Nine things to know about Bethpage Black, site of the 2025 Ryder Cup

What started back in 1927 as a sedate, two-day team match between the U.S. and Great Britain dominated by the Americans changed character in 1979 when the overseas team was expanded to include Europeans. Historically, the biennial matches now stand at 27-15 in favor of the U.S. squad, but since 1995 the Europeans have prevailed 10-4. With the U.S. having won three of the last four home matches, playing in the friendly confines of a home game should be a much-needed advantage to the squad captained by Keegan Bradley.

The 120-mile long glorified sand bar comprising the four counties of Long Island (Brooklyn, Queens, Nassau, Suffolk) is home to eight million people, who have the run of 160 golf courses. They run the gamut from world-class private membership venues (Shinnecock Hills, National Golf Links of America) to modest city courses in Brooklyn like Dyker Beach under the Verrazano-Narrows Bridge or Marine Park Golf Course adjoining a landfill. Over the decades, those golf courses have been home to 10 U.S. Opens, seven U.S. Amateurs, six PGA Championships, five U.S. Women’s Amateurs, four Walker Cups, one U.S. Women’s Open and now its first Ryder Cup.

The Black Course is one of five 18-hole layouts at Bethpage State Park, a 1,475-acre (2.3 square mile) municipal recreation area that is part of the New York State Park System. The facility, 29 miles due east of Times Square and at the center of Long Island, includes bike paths, picnic areas, polo and soccer fields, pollinator gardens and hiking trails. It dates to a 1930s, Depression-era program by ambitious visionary state official Robert Moses (“The Power Broker”) that deployed government-funded laborers to build gardens, beaches and swimming pools – as well as the network of bridges, tunnels airports and highways that still define modern New York transit.

The golf component of Bethpage State Park includes a pre-existing private course, Lenox Hills Country Club, that was requisitioned for the project and converted to public access as the Green Course. Three more courses – Blue, Red and Black, all designed by A.W. Tillinghast – were built in the 1930s. A fifth course, Yellow, was added in 1958. Prior to the 2002 U.S. Open, Rees Jones volunteered his services to help the Black Course recover from years of deterioration.

Today these courses register some 250,000 rounds a year, with green fees set at very favorable rates. Weekend green fees for walkers on the Yellow, Green and Blue Courses are only $43 for state residents and $48 for non-residents. The Red Course is $48/$100 and the Ryder Cup venue Black Course is $80/$160, making it one of the world’s most affordable, highly ranked golf tickets. Demand for golf is so great that in addition to advanced online access, a highly competitive queue forms early in the morning (or the night before) in the parking lot for access to highly prized tee times, particularly on the Black.

Albert Warren Tillinghast, 1876-1942, was an iconoclastic golf designer, journalist and fine amateur golfer who helped define the Interwar Golden Age of Golf Architecture. Among his leading designs are San Francisco Golf Club, Winged Foot, Baltusrol, Baltimore Country Club – East Course, Quaker Ridge, Philadelphia Cricket Club – Wissahickon and Brook Hollow in Dallas. A flamboyant, free-spending and mercurial figure typical of Gatsby-era New York, he had a fine eye for the game and conveyed it in a stream of entertaining golf columns that have lately been reissued in a three-volume collection. His work is defined by aggressive bunkering, dramatic greens and intimately stitched routings. Bethpage Black represents the last of his great works in a career that earned him a place in the World Golf Hall of Fame.

Clifford Charles Wendehack, 1884-1948, was a native New Yorker who single handedly elevated the art of clubhouse architecture to a recognized art form. His design of the Tudor-style clubhouse at Bethpage State Park in 1935-36 also came relatively late in his career and was one of the very few such public facilities that he created. Trained at the distinguished Académie des Beaux-Arts in Paris, he set up his practice in Manhattan and Montclair, New Jersey, where, among many other residential homes, he designed the house that Robert Trent Jones Sr. long lived in and had an office.

Wendehack’s clubhouse creations, variants of Tudor and Norman Revival, include the clubhouses at Winged Foot, Park Country Club of Buffalo, Mountain Ridge (N.J.) and The Ridgewood Country Club (also in N.J.). These works form the backbone of a thoughtful, lavishly illustrated book he published in 1929, "Golf & Country Clubs: A Survey of the Requirement of Planning Construction and Equipment of the Modern Club House" that emphasizes the role of these buildings in providing much needed rest and retreat for the American businessman.Nearly a century after its publication, this rare, hard-to-find volume remains the only serious book ever authored about clubhouse design. His design of the Bethpage clubhouse is in a subdued English manor style, one that contributes to the facility’s reputation as “a country club for the people.”

