Part I: Piping Rock
Just before noon, rather than sit in my comfortable yet overpriced hotel room and do school work, which I of course should have and for which I paid dearly upon my return home, I ventured down to Bethpage, with the intention to walk around, hit some putts, and drink a warm-up beer. My tee-time at Piping Rock was “sometime after 2pm”, a schedular vagueness you quickly get used to in this pursuit. I figured that the fine folks at Piping Rock wouldn’t take too kindly to a rater showing up a few hours early to hog the practice facility, lounge in the library, sip a scotch near the fire place in the men’s locker room, and just generally pretend to be a member of the “Gold Coast” WASP gentry.
Anyways, there was only so much window shopping I could do at the Americana Manhasset, an “outlet” mall near my Holiday Inn Express, featuring Gucci, Prada, Burberry, and the like. Furthermore, I hadn’t returned to Bethpage in twelve or thirteen years. “The Black” was the first major championship course I ever played. To do so, my father and I spent the night in our car, received our bakery ticket from the flashlight bearing marshal, queued outside the pro shop at some ungodly hour of the morning, paid our rather reasonable fee, and warmed up on the sharply downhill range until it was time to tee off, eyes bloodshot and bodies ragged. We hadn’t planned on doing this the first evening of the trip, but, this being at the very infancy of the smart-phone era, the hotel we’d booked through some call-in service on the way down turned out to be, let’s just politely say, not what we’d been sold. Even my father, whose idea of a fine overnight establishment was a Motel 6, was shocked (and probably scared like I was) when we pulled in and saw open and missing doors, cars on cinder blocks in the parking lot, and folks sitting in white plastic chairs on the outdoor concourse, beadily eyeing us while drinking malt liquor wrapped in brown bags. It seemed as good a place as any to get your pockets cleaned and ass kicked. Frankly, I can’t recall why we didn’t just decide to go to another hotel.
I can’t admit that I overly enjoyed the whole buildup to Bethpage experience, and that I am dying to go through it again. I’ll take an overly priced hotel bed, a shower, a sit down breakfast, and a tee-time set well in advance, thank you very much. But it’s an experience. And I imagine it’s different with a bunch of buddies than with your old man.
Even at that age, I could already recognize that Bethpage had its flaws, especially on and around the greens thanks to Rees Jones’ neutering of them, yet the scale was truly awe-inspiring and so far greater than anything I had experienced up to that point in my golfing life. The only thing I could compare it with was when I first emerged from the cramped, dark, humid, and gloomy concourse of the Stade Olympique in Montreal and saw sprawled out in front of me, from one edge of my eyesight to the other, the sharp green field, the yellow bleachers, the massive scoreboard, and the white canvas roof overhead. In fact, Frank Lloyd Wright often used this experiential effect—termed “compress and release”—in his works, as the restrictiveness of the first space makes the expansiveness of the second all the greater.
Upon rounding Bethpage’s red brick clubhouse, which is perched almost at the edge of the ridge overlooking the massive plain where the Red and Black courses begin and culminate, even the most well-travelled of golfer’s breath is sure to be momentarily halted by the scene that awaits him/her: to the left, the winding first fairway of the red course that, in its last hundred yards, snakes up a nearly vertical ridge atop which its green is set amidst towering pines; in the middle, the 18th fairway of the Black Course, and the sprawling bunker complexes that tightly pinch it from both sides; in the background, the similarly massive and fingered bunkers fronting the 17th green; further back, the 16th green and 15th fairway; in the front and center, the 1st fairway which is engulfed by an ocean of golden fescue and bends sharply to the right around a handful of miniscule looking trees; and to the right, the first hole of the green course (I believe), which similarly opens with a plunging tee shot off the ridge to a ribbon-like fairway at the bottom.
The scene that greets the golfer at Piping Rock is of a similar scale. Upon emerging from the tight alley that passes between the main clubhouse and detached ladies locker room, the awed reaction I had to the grandeur of the driving range (which originally served as the club’s polo field and is, I joke not, three hundred yards, or so, in width), the terrifying height of green-side bunker face guarding the inside of the redan 3rd beyond the back of the range, and the cluster of bunkers just short of the first green traced back to when I first entered the cavern of Olympic Stadium, when I first rounded the clubhouse at Bethpage and, later, at Augusta National, when I first chased my tee-ball over the ridge of Old Macdonald’s 3rd hole and saw the rest of the course juxtaposed against the bright blue backdrop of the Pacific Ocean.
Being at Piping Rock feels akin to being in a Fitzgerald novel. With its white pillared colonial clubhouse that overlooks the front nine, to the dozen grass tennis courts (where it is still required to wear white from head to toe), to the crocket court set near the putting green and range, to the wood paneling and brown-leather upholstered furniture all throughout the interior of the clubhouse, it’s not hard to think that you are walking in the footsteps of those after whom Fitzgerald modelled his Gatsbys, Buchanans, Bakers, Divers, and Patches. As someone who considers Fitzgerald his favourite writer and the greatest one that America has yet produced, I felt like a comic book fan dressing up to go ComicCon (or whatever the hell those people do).
Not even the rapidly eastward sweeping thunderstorm, in which a mad flurry of pelting hail was mixed for a few minutes, could dampen my spirit. Frankly, even a few weeks later, as I sit here writing in my study ten hours away, I still haven’t fully sobered for the narcotic of the round. Prior to playing it, I must confess that I didn’t really “get” the whole infatuation with C.B. Macdonald, from his words to his work to reconstructing the Lido, but now I do, now I fully am a converted member to the Evangelist’s congregation. And since, as I’ve plodded along comparatively uninspiring and spiritless modern links, I’ve felt akin to Nick Carraway starring with awe at Gatsby’s effervescent mansion, or even to Gatsby eyeing the green light at the end of Daisy’s dock across the day.
The majority of those who frequent and are members of Piping Rock, C.B. Macdonald’s first course after National Golf Links of America, belong to a stratosphere of society, a world that is and will always be inaccessible to those such as myself, and even to those such as Gatsby, the new money set. This is East Egg, not West Egg, and Piping Rock, like Fitzgerald’s fictional neighborhood and all that it symbolizes, is a club of the blood, not of the wallet. As my caddy joked, “you’ll find more people here with bloodlines back to the Mayfair than not.”
