2 months from Ryder Cup, Bethpage Black undergoing bold transition

The tent city sprang up in April.   

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

The golfers arrived early and often, as they always do here: Residing in spot after spot on the white-lined asphalt outside the Bethpage State Park clubhouse. The lots were full by the time the night arrived on the first day of the season, brimming with golfers from the world over dreaming about the elusive tee time in their crosshairs. The crowds remained this way through the heat of the summer, surprising park officials who figured nothing — not even the boon of a forthcoming Ryder Cup — could raise demand even higher.

The tradition of the Bethpage sleepover remains one of the course’s greatest legacies, a living embodiment of the egalitarian spirit that Long Island’s grandest municipal golf complex was founded upon. Each day, the park reserves a certain number of tee times for those who spend the night sleeping in their cars, sharing beers and meals and banter and a dream. In the evening, golfers receive tickets that cement their spot in line for when dawn arrives. The following morning, they are shuffled from the parking lot into the park office and given a tee time at an affordable rate — about $80 for New Yorkers, and about double that for out-of-towners.

It all brings about a general sense of giddiness on most nights in the lot, and for good reason. For those with a golfing addiction so serious as to sleep in their trunks, a Bethpage tee time is a hit of weapons-grade purity. The state could charge them 10 times the price and they’d still gladly pay it. Instead, the greens fee was a bargain … so long as you didn’t factor in the cost of lost sleep.

This was fitting. Bethpage State Park exists thanks only to the so-called “grand bargain”: the New Deal. Back in the ‘30s, the park was one of the crowning New York achievements of the Works Progress Administration, a Depression-era Roosevelt program that sought to put America’s record numbers of unemployed to work building schools, government buildings and parks that would benefit the public good.

When Robert Moses, the legendary New York inside man, found the parcel of land that would become Bethpage, he was giddy with the thought of golf. He hired the preeminent golf course architect of the day, a swashbuckling man of America’s Roaring 20s, A.W. Tillinghast, for the grand fee of $10 per day. The vision? Create the course Moses called “The People’s Country Club.”

Tillinghast, working with local golf legend (and course cartaker) Joseph Burbeck, produced the course that is now called Bethpage Black, a mythical municipal golf course of draconian dimensions and major-championship esteem.

For most of those sleeping in the parking lot, the reward is a round on “The Black,” a 7,400-yard, par-72 bludgeoning that elicits many vertical walks and the distinct feeling of a kick in the shins. Really, though, the reward is an opportunity to share the same real estate as the legends of the game in the U.S. Open in 2002 or 2009, the PGA Championship in 2019 or the Ryder Cup in 2025.

The Black Course has undergone several renovations over the years, the most significant of which was completed by the so-called “Open Doctor,” Rees Jones, ahead of the ’02 U.S. Open. The work ahead of 2025 has been more modest: A new set of fairway bunkers on