs as well as hotel guests and city dwellers.  Sayville was more of the latter -- it was one of several areas on Long Island's south shore known as a resort destination, and it would also develop into a popular community for summer residents from Brooklyn.  The course itself was built on a small parcel along Great South Bay, with nine holes covering around 30 acres along Candee Avenue. 

Previews included the type of exaggeration standard for the era.  "It is said that the turf comes as near to the typical Scotch soil as any to be found on Long Island," said a July 1903 write-up in the Brooklyn Daily Eagle.  Charter members paid $10 for the season and non-members could play for 50 cents, according to the 2015 book Sayville and West Sayville: Pictured Through the Years.

It wasn't until July 1922 that a clubhouse was built on the property, offering the services of a country club in addition to golf.  Prior to that, a second course opened on a piece of farmland north of the original course on Montauk Highway and shared space with a tennis club.  Throughout the 1920s, the various clubs starred as lively social gathering spots serving well-known families from the local area and parts of the city.

But as the common story goes, the Depression set in and bent many of Long Island's less prominent clubs until they broke.  Sayville was sold in 1935 to a developer who planned a neighborhood of "Elizabethan and New England-style" homes, per the Eagle.  In the golf course's place sat about a half-dozen new residential roads, two of which -- Fairway Drive East and Fairway Drive West -- live on today sized and spaced like parallel par-4s.

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

Newspaper images courtesy of Brooklyn Daily Eagle via Newspapers.com

Bethpage's Andrew Wilson chats about the 2019 PGA on "Around the Met" podcast

Bethpage State Park's director of agronomy Andrew Wilson joined A.J. Voelpel on the Metropolitan Golf Association's "Around the Met" podcast earlier this month to discuss the park and its preparation for next May's PGA Championship.

Wilson and Voelpel chatted about ideal winter conditions leading up to the event, which will tee off in May for the first time rather than its traditional August slot.  They also discussed recent tweaks to the Black Course, how the PGA will impact Bethpage's other courses and more about the crew's efforts around the park.  Listen to the podcast on SoundCloud at the Met Golf website.

Wilson has also contributed annual updates on conditions and park renovations here for Golf On Long Island.  For a refresher on changes and renovations made ahead of this past playing season, see Wilson's 2018 Bethpage update.

You can also view photos of ongoing renovations by visiting Wilson's and Bethpage Golf's Twitter pages at @Greensideup17 and @BethpageGolf.

Golf and the "Long Island Express," 80 years ago this weekend

Fall arrived on Long Island this weekend carrying with it bright sunshine and comfortable temperatures -- ideal conditions for the start of autumn golf season.  Eighty years ago this weekend, however, in the first days of the new fall season, Long Islanders on the East End ventured outside not to play golf, but to survey the damage left behind by one of the most vicious storms in local history. 

On September 21, 1938, a storm so fast-moving that it would come to be known as the "Long Island Express" crashed ashore near Bellport as a category 3 hurricane.  Its uncommon speed left Long Island unprepared, weather forecasters flummoxed and areas east of the storm's eye in ruins.  In the days that followed, East End residents picked up the pieces of homes and businesses and first witnessed a newly changed landscape, as the Island's south shore geography changed in a flash.

The Express took its toll on the Long Island golf landscape as well, already struggling through the turmoil of the Depression era.  The Maidstone Club in East Hampton was "battered to pieces," wrote the Brooklyn Daily Eagle, with remnants of the club's cabanas strewn across the beach amid other damage.  The club's 36-hole layout, feared lost at first, was reduced to its current 27 due to storm damage.  A source described the state of the course for the Daily Eagle in the storm's aftermath:

The worst damage was done on the ninth.  There the wind tore through the big protective dunes, swept away the tee and carried on through the tenth.  The ninth fairway is under about three feet of water.  The 15th tee is gone and, freakishly, the waters knifed off the back of the 14th green.  Plenty of mud lies on the 17th, while the holes across the pond, the third and 16th, got a severe salt bath.  Both bridges were tossed almost across the road.

Westhampton, just east of the storm's landfall, was leveled by the storm.  More than two dozen people were killed in Westhampton alone.  At the Westhampton Country Club, the clubhouse was temporarily repurposed as a morgue.  On the course itself, debris littered the fairways, and a boat thrown ashore by the storm was left with its anchor resting in a bunker.

Just to the east in Quogue, two bridges connecting the beach to the mainland were destroyed.  The Quogue Field Club itself was spared in the short term, but the rerouting of an access road through the heart of the course to a new beach bridge eventually caused the club to downsize from 18 holes to nine.

Montauk Downs, like the rest of the Montauk area, was stranded at sea as the Atlantic surged over land and reached Napeague Bay, temporarily turning Montauk into an island.

Meanwhile, to the west, many of the Island's courses were spared lasting damage from what the Daily Eagle described as, at least in some areas, merely "one big rain."  The Lido Club suffered $100,000 in damage along the shoreline.  Stately trees fell at Rockville Links, Hempstead, Garden City and Wheatley Hills.  Fresh Meadow (then in Queens) flooded and lost several trees, though Ralph Trost of the Daily Eagle viewed it as a positive. 

"Two were meant to go," Trost wrote.  "They always cast too much shadow on the 14th green.  But until the wind did the job, no one had the heart to cut 'em down."

[Photos courtesy of East Hampton Library and Westhampton Beach Historical Society.]