I don’t mean to imply, however, that the club is pretentious or stuffy; in fact, like most clubs I’ve yet visited of this stature, there is a laid back comfort, a sense of assurance and aplomb that prevails in its atmosphere. New money tends to show off, to need to make its new money visible, to make sure that you know that you don’t have as much new money. There were not any fire red Ferraris, or dazzling Porches, or tank-like G Wagons in the parking lot. There were no personalized carts. There is no halfway house, nor music being piped onto the range, and cell-phones are prohibited anywhere around the clubhouse except in the designated phone booths. The members dawned tame clothing and quiet dispositions, and the staff was friendly if slightly business like. In fact, I saw as many members under the age of twenty as I did fully grown ones. This is a proper club of the old school. A family club, if your family’s lineage traces to the Whitneys or Rockefellers, of course.
The wonderful 14th
Legend goes that C.B. Macdonald, who, according to all accounts, was never the most easy-going and co-operative person to work with, was upset that the club forbade him to route any holes over the polo ground (which is now the range), and, as a result, essentially let Seth Raynor, then still a relative novice at the craft, run the project for him. My caddy, who seemed extremely knowledgeable about the history of the club, said that Raynor mostly built the back nine himself. In truth, the back nine, which occupies the more tumbling and better portions of the property to the south and east of the clubhouse, does feel a lot more geometrical and “angly” than the front, two characteristics I tend to associate with Raynor. Perhaps this is just me, and frankly I am not well versed enough in the history of the club to know with certainty if this is true.
My caddy also mentioned that the 4th and 5th holes, which run in opposite directions through a little corridor jutting out from the northern most boundary of the property, are also unoriginal. This I can also believe, and, in truth, they’re probably the two worst holes among the eighteen. My first drive on the insanely right to left canted 4th landed in the right edge of the fairway, yet finished in the left bunker. For fun, I attempted a second, which I hit into the right rough with a fade, and it still ran down almost across the fairway. There’s nothing wrong with the fifth, a short and semi-blind driveable par 4, but it’s not up to the standard of the rest. I also found odd the fact that the club opts to mow the front and lower sections of the Biarritz (the 9th) at fairway length, but, according to my quick search on GCA, they’ve done so forever; considering the firmness of the ground, however, a scooting ball that lands at the front, or down in the trench, can still climb up to the back platform.
The Biarritz 9th and the Road Hole 8th
Everything prior and everything after them, however, is impeccable. I don’t particularly enjoy hole-by-hole tours (and I tend to not like to snap many pictures when I play), so, out of selfishness, I won’t write one. Yet I will highlight the redan 3rd, the knoll 13rd (in particular), and the up and down 15th and 16th as my favourites.
Currently, Top100golfcourses ranks it 52nd in the U.S., Golf Magazine 56th, and Golfweek 40th (classic). I’d say, with certainty, that it’s still underrated.
Part II: Sleepy Hollow
“Anticipation has a habit to set you up for disappointment,” warns Alex Turner, the lead singer of the Arctic Monkeys, in the opening line of their first record. I wouldn’t go so far as to say that Sleepy Hollow was an outright disappointment for me, but, perhaps, more so a victim of the circumstances. Ultimately, I don’t think anything is rated or reviewed in a vacuum; after-all, whether in criticism of art or architecture, there is a human element to the practice which can never be entirely eliminated.
Thanks to Gil Hanse’s and George Bahto’s renovation, Sleepy has gone from being a rather obscure C.B. Macdonald, by way of A.W Tillinghast, by way of Rees Jones, design to one of the foremost classic clubs in the North-East, if not the country. I doubt that any other club’s reputation has benefited as greatly from social media—seriously, is there a day that goes by without someone posting a picture of the course, usually of the 16th hole, on their account? And one cannot deny its beauty, with the Hudson Valley in the background, and the square, thumb-printed green with the bunker that wraps all around it.
The benefit has been a rocket-like ascension up the rankings: it debuted 96th in the U.S. in 2017 according to Golf.com, and then climbed to 36th in their 2020 ranking; meanwhile, Golfweek (being, as usual, ahead of the curve) ranked it for the first time as the 57th best classic course in 2012, and now rank it 44th. Looking at Golf Magazine’s list, I would probably have it ranked somewhere between its two positionings. And herein lies the crux of my issue, I think: I carried to the first tee an expectation to be playing the 36th best course in the U.S., and I was ultimately let down a tad.
It also had the unfortunate luck of following Piping Rock, which I would consider perhaps not the best course I have played to date, but likely my favorite.
The view of the clubhouse from the range
One thing that did not let me down, however, was the clubhouse, an opulent, seven or eight story estate of mustard yellow-hued stone and gray marble that was built by a member of the Vanderbuilt family and was once owned by Frank Rockefeler. Like Piping, Sleepy’s blood runs blue, deep blue. Their website indicates that the club was founded by John Jacob Astor IV, Cornelius Vanderbilt III, and Edward Julius Berwind, among others. Yet, despite this, Sleepy feels rather nouveau-riche, as if, like the remnants of Rees Jones’ work that were swept away in Hanse’s and Bahto’s renovation, that patrician atmosphere which usually pervades turn-of-the-century works built by these American tycoons, and their friends, has been swept away in a onslaught of cell-phone bearing traders and money councillors hoping to get a quick round in before rushing southward into town. Whereas Piping felt quiet, laid back, and sumptuously relaxed, Sleepy, conversely, felt hectic, frenzied, and, well, decidedly un-Sleepy, a Wall-Street trading floor rather than a country estate.
