by Bob Duden

Created on: December 11, 2009

There is an old adage about golf; it is a game you play, but cannot win.  You can beat an opponent, but you just cannot beat a golf course.  Try as you might, the golf course always wins.  No matter how well you play, no matter what your handicap, you always leave a shot or three out on the course.  The lipped putt, the wedge that spins the wrong way, or the pured drive that rolls through the fairway into the thick rough, are all lost shots on your score card.  The golf course is the demonic devise that determines your day, and in this whole wide world, no two golf courses are identical, so where do you play?

One of the finest public golf facilities anywhere sits on the wooded bluffs and rolling hills straddling Nassau and Suffolk Counties on Long Island.  Bethpage State Park is home to five different golf courses, all open to the general public.  The storied Black Course at Bethpage has been host to two United States Opens, the peoples opens, but that doesn't begin to tell the story of Bethpage.  When you drive through the front gates you are faced with the panorama of Yellow, Blue, Red, Black and Green from left to right, a storied choice of venues steeped in Long Island history.  

In 1912, rail road magnate Benjamin Yoakum did what a lot of big monied New Yorkers did, he bought land out on Long Island.  He joined the Astors, the Belmonts, the Whitneys and a host of other New York society families as they expanded their play grounds east of New York City to the farm lands on Long Island.  They built the palatial estates and summer haunts that F Scott Fitzgerald wrote about in The Great Gatsby.  Yoakum bought 1400 plus acres and leased a portion of that land to The Lenox Hills Country Club.  A golf course was built in 1923, designed by Devereaux Emmet.  By 1929 and the stock market crash that started the Great Depression, The Lenox Hills Country Club had fallen into hard times.  Yoakum died that year as well, and his heirs were fighting over the estate.  Lenox Hills wished to remain open but Yoakum's heirs solved their squabble by selling the land to New York State.  Parks commissioner and noted  'master builder ' Robert Moses brokered the deal.  In 1934, under Franklin Delano Roosevelt's Work Progess Administration program, Moses began the construction of three new golf courses,

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