Bethpage Black has undergone a bold transition 2 months from Ryder Cup

The Tent City flourished in April.

It was a long and cold spring in New York, but neither the length nor the cold could delay the official start of one of Bethpage’s most anticipated summers in recent history.

Golfers arrive early and often like they are here: sit on the scene in the white-lined asphalt outside the Bert Patch State Park Club. When the night arrived on the first day of the season, many were already full, dreaming of their elusive serving time with golfers from the world. The crowds remained like this throughout the summer heat, and the surprising park officials didn’t expect that there was no even the boon of the upcoming Ryder Cup – not even the demand could be raised.

The Bethpage tradition of overnight stays remains one of the course’s greatest legacies, a lively manifestation of the spirit of equality in Long Island’s most magnificent municipal golf complex. Every day, the park is for a certain amount of serving time for those who sleep in the car overnight, share beer, eat, play and dream. At night, golfers will receive tickets to consolidate the queue at dawn. The next morning, they were shuffled from the parking lot to the park office and gave the kickoff time at an affordable price – the New Yorker had about $80, twice as many as the outsider.

It all brings a general sense of weather on most nights, and for good reason. For those who are golf addicted, it’s so severe that those sleeping in the trunk, Bethpage serves as a blow to weapon-level purity. The state can charge them 10 times the price, and they are still happy to pay. Instead, green fees are a bargaining…as long as you don’t consider the expense of unemployment.

This is very suitable. Bethpage State Park’s existence is only attributed to what is called “large bargaining”: new deals. Back in the 1930s, parks became one of the New York achievements of the Works Progress Administration, a depressed-era Roosevelt program that attempted to bring record numbers of unemployment in the United States to build schools, government buildings and parks that would benefit the public interest.

When legendary Robert Moses, an inside legend in New York, found the land that would become Bethpage, he felt dizzy about the idea of golf. He hired the outstanding golf course architect of the day, a roaring 20s in America, Aw Tillinghast, $10 a day. Vision? The course that created Moses was called the “People’s Country Club.”

Tillinghast, in partnership with local golf legend (and course photographer) Joseph Burbeck, produced the course, now called Bethpage Black, a fabulous municipal golf course that is harsh in size and major intellectual respect.

For most people sleeping in the parking lot, the reward is a “black” round, a 7400 yard, par-72’s clumsiness that causes many vertical walking speeds and kicks on the shin with a unique feel. In fact, though, the reward is an opportunity to share the same real estate as the 2002 or 2009 U.S. Open, the 2019 PGA Championship or the 2025 Ryder Cup (PGA) Championship.

Black courses have undergone several renovations over the years, most important of which was done by so-called “open doctor” Rees Jones, before ’02 US Open. Work before 2025 is even more modest: A new set of fairway bunkers on the 13th hole is several traps with new features, while fairway trees are wider than most locals and survive in the summer with new additions (first cuts).

Indeed, the biggest upgrade has nothing to do with the golf course: it’s a huge, temporary tent city that will now bring the golf course from the first t-shirt to the 18th. The renovation works are incomplete – the largest building, which will actually renovate around the first tee, was inserted after the course closed later this summer. But you can understand the overall situation.

I’ve been shocked by the huge shock of Bethpage. When I first took the course in 2020, I thought it was a fabulous beast. In many ways, I still do that. But now, with hospitality and the bleaching building in full swing, it is much bigger and more intimidating than I remember.

When Team USA and its European rivals arrive in town, the result will be one of the largest and most grand games in golf, a spectacle and one of the largest and most global events in the sport.

But before that, Hubbub generated something simpler for people who fill parking lots and fairways every night: excitement, which never diminished in Bethpage, but has magnified it to new heights in 2025.

When dusk turns dark every night at the large asphalt parking lot at Bethpage State Park, you will feel it in the air – every morning, as the darkness turns into dawn. At that time, at least six days a week, new rookies fell into Bethpage Black.

It’s a grand, beautiful, glorious bargain. Somehow, it only gets better.

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