And this frantic sense extends to the golf course, itself. From the first tee shot, which is set literally under the shadow of the clubhouse, to the eighteen green, which likewise finishes at the base of the stonewall under the patio, it is a thrilling, roller coaster ride, climbing up and down, and back up and back down, and back up and back down the massive ridge that bisects the property. I don’t think anyone would evaluate this a great property over which to route a course, but it certainly allowed for some hair-raising, spine-tingling moments, as well as a couple regrettable ones. Here I am referring to the 2nd, a short-ish par 4 that climbs right up the ridge to a semi-blind green protected by a cavernous bunker to its front and right. My playing partner that morning, a Golf Digest rater, found himself in it and I am not sure if he has yet escaped it. The second regrettable moment, and the worst, comes at the 6th, a short, almost cape like par 5. The golfer’s tee ball must climb a mounded, nearly vertical ridge of some fifty-ish feet atop which the fairway is set at a nearly ninety-degree angle. What makes the hole especially difficult, and awkward, for the longer player, especially, is that the fairway is extremely slender in depth, making it nearly impossible to hold when downwind and firm, as it was that day when each member of our three some found their ball resting in the fescue through the landing zone. For the shorter hitter, on the other hand, if he cannot fly his tee-ball to the top, then he is faced with either an entirely blind second from the base of the plateau, or an extremely sidehill one from the rough. However, I’d have to play it a few more times, and in different conditions, to truly judge its merit, but my initial impression of it wasn’t favourable. Perhaps extending the fairway, or banking it in, would improve the tee shot, for, after that, the approach and green are both excellent, in truth. I am especially fond of how they set the “principal’s nose” bunker complex some sixty yards short of the green, mainly as a visual obstruction.
The scary 3rd, an “eden” template
However, the ill taste was quickly washed away by the plunging, reverse-redan 7th, the best par 3 on the property. The 8th, however, a “road” template, is a bit of a let-down, mainly because it plays straight from the tee, thus eliminating much of the template’s strategic genius. Piping’s “road” hole, on the other hand, is widely considered the best copy of the original, and once again, I think, Sleepy suffered from the circumstance. Although not the most picturesque of stretches on the course—apart from the 10th perhaps—, Sleepy’s middle portion is rock solid, chock-full of tough, interesting golf over rolling, though less extreme, land. The par 5 12th, featuring a creek that must be avoided from both the tee and upon approach, is a real standout.
The best hole is the 15th, a 505 yard par 4 with a punch bowl green set just over the apex of the main ridge. Setting wise, I doubt that any other “punchbowl” can match it. I also think, considering modern equipment, that the template works especially well at such a brutish length, because it necessitates the golfer to consider where and how to land his second, rather than just fly it all the way to the middle of the green, as he would with a short iron second. That morning, the hole played right into the wind, and I was forced to hit a 3 wood approach, which must have just barely flew the bunker guarding the front of the punchbowl, yet, according to the group ahead, trundled off the flagstick some thirty yards further and settled to an inch.
The punchbowl 15th in the foreground, with the 16th green in the background
My meager words can hardly do justice to the beauty of the 16th; however, I will say that the thumbprints are far more extreme than I had expected them to be. Considering that the tee ball is played with hardly more than a wedge, I think that the vicious contouring of the green works perfectly. The hole was cut in the far left portion of the green and my playing partner pushed his tee shot well right, leaving him a putt through the entirety of the print, which he failed to property judge and rolled into the bunker.
The now world-famous 16th
The 17th, which tumbles down the side of the main ridge, is a bad hole, feeling somewhat out of place and forced into the routing. Once again, though, the climbing and meaty 18th quickly puts this weaker hole out of mind.
The ultimate approach
The major overriding gripe I have with the routing is that too often the back tees require the golfer to march forty or fifty yards in one direction from the previous green and then retrace his steps to get to the fairway. But I can hardly blame the club for wanting to keep up with the Jones in this respect. The ball goes too far, we all know this.
Deeming a course as the 36th best in the U.S. means that it rests comfortably among the elite. I’m not sure I can quite rank Sleepy that highly, but it’s pretty close for me, likely around the midway point of the list.
One thing that remains unchanged from undergrad to grad-school is that, in most cases, the first week of classes is largely useless and thus eminently skiptable. If one of my profs is reading this (which is highly unlikely) I am sorry. With that being said, rather than suffer through another monotonous reading of a syllabus and then a short-introductory lecture of some kind, I traveled down to New York City for a few days, to play some golf and visit a friend who now works in Manhattan. Just a month prior, I had made the same journey to play Piping Rock and Sleepy Hollow; this time, though, the only round I had scheduled was at Baltusrol – enough reason in and of itself to visit.
Part III: Bethpage (Black)
I’d been too lazy to schedule another private club, and, truth be told, there aren’t that many appealing public options between Ottawa and NYC along Interstate-87 – and even near New York City. Glens Falls was hosting their club championship that weekend. I had no desire to go through Yale’s awful booking system; nor pay 250$ USD to play what seems like another middling, over-shaped, overly-penal, and sloggy Pete Dye design at Pound Ridge; nor drive all the way out to the tip of Long Island for Montauk Downs. This essentially left me with Trump Ferry Point, Lido, and one of the Bethpages as my options for Thursday afternoon. The thought that a single one of my dollars would somehow, someway end up in that man’s pockets, equally for political and for golfing reasons, was plenty enough to dissuade me from stopping at his place, despite its convenient location near the Throgs Neck Bridge, which costs about 20$ CAD to cross. I’ve always wanted to visit the location of the original Lido, and, based on the aerial, some of the current holes look pretty unique and cool; however, too much of the course looks plain and unimaginative, coupled with negative impression I hold of the kind of crowd a sub-50$ USD green-fee tends to draw. Despite having grown up playing public golf – and probably due to having grown up playing public golf and still being a member of a semi-private club – I’ll admit that I am a bit of an elitist when on vacation. The point of spending money to go somewhere, I believe, is not to experience, to get away from, what you do and deal with regularly.
Considering that it was a chamber of commerce day over the five boroughs, I figured I had little hope of sauntering up to the window and securing a tee time on either of the Tillinghast courses at Bethpage, so, as I listened to an E-Book of Michel Houellebecq’s The Possibility of an Island while watching the countless red-brick apartments, sleazy bodegas, over-crowded parking lots, chop-shops, and side-walk merchants surrounding the Cross-Bronx Expressway recede out my window, I resigned myself to the fact I’d most likely have to settle for one of the lesser courses at the facility. I had played one of them (I forget which) when I first visited, and it was fine, but hardly the kind of course you want to drive eight hours to play.