Bethpage bolsters digital marketing and social-media voice under pro Kelley Brooke

Bethpage State Park is officially a member of the modern era, and it's not only because booking tee times has migrated away from *66 ("the busy-signal fix").

Nearly two decades after hosting its first U.S. Open and entering the international golf discussion, management at Bethpage is now marketing the Black Course and its four sibling layouts in a way befitting America's leading public-golf facility.  Gone are a sparse NYS Parks landing page and dreary unofficial website.  In their place, a newly designed site and a newly found voice have turned Bethpage from a largely silent golf powerhouse into one of the most socially engaging facilities on the Island.

The park's digital transformation arrives under the watch of Kelley Brooke, the Golf Channel Academy instructor with a resume that lists decades of accomplishments in teaching and golf operations in the New York City metro area.  Since winning a New York State bid and taking over at Bethpage earlier this year, Brooke has been in charge of the pro shop, private lessons, clinics and women's programs.  Her to-do list continues to grow as junior-camp season approaches.  "I'm running everything here but tee times," Brooke says.

Among Brooke's top priorities is marketing, specifically connecting with Long Island golfers on social media, a space where the park has remained mostly quiet outside of the informative @BethpageGolf Twitter feed and that of superintendent Andrew Wilson (@greensideup17).  Over the past few seasons, both have been valuable outlets for photos and information on renovations, aeration schedules and other happenings around the courses.  Brooke's focus, though, is on promoting and growing the many instructional programs, including junior and women's clinics and the park's first-ever summer golf camp, that now make Bethpage what she calls a "full-service academy."

Inside the clubhouse and out on the range, Brooke and her staff teach using a variety of launch monitors, swing and putting analyzers and state-of-the-art video and biofeedback systems.  Instructional programs include sessions focusing on specific areas like driving distance and wedge play, as well as group practices and couples' clinics.  The "Start to Finish Women's Program" meets once a week for five weeks, covers all aspects of the swing and takes players onto the course for a supervised test of skills.

To amplify Bethpage's new voice, Brooke hired Zach Toste, a digital-marketing consultant with golf in his blood.  Toste played at Notre Dame, graduated in 2016 and works remotely from Florida, where he runs Bethpage's new Facebook and Instagram pages, tweaks the website and creates video content.  Toste first learned of Bethpage the way young players in the 1990s discovered TPC Sawgrass -- through video games. 

"I remember seeing the 'Warning' sign in Tiger Woods PGA Tour Golf and thinking, 'Wow, that's so cool,' " Toste says.

In addition to promoting Bethpage programs, the digital-marketing team updates the Facebook page with video demonstrations by Brooke and her staff of instructors and fitness professionals.  Action shots around the courses and in training sessions appear on Instagram.  Last week, they launched an e-commerce section on the Bethpage website, enabling fans to purchase head covers, hats and on-course accessories branded with Bethpage's iconic caddy logo.  Toste's also introduced a short-and-sweet Bethpage slogan -- "Experience Tradition."

Their goal, overall, is to connect with all golfers and make Bethpage synonymous with playing, learning and experiencing golf, not simply the Black Course and sleeping in cars for tee times. 

"Golfers haven't really heard much from Bethpage over the years," Toste says.  "We want them to start thinking, 'Hey, there's something going on at Bethpage.' "

[Screenshots courtesy of Bethpage Golf Course via Facebook and Instagram.]

Family-operated Spring Lake Golf Club celebrating its 50th anniversary

Fifty years ago, with the Long Island golf industry in the midst of a boom period, a local farmer turned his attention away from the fields and toward the fairways, setting the groundwork for a new family business that would provide a half-century worth of golf to players in and around Middle Island.  That's the boiled-down story of the Spring Lake Golf Club, a fixture on the local golf scene since 1967, as described by Newsday's Mark Herrmann earlier this month in a profile of the public course in its 50th-anniversary season..

Charles Jurgens, along with his brothers Fred and Herman and course designer Charles K. Martin, built the course in the late 1960s, a decade that saw dozens of new public and private golf facilities pop up in Nassau and Suffolk to accommodate the new suburbanites flocking east to Long Island.  Three generations later the family business of running the 18-hole Thunderbird course and nine-hole Sandpiper course remains successful.

[Jurgens'] life’s work involved putting in the original irrigation system and outlining the fairways, pacing off yardages from Martin’s intricate pencil drawings (which still exist and were out on a clubhouse table yesterday).  His nephew Rick started working at Spring Lake as a teenager and is now the manager.  Rick’s son Tyler is a key member of superintendent Don Amsler’s greens staff and is married to the head pro, the former Cristy Grzymala.  Their two children, five and one, are well known to the golfers who keep showing up.

“Being a family business, it becomes personal,” Cristy said. “They look forward to hearing about our lives and what’s going on.”

The Jurgenses have built and/or owned other courses, including Indian Hills, Heatherwood, Swan Lake and Cherry Creek.  But Spring Lake — with its 18- and nine-hole courses — is the flagship, still doing 50,000 rounds a year despite a national decrease in golf participation." -- Mark Herrmann, Newsday, 9/14/2017

Spring Lake's parkland setup, with trees closely hugging just about every hole, has been given a boost over the past few seasons thanks to faster green speeds.  A new drainage system has the course in "the best shape it has ever been in,” Rick Jurgens told Newsday.  “The greens are a lot quicker than they’ve been, a lot smoother than they’ve been in the past.”

For more on Spring Lake, check out the Thunderbird and Sandpiper flyovers.