From the low point of the first fairway to the high point (ninth green, holes 10-12) the Black Course presents 77 feet of elevation change. The transition is not a gradual slope, but rather a recurring theme underfoot that is very evident up or down midway through the front nine and the last half of the back nine. It wears on you, as do the psychological demands of an average golfer knowing he or she has to hit fairways and avoid fairway bunkers to have any chance of playing within 10 shots of their handicap. Even for Ryder Cup team members, the mental strain is compounded by the physical exertion. The U.S. team will be buoyed by the certainty of a receptive hometown crowd and that will create some surplus energy, which should surely be a factor in boosting their chances.

In terms of basic playing strategy, the key here is simply hitting fairways, since the thick rough (a mix of Ryegrass, Kentucky bluegrass and Poa annua) does not allow for much ball control coming into these greens. As good as these golfers are when playing for discrete pin positions, the advice that respective Captains Keegan Bradley and Luke Donald should be conveying would be to throw away the pin sheet and simply play for the centers of greens. That enhances the margin of error for avoiding greenside bunkers and puts the pressure on match-play opponents to play regulation golf aiming at simply at fairways and greens in regulation.

That “drive-by” judgment derives from a superficial assessment that presumes that all of Tillinghast’s greens should be equally as convoluted as those at Winged Foot (West) or San Francisco Golf Club. But those are relatively flat courses where the greens need to be dramatic to make up for rather tame land of the routing. With the dramatic roll and topographic movement of Bethpage Black, intensely contoured greens would have been a mistake. Besides, these greens do slope, but in a steady way like a plain built on a continuous slope that blends into the surrounding terrain. In other words, they are built more or less at grade, and where the grade tilts, so does the putting surface. For the 2002 U.S. Open, Rees Jones did make sure to add various pockets for discrete hole locations on half a dozen holes; the par 3s are especially notable for this effect and provide distinct positions when players have virtually the same approach club from the same fixed position. On the longer holes, like the six par 4s over 475 yards, the greens are marginally more sedate but still offer enough interior contour to make a difference on the approach and the first putt.

Bethpage Black’s most photogenic hole, given the long view from the elevated tee of the three bunker complexes defining each shot from tee to green. At only 517 yards, it is within easy reach with two shots by everyone in the field, the more so since it plays down the prevailing wind out of the southwest. But this only puts more pressure on players since they know they must make birdie or likely lose the hole. Tillinghast’s design genius is undercut significantly given the distances that Ryder Cup players drive the ball; 300 yards on a slightly downhill tee shot carries a lovely cauliflower-shaped bunker on the left that most everyday Bethpage golfers struggle with. Some longer hitters might hit a 3-wood to keep from running into a secondary wall of bunkers at the far end of the fairway – a bunker formation that most of us mortals struggle to carry in two. From the fairway, these golfers will have a middle iron of circa-200 yards uphill 37 feet to a green perched just beyond yet another wall of sand.

The trick will be to come into this platform green with enough loft to carry the fronting bunkers and yet with enough spin to hold the long approach without running over the putting surface into a deep falloff behind. That, in turns rebounds back to strategy off the tee: Drive it long enough to have a shorter approach or lay back safely and come in with a longer, less lofted club, There will be much discussion about this on the tee Friday and Saturday during Foursomes (alternate shot) and Four-ball matches.

Here's the stretch that stresses golfers of every skill level at Bethpage Black. For the Ryder Cup, these four consecutive par 4s average 478 yards. They sit at the very far end of the layout, 1.5 miles from the first tee, and with the ninth tee actually in another county than the bulk of the golf course. Hitting fairways off the tee is paramount, especially managing the 300-yard carry into a prevailing breeze over a deep diagonal bunker on the inside dogleg at the ninth hole. In recent years, the intense phalanx of lateral fairway bunkering on the 10th and 11th holes has been moved in closer to the line of play rather than protected by dense rough, as was the case during U.S. Opens in 2002 and 2009.

This is by far the hardest hole on the course, with an average score of 4.36 at the 2019 PGA Championship. The unbunkered fairway is narrow and bends steadily to the left, making it particularly elusive for those playing left-to-right who tend to miss it on the outside. From an ideal fairway landing area, the green is the most elevated on the course, 50 feet in the area; it’ also the most steeply sloped putting surface on the course: two-tired, sliding from back left to front right at such a grade that the maintenance staff treats it with TLC by reduced rolling and mowing Otherwise, it would be hard to fund enough hole locations where putting would be fair and the ball would come to a stop before truckling off into a steep front bunker – or down a slippery slope. Miss the fairway off the tee and there’s close to a 60 percent chance of a bogey ensuing. Lay back off the tee with less than driver for safety and there’s the burden of an additional iron or two into the green with a lower trajectory, less spin and more chance of either hitting the front face or running through this putting surface.

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