To my great surprise, though, there was a time available on the Black, which I of course took. Considering the reputation and location of the course, the 150 $ USD green-fee is extremely reasonable, especially when compared to Pinehurst #2 and #4, or TPC Sawgrass, or Bandon, or Streamsong, or even Pebble, which, at least based on pedigree, the Black can be. Surely the Black, despite its shortcomings, is one of the better pure values in America – and, from what I’ve heard, the Red is as well. In fact, both of my partners, two locals and regulars, claimed to prefer it to its more celebrated neighbor.
My one partner, whose name eludes me now, was about as stereotypical of a New Yorker as you can imagine. He strutted to the first tee with a Miller Lite in hand, his already sweat-drenched shirt untucked, and his black socks pulled up to the middle of his calves; his bushy black beard reached down to his chest almost; he dragged his push-cart all day, blasted country and classic rock, smoked twelve cigarettes, and housed another fifteen clandestine Lites.
Suffice to say, when he asked me if I wanted to put a little action on the game, I figured, after eyeing his game improvement irons and his fifteen year old titleist driver, there was no way that this guy was beating me. Of course, after learning that he was a “two or three handicap”, I said I’d only play him straight up, figuring that the metropolitan golf scene isn’t shy of men whose bags turn to mud when it rains. To my surprise, he accepted right away and we were off. Ten dollar nassau, two down auto. Despite being so-so all summer, my game was in a good state at that point. He began rather shakily by heel-scraping his drive behind the strangely planted trees along the inside of the plunging and right-bending 1st hole.
Although it hosted the first of its two U.S. Opens twenty years ago, playing the Black already sort of feels like playing a course from a (thankfully) by-gone era. This sense was further exacerbated after I played Baltusrol’s Lower course the following day, which like many of the other blue-blood championship venues, but unlike the Black so far, has recently de-Rees Jonesed its course.
Looking down at the twenty some yard wide ribbon of introductory fairway between the bordering velvet-lush expanses of rough morphing into wispy brown fescue, I’d forgotten just how narrow the fairways are cut and how small and flat most of the green surfaces are on the Black. And they seem even more so to the eye due to the fact that the playing corridors, most of which are framed by rows of stately pine trees, are expansive, in addition to the imposing scale of the fairway bunkers and those fronting a number of the greens. As I said in an earlier article, Bethpage is a massive ballpark, and, therefore, the scale of the architecture must be of a similar stature in order to effectively fit into the landscape, which, in its current iteration, it too often does not. There are scattered moments when the golf matches the land, but far too many of the fairways and greens feel as if they are engulfed, futile, and overwhelmed amidst the panorama.
Not to sound over-dramatic or mystical (an annoying tendency that plagues far too much of the literature about the practice, especially of late), but I do think that the architect, especially in grand natural settings, must duel, or combat with, or struggle against nature, against its hand. The best architecture – whether Stanley Thompson’s in the Rocky Mountains or at Highlands Links, or Tom Doak’s at Pacific Dunes, or Coore’s and Crenshaw’s in the Sand Hills of Nebraska, for example – matches its scale to that of its surrounds, its setting; thus, it doesn’t feel overwhelmed, that it stands toe-to-toe with what surrounds it. In layman’s terms, big vistas require big architecture.
The 1st, 2nd, 5th, and 7th at Bethpage, however, all provide prime examples of this sense of the architecture being engulfed, of being enfeebled by the landscape. The leftward sweeping par 4, 2nd, brings to mind St George’s, in Toronto, specifically with the way that the fairway runs through the bottom of the tree-lined valley and then climbs towards the perched green. At St George’s, though, the fairways tend to spread across the floors of the valleys through which they run and are, most often, almost entirely visible from the tee, which renders to the architecture a sense of potency. Whereas on the 2nd at Bethpage, hardly a sliver of the target is visible from the back tee, which induces the impression that the rough and even the overhanging trees are overwhelming the fairway. Simply pushing the mowing lines of the fairway further out so that both edges – but especially the outside one – climb slightly up the currently rough- covered embankments would not only improve the visual impact of the hole but also restore a measure of potency to the design.
The par 4, 5th, is, more or less, a mirror of the 2nd, although longer and probably better. Don’t get me wrong, it’s an excellent hole, but the fairway again feels smothered and feeble amidst the encroaching rough and within playing corridor, as does the green, which is cut halfway up an embankment and rests completely blind to the fairway behind the two fronting bunkers. The fact that it follows the genuinely all-world 4th, where the scale of the architecture perfectly matches that of the landscape, further exacerbates this sense.
On the long 7th, with its quasi-cape-ish tee shot that must carry the cavernous bunker that looms short of the fairway set diagonally to the tee, it is more so on the second shot that this feeling is again evident. Here, the two green side bunkers, due to the verticality of their faces, almost appear as if they are looming over the miniscule putting surface, like two gargoyle statues carved into the walls of a marble hall.
Returning to my match, as I stood on the seventh tee of the Black, however, at only one-over par but three down to my cab-driving opponent, I knew I’d been duped (or that I was, conveniently, as he claimed, witnessing the best he’d played all summer) and that, unless I started carding some birdies, the round wasn’t going to be as great of a bargain as it appeared it would be when I handed over my AMex to the pro-shop clerk an hour and a half earlier.
I’ll be honest, I was feeling pretty tepid about the course through 7 holes: Tillinghast’s original genius and its potential are evident, yes, but it’s hard to appreciate them considering the current state of the course. Thankfully, the 6 iron I hit to a foot on the downhill par 3, 8th, with its large, multi-tiered, severely back-to-front pitched green, which fits into the grandiose vista, and the new false front they’ve added, which can draw balls back into the pond that fronts the complex, along with the solid par I made from the front-bunker on the 9th, where the mowing line of the fairway beautifully climbs and rides the embankment along the outside edge of the playing corridor, restored me to a bit better of a mood.
The 10th and 11th, however, dampened it again. These have got to be the two most egregiously mowed fairways in America, if not the world. The left edge of the 10th fairway is currently cut twelve paces from the edge of the bunker that flanks it – I paced it off for fun. And even though the 11th runs pretty much flat, the fairway is essentially invisible from the tee: seriously, you stand up there and you stare out at an expanse of rough. I thought I stripped my drive, but I found my ball resting 9 yards into the rough, which, like every ball that doesn’t find the short-grass on the Black, I then had to try to chop-cut with a 4 iron into a 3 yard wide run-up between the two-fronting bunkers.
