Bethpage State Park - Black Course

Bethpage Black is a publicly owned course on Long Island considered a demanding tests in American golf, with a famous warning sign at the first tee cautioning that the course is recommended only for highly skilled golfers. Designed by A.W. Tillinghast and opened in 1936, the Black Course became the first public venue to host a U.S. Open when it welcomed the championship in 2002 and again in 2009, and it hosted the 2019 PGA Championship and the 2025 Ryder Cup.

Bethpage State Park traces its origins to the New Deal era of the 1930s, when New York Parks Commissioner Robert Moses conceived an ambitious public golf complex on Long Island. Moses enlisted A.W. Tillinghast, one of the foremost golf architects of the age, to design three of the five courses that would ultimately occupy the property. Tillinghast worked closely with Bethpage superintendent Joseph H. Burbeck, and the Black Course was opened in 1936 as the centerpiece of the complex. The Long Island Park Commission charged Tillinghast with creating something that might compare to Pine Valley as a great test of golf—a mandate he fulfilled with an uncompromising 7,000-yard layout featuring severe rough, sharply contoured fairways, and boldly shaped greens that reward precise ball-striking above all else.

The Black Course developed a local reputation for difficulty almost immediately after opening, and the warning sign posted at the first tee—cautioning that the course is recommended only for highly skilled golfers—became a photographed markers in American golf. For decades, however, the course remained largely unknown outside the New York region, its status as a public facility placing it outside the orbit of the major championships that typically visited private clubs. That changed in the 1990s, when the USGA began exploring Bethpage as a potential U.S. Open site. Rees Jones was retained to lead an extensive restoration ahead of the 2002 championship, regrassing fairways, rebuilding bunkers, and reconfiguring several holes to accommodate professional tournament standards while honoring Tillinghast's original routing. The result was a course that played firm, fast, and extremely difficult when Tiger Woods captured the title in 2002, becoming the first player to win the U.S. Open at a publicly owned course. The tournament's return in 2009, when Lucas Glover prevailed, confirmed Bethpage Black's status as a legitimate major championship venue. The Black Course hosted the 2019 PGA Championship, won by Brooks Koepka, who became the first player since Tiger Woods to win back-to-back PGA Championships. That event was followed by the 2025 Ryder Cup, marking the first time the competition was staged at a public venue in the United States. The course plays to 7,468 yards from the championship tees at a par of 71, with a course rating of 78.0 and a slope of 155—numbers that reflect the extraordinary challenge Tillinghast built into the design. Characteristic features include the massive par-4 fourth hole, the brutally long par-4 fifth, and the undulating eighteenth hole where enormous galleries have witnessed so many championship moments.

The fairways are framed by dense rough that penalizes any deviation from the straight and narrow, and the greens are complexly sloped in the Tillinghast tradition, demanding that approach shots be precise both in distance and in angle of entry. Bethpage Black stands as one of the great achievements in American public golf—a course of championship caliber that remains accessible to any golfer willing to wake early enough to claim a tee time. The combination of the A.W. Tillinghast design, the New York State Park system management, and the U.S. Open championship history creates a public golf experience whose democratic character — accessible to any golfer willing to wait in line or enter the lottery — embodies the ideal of championship golf available to all. For New York golfers, Bethpage Black represents the pinnacle of what public golf can be: a genuinely high-quality championship course operating as a public facility at democratic pricing in one of the state's most beloved parks.