Walking over to the 12th tee, I was suddenly overcome with a foreign sensation: namely, when’s this round gonna bloody end? And herein lies the primary issue I have with the Black: it’s simply not a lot of fun, if at all, to play. Trying to hit drives into twenty yard ribbons and long irons into miniscule, often elevated surfaces that were, at least that day, rock hard gets tedious after about the front 9. And if you miss them, you’re either pitching out, chopping something down the fairway, or grabbing your sixty degree wedge.
The 15th’s approach
Nothing really shook this sensation the rest of the way homeward. It’s so plainly obvious what needs to be done that it hurts my head to look at most of the holes. Still, the 14th and 15th are both cool, especially the later, despite another fairway that’s swarmed by an ocean of rough. The 17th is a pretty setting but 18th is as utterly terrible as I remembered it. (For major championship golf, the fix would be to play cross-country to what I think is the final green of the Red, way off to the right. It would either be a long par 4 or a short par 5, but I don’t think it would require a ton of work. You could push back the current fairway bunkers to the right of 18 Black, creating a diagonal tee shot across them, and then pretty much leave the green as is.)
Sure, what is there now was considered the ethos of “championship golf” not that long ago, but it’s not anymore. And, aside from what I assume would be a painstaking process, considering the political hurdles I am sure you’d have to go through to get a plan approved, I think it’s a shame to have a Tillinghast kept in this fashion. Operating at its full-potential, it’s likely a borderline top 15 course in America; as it currently is, however, I don’t think it’s in the top 50, maybe not even the top 75.
Perhaps shooting 73 and losing by 5 shots to a “two or three handicap” also had something to do with the sense of disenchantment I carried towards Manhattan.
Part IV: Baltusrol & the Lower East Side
“The future’s dead. Retro’s the new thing…everyone’s looking back, not forward”
– The Mighty Boosh
What happens when we run out of past? Is this retromania a death knell for any originality in our own era?”
– Simon Reynolds, Retromania
“My biggest gripe with Doak and Coore and Crenshaw and Hanse (among a few others) is that their work is far too similar to eachothers’. There’s a far greater variety and sense of individualism in the catalogs of, say, Donald Ross and Stanley Thompson and Dr. Mackenzie than between those of these three modern firms – with Streamsong being perhaps the prime example of this.”
My journey from Bethpage to Baltusrol the next morning would be, at least, a three step one. First, I had to get to my friend’s apartment on the Lower East Side. Second, we would, in all likelihood, patronize an establishment (or two, or eight) nearby. And third, I’d exit Manhattan Island and enter the great thumping belly of America, as Kerouac put it, through the Holland Tunnel in direction of Springfield, New Jersey, where the blue-blood club is located and has been since 1909. (Fun fact: Baltusrol is the only club to have hosted a major on three of its golf courses)
Yet, it turned into a much more complicated journey than that.
Driving through Manhattan is, at the best of times, a slightly daunting prospect for me, nevermind right during the heart of rush-hour, which is when I departed Bethpage towards that world-familiar sky-scraping barrier of buildings that marked the end-point of the first step of my journey. My friend, let’s just call him A., whom I hadn’t seen him since the beginning of the pandemic, had only recently moved to Manhattan for work. And, despite having visited the island a few times, I had never really spent a night out on the city.
Now in my later-20s, the anticipation of spending a few hundred bucks on an Uber and cover and sloppily made mix-drinks and over-priced craft cocktails—along with, of course, the inevitable dry-mouth and headache and upset stomach and sense of regret that come with them the following morning—doesn’t crank my gears the way it once did. However, as I crawled westward along the Long-Island express, in direction of the centre of the world, that concrete jungle where dreams made of, where they dream of dealing on the dirty-boulevard, where everybody’s searching for a sound they haven’t heard before, where they act like romans but they dress like turks—to quote just a few of the song lyrics that helped shape my imagination of what I presumed New York was like, or at least how it once was—, I truly felt the way I did when I was a seventeen-year-old boy with a newly acquired fake I.D. waiting by the front window of my mom’s living room for the boys to come pick me up in a beater Honda of some-kind to go downtown.
The fact that I am a massive, and I mean a massive, fan of The Strokes (along with Interpol and L.C.D. Soundsystem, as well as a few of the other early-aughts N.Y.C. revival bands that rode on the skinny-jeaned, jean-jacketed, converse-footed, beer-soaked-hair wave instigated by Casablancas and co.) even further intensified my sense of anticipation and excitement. I was going to the neighbourhood where they had cut their teeth, see the same sights they had, drink in the same bars they had, eat at the same places they had, stumble home along the same streets they had.
Well, not really. In truth, though, it hardly mattered that I knew fully well that the Lower East Side they had mythologized and which I had so often fantasized about in my teenage years—a hard-pressed, scuzzy, dank, graffiti-tagged, sightly dangerous but completely enchanting neighbourhood populated by street-cart merchants, keen-eyed shop-keepers, poor students, aspiring models, musicians dreaming of fame, sidewalk philosophers, body-sellers, and down-and-outers—had been, like most of today’s New York City, crushed under neoliberalism’s blinging, pigeon-free, glass enclosed, upwards trending, privateering, and placeless vision for the modern city. Disney World in the North-East. Still, I was ready to test out its energies, to see if there were still some ghosts of how things once were to conjure from the bottom of a bottle.
I enjoy, when possible, matching my soundtrack to the place I am visiting—sometimes it’s a literal match, as in this case, but other times it’s more of a spiritual pairing, based on the feeling I get from the environment. I’m a complicated guy, what can I say. So the selections filling the cabin of my car, as I inched over the Williamsburg Bridge, doing my best to keep my eyes on the rear-bumper a few feet ahead and not on the moody dusk enveloped city around me, were mainly from Room on Fire and Is This It?, their first two albums and my favourites of theirs, as is common I guess. Although I do enjoy their last four albums, to varying extents, there’s something vaguely indistinct, and insipid, and even, if you allow me to step into a Mark Fisher mode of musical criticism, corporate to them that muffled, or in the case of a few songs entirely erased, what had made their early material so uniquely seductive when it first burst through the sluggy and depressive mush that had come to rule the airwaves in the late 1990s, in the wake of Be Here Now’s thud and Ok Computer’s boot up. The Strokes’ combination of sleaze and seductiveness and rawness and nonchalance in their sound which harkened back to the bygone NYC of Scorsese’s Mean Streets and Taxi Driver, The New York Dolls, The Ramones and, of course, The Velvet Underground, when it was still a city you could somewhat live in if you weren’t a trust fund-baby or didn’t pocket upwards of 200k a year.
You get the point. Surely, even if you are hardly or perfectly unfamiliar with the band, you’ll recognize “Last Nite”, which was a rather big alternative rock hit when it came out and remains popular and features a jangly riff stolen from Tom Petty’s “American Girl” and Julian Casablancas’ signature detached and scornful and even cynical manner of delivery.
Like most New Yorkers, my friend does not own a car, which meant that I had to find a parking spot for the night, somewhere around his building. As a general rule of thumb, I refuse to pay for parking, even if it means that I must walk an extra fifteen or twenty minutes to my destination; however, being unfamiliar with the parking rules of the city and, just as importantly, the areas where I could safely park my mom’s BMW (I always borrow my mom’s car for trips—you can’t show up to Baltusrol or Sleepy Hollow in a Kia) without it disappearing forever, I bit the bullet, renounced one of the core tenants of all I stand for, and begrudgingly payed the twenty bucks. Even by NYC standards, the neighbourhood was alive that night—I only realized later that it was Fashion Week.
The light pollution tinted the night-sky a faint creamsicle-orange, illuminating the clouds that were being called for the whole next day. Waiting to cross Delancy Street, somewhere near the Tennement Museum, I eyed a girl, perhaps an inspiring model (whatever that means anymore in this era of Instagram) in knee high pink PVC-material boots and a baby blue plastic trench coat risk life and death in order to get the perfect, supposedly candid, abbey-road style shot of herself sauntering across a row of idling cars with the electicityscape of the Lower East Side forming the backdrop. I knew, however, that if this wanna-be Emily Ratajkowski lingered merely a moment too long in front those ready-to-pounce New Yorkers, or temporary New Yorkers, sitting at the edges of their seats waiting for the light to flash green, they would, in all likelihood, be quite ready and willing and able to put a premature end to her career just so that they could save a second on their journey to wherever.
I was expecting my buddy’s place to be a ramshackle, run-down, redbrick apartment building, with a rusty fire escape crossing its way up the graffiti-marked exterior wall. In truth, I sort of wanted it to be like this, a real Lower East Side tenement. Instead, it was the exact kind of sleek, square, swank sort of building I figured had over-run the entire neighborhood and city. Cocaine-riche, is how I’d best describe it. Although comfortable and glossy, the main lobby, locked and guarded by a security person, was essentially identical to the one that greets you at my best friend’s place in Ottawa, or at my other friend’s place in Toronto. Black marble tiles. White vinyl furniture. Glass coffee tables on which were set some fashion and art books that had never been read. Wide black-and-white skyline panoramas of the city.
A., who lives with two roommates he met at NYU, had warned me that they were having some friends over, which, in my mind, was an incentive rather than a deterrent, despite the 730 am tee time I had the following morning.
I had considered changing in the car, so that I wouldn’t roll up looking like some dork in my Peter Millar striped polo (whose sleeves reach down to my elbows, the way a golf polo is meant to be worn), my thick yet stretchy and form fitting Banana Republic khakis around which my Old Town Club needlepoint was wrapped, and my gray sperry casual runners. But, ultimately, after evaluating the contortions I’d have to go through to change in my car, I figured I’d show up looking like a middle aged Country Clubber from Palm Beach—the risk of tweaking my back or neck or shoulder the day before playing Balty simply wasn’t worth it.
I knocked on the solid black wood door, allowing the chorus of voices and mellow drum and base music escaping around it to wash over me. I anticipated making a George Costanza-esque twirling entrance, having all eyes instantly drawn towards me, me this mysterious out of towner playing one of the City’s foremost private clubs the next day, but my arrival triggered no noticeable reaction on the part of anyone besides A. Too cool New Yorkers—“work hard and say it’s easy”.
In fact, the only mention I made of Baltusrol, sometime later as we made our way down Ludlow Street, elicited stares of zilch from the two girls at whom I directed it. As did my middling (if that) career prospects and bone structure and Thomas Tuchel-esque physique.
I figured, eyeing my well-groomed male competition, that I wasn’t going to play the role of the alpha-cool in the room; yet I judged I could fit somewhere in the middle of the cool spectrum. My ability to quote, at a moment’s notice, Baudrillard or Foucault or Derrida or Delillo or DFW or The Strokes or Godard or Seinfeld or Annie Hall or Stepbrothers would play well with this crowd of yuppies (a few of which were likely to have also been liberally educated) and would thus cement my status as at least a middling cool guy in their eyes. I told myself this as I changed into a grey button which I’d roll up to the elbows upon exiting the well air-conditioned room back into the still city-humid evening, black jeans, and white runners; I then applied a layer of cologne apparently engineered in France for boys who like girls who like boys.
Somehow, the following morning, I woke up without the help of my alarm, its oh so familiar ring, ring, ring that sends shivers up my spine merely writing about it. As I do whenever I fall drunkenly asleep, fully clothed, somewhere that isn’t my bed (alone, unfortunately, that morning, like most of the time), I immediately checked the pockets of my jeans to see if my wallet and keys were still on my person, which they were, thank god. My phone! Shit, shit, shit. I rolled to my side, a rush of the previous evening’s sin soaring up my stomach to my mouth and face and head, which immediately forced me to go into full survival mode. Deep breaths, close my eyes, deep breaths. It’s okay. It’s okay. Based on the sharp sun invading the room, burning my eye balls, microwaving the pool of acid in my gut, I couldn’t accurately judge what time it was. But I could recall having set an alarm for 6 am, under some table littered with bottles and ice-filled glasses and plates with wasting food on them in whichever one of the handful of dark, loud, clanking bars we had gone to until lord knows what wee hour of the morning. It hadn’t rang yet, so I judged I was good to linger a moment. Out of the corner of my eye, I saw my phone resting on the table, amidst cracked cans, empty chip bags, cooled pizza, and dirty plates. You’re too old to be doing this shit, bud.
Once I became somewhat of a functioning human being again, a few minutes later, I reached over and checked my phone, but nothing happened. Black screen. The damn thing is dead. Now I was in full panic mode. Due to issues with the chain-of-supply, which meant that my mobile service provider had been unable to provide me with a new iPhone the last time I needed one, I was forced to switch to another brand, an especial issue when it comes to trying to find a charger in a world full of iPhone zombies. Ignoring what was rumbling in my mid-section and my spinning head, I lept to my feet and marched to the door. All I knew was that I wasn’t in A.’s apartment; other than that I was clueless as to my geographical whereabouts, as well as the time. The clock on the stove showed a line of zeros.
Emerging from the lobby, which was essentially identical to A.’s, I found myself on a stock New York City avenue. I searched for the sun through the seemingly inward-leaning row of buildings that lined whichever street I was dying on the side of; when I found it, I began toward that general direction, knowing that the Lower East Side is at the south-eastern end of the island. The first street signs I came upon revealed nothing—a numbered avenue and a named one. At this point, I figured I wasn’t going to end up playing Baltusrol, having succumbed to the enchantment of alcohol, old friendship, and a few pretty women rather than world-class golf. Honestly, despite how I was feeling at that moment, I had had a great night.
Resigned to my faith, no longer wanting to move my heavy booze-tainted legs, I jumped into a yellow cab lingering near the intersection ahead.
“Where ya heading,” the driver growled, in that lovely New York manner. If life worked like fiction, the driver would’ve been my playing partner from the previous day at Bethpage, and I would have forgiven him for having sand-bagged me out of xxx bucks. But alas, it wasn’t him; rather it was some unshaven, leathery-skinned, seen-too-much shit veteran of the dirty boulevards and mean streets. Another measly private serving in this ever reliable army of the avenues.
“I don’t know…uhm…Lower East Side, wherever.”
“Big neighbourhood,” he responded.
“What time is it?”
“Just after 6.”
And just like that my spirit was reborn; I might make my tee time after-all. What had been a great night might, in fact, turn into an incredible one.
I can’t tell you I felt very good standing on the first tee, hoping to not to snap-hook my opening shot onto the road that closely borders the entire left side of the short par 5, 1st, on the Lower course. Still, somehow, someway, I had made it, with time to spare, too. Rather than hit balls and roll putts, though, I sat on the outdoor patio overlooking the side-by-side finishing holes and nursed a glass of water, while the caddy master sorted out the early arrivals, all of whom were members, it seemed, apart from me.
I have to admit, despite being fully aware of Baltusrol’s nearly unmatched championship pedigree and the aesthetically pleasing pictures and drone shots I had poured over of the recent renovation done by Gil Hanse’s team, my expectations were somewhat tempered. Watching it on TV, as far back as 2005, when Steve Elkington (then as now one of my favourites, mainly thanks to the Jim Rome show) lost in heartbreaking fashion to Hefty on a Monday finish, it had never really tickled my fancy; it seemed the archetypical Northeastern Parkland Test, which is fine and dandy and all, don’t get me wrong, but playing through trees and amidst housing simply can’t be compared to playing by the ocean, or in the dunes, or out on the tip of Long-Island. And I assume I am far from the only person who cannot recall a single moment from the 2016 PGA, won, perhaps fittingly, by Jimmy Walker, just about the blandest possible player in PGA tour history.
What I found, now thinking back on it a few months afterwards, was a truly fine golf course, one worthy of all the praise it’s received since re-opening, but one (among many), I can’t help but somewhat feel, that is symptomatic, or symbolic, or affected by the wide-spread mode, or ethos, of discombobulating nostalgia that is currently omnipresent in every aspect of society and popular culture, from politics, to music, to film, to fashion, to architecture, to gentrification. What Simon Reynolds described, in his brilliant 2011 book Retromania which through the lens of 21st century music and Ipod culture attempts to get to the root causes of this widespread sense of anachronism and inertia, as a “pop age gone loco for retro and crazy for commemoration”. Reynolds wonders if “we are heading towards a sort of cultural-ecological catastrophe, where the archival resources of rock history have been exhausted? What happens when we run out of past? Is this retromania a death knell for any originality in our own era?”
Speaking to The Guardian regarding his inspiration for the book, he reveals that “there were specific things I noticed from the mid-2000s: the popularity of the “don’t look back” template, where bands play their iconic album all the way through in sequence, or the multiple simultaneous revivals (80s synth pop, late 70s post-punk, late 60s folk-rock, etc). But it also came from everyday use of the internet: downloading out-of-print albums from file-sharing blogs or trawling through YouTube, and entering a state of temporality where the past and the present are intermingled and indistinguishable, in an eerie way.”
“Youtube’s ever proliferating labyrinth of collective recollection,” Reynolds writes in Retromania, “is a prime example of this crisis of over-documentation triggered by digital technology. When cultural data is dematerialized, our capacity to store, sort, and access it is vastly increased and enhanced. The compression of text, images and audio means that issues of space and cost no longer deter us from keeping anything and everything that seems remotely interesting or amusing.” As a result, we’ve become overwhelmed with cultural relics from the past, costless and ready to access, whereas they used to be confined mainly to archives or to dusty volumes on our bookshelves or to paintings on our walls.
Mark Fisher, a British critic of music and culture whose writings are far more theory based and Zizekian and Deleuzian than Reynold’s, cites, what he terms as, “the slow cancellation of the future”, brought about by neoliberalism and short termism and post-fordism: “While 20th century culture”, Fisher claims, “was seized by a recombinatorial delirium, which made it feel as if newness was infinitely available, the 21st century is oppressed by a crushing sense of finitude and exhaustion”.
You may be wondering what books about pop-music and culture have to do with golf architecture, but I do believe, as Keith Cutten explored in his brilliant study, that golf is far less insular, far more affected and influenced by popular culture and societal trends—urban development especially—than we probably presume—and has so far been fleshed out by its thinkers.
Citing the writing of Fredric Jameson, arguably the foremost critic of “postmodernism” in the arts, Fisher argues that popular culture has, in response, retreated into a postmodern era of pastiche and anachronism—to the soothing narcotic of the past, of nostalgia: “Jameson’s nostalgia mode is better understood in terms of a formal attachment to the techniques and formulas of the past, a consequence of a retreat from the modernist challenge of innovating cultural forms adequate to contemporary experience”.
Fisher singled out The Arctic Monkeys, a massively popular and critically acclaimed British alternative rock band, as being especially representative of this strange mode in which we are currently caught: “what makes The Arctic Monkeys typical of post-modern retro is the way in which they perform anachronism. While they are sufficiently “historical”—sounding to pass on first listen as belonging to the period which they ape (the early 1980s in the case Fisher is referring to)—there is something not quite right about them. Discrepancies in texture—the result of modern studio and recording techniques—mean that they belong neither to the present nor to the past but to some implied “timeless era”, an eternal 1960s or an eternal 1980s”. Reynolds echoes and adds to this thought when he writes that “Retro-styled groups had generally been a niche market, for people unhealthily obsessed with a bygone era. But now these kinds of heavily indebted bands—The Jesus and Mary Chain, The Stone Roses, Elastica, Oasis, The White Stripes—could become “central”: epoch-defining figures even when the substance of their sound referred back to a much earlier epoch”.
First let me say that the Arctic Monkeys are among my favorite handful of bands, as are The Strokes, another band Fisher could have singled out just as easily—same with Oasis, Blur, The Stone Roses, The White Stripes. I love this kind of music and consume it in unhealthy amounts. And not even Reynold’s and Fisher’s dismissing of them could tarnish my love. Second, I understand that many may not agree, or get the same impression I do, but criticism of golf architecture, like that of all forms of art, is, after-all, a personal reaction—emotion recollected in tranquility, a spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings.
Similarly, it’s not that I do not think that the work of Hanse and Co., and Doak, and Andy Green, and Coore and Crenshaw is not first-rate in what it attempts to do and not likely an improvement on what was there prior; it’s just that I’m always struck, inflicted by this sense of there being something not quite right to it, something about these projects that are little too clean cut, or graceful, or neat, or expected, in the same manner that modern recording techniques have cleansed the faint fuzz and hum and rough edge that is audible in the recordings of the Buzzcocks, or The Velvet Underground, or The Clash.
Compare a picture taken recently of one of these full scale restorations and compare it to a black and white original of the same hole or course. In these new renovations, the general aesthetics of the golden age are there, certainly, but filtered through a twenty-first century lens and, just as importantly I think, its expectations: perfect grasses and bunker faces, neat rough, pruned trees, 500 yard par 4s built to handle modern technology, etc. (see authorial interjection #1, here). As a result, the discrepancies in texture elicit in me a strange, discombobulating sense of time being “jumbled up”, as Fisher coined it, as if I’m supposed to be in two or three eras simultaneously: a timeless one, where the way bygone amalgamates uneasily into the now.
Something akin, perhaps, to The Strokes’ “Two Dollar Bill” set, which was filmed in 2001 in a warehouse in Los Angeles but possesses the atmosphere and look of something broadcast in the late 1970s. Or, like those vintage band T-shirts that are now sold everywhere, at HMV, or Sunrise Records: they look incredible and the real item from afar, but their corporate, pristine nature becomes evident upon closer inspection. The bloke wearing it looks cool, but you know that he probably can’t name a song from the band he’s wearing; you know his shirt smells good; you know that those rips were cut by some machine in a sweatshop of the third world.
Frankly, my gut feeling is that within 30 or 40 years, many of these clubs will begin planning or will have already re-visioned their courses—what that will look like, I am not sure. If anything, a few will probably do it merely to differentiate themselves from their neighbors – in fact, there’s already a sense of homogeneity, of placelessness creeping into golf architecture. (see authorial interjection #2, here)
Essentially, the market for renovative and restorative work has fractured into a Hanse-school and an Andy Green one—and nearly every course that was touched by the Joneses has now been reworked into one of these two models. Moreover, in any business where there’s mass profit and money just lying around, people tend to go restless and want to spend it on something—a very American instinct.
Returning to my hunch for the future, by then, they’ll be a whole new crew of young architects and even golf writers looking to cut their teeth, and at whom will they direct their criticism? Right now, Doak and his minimalist friends rule airwaves, are on MTV, and are selling out world tours in all the NFL and MLB stadiums. After all, every new generation of kids needs something to rebel against, just as Doak did, just as Pete Dye did, just as Trent Jones did, just as Travis did, and so on. I doubt that this coming generation of architects—perhaps those not quite yet in the business or just entering it—will be content with spending their careers simply doing routine maintenance work on the pièces de résistance of the game—unlike the Mona Lisa, or Sgt. Pepper, they can and have been worked, a number of times in fact. And why won’t they be able to have their gos at them?
I suspect much of the current hesitancy about “modernizing” architecture is because its last practitioners were slightly astray in their values and implementations; however, merely because it failed once, does that mean we shouldn’t try out the future again? If, as I suspect, minimalism was the first great “punk” movement in golf architecture, then what will be its post punk equivalent? King-Collins? Or, was Pete Dye a one man punk wave, and the minimalists golf’s post-punk-revivalists?
You all made fun for Robert Trent Jones Jr for saying that we’re getting swept up in the era of nostalgia. But look around you. I think he’s onto something.
(authorial interjection #1: Let’s be real, the notion of twenty-thousand dollars a year to play from un-raked bunkers, or in patchy and barren rough, or on greens running at eight is hard for most people to fathom—the majority of the membership at these blue-blood clubs is older and thus still conditioned by the dominant expectations of yesteryear. We must’n forget that we, we, the wokesters, are still, by and large, operating in a bit of an echo chamber—speaking to the three members I played with at the club, their reaction to the work was far more tempered than I had expected).
(authorial interjection #2: My biggest gripe with Doak and Coore and Crenshaw and Hanse (among a few others) is that their work is far too similar to eachothers’. There’s a far greater variety and sense of individualism in the catalogs of, say, Donald Ross and Stanley Thompson and Dr. Mackenzie than between those of these three modern firms—with Streamsong being perhaps the prime example of this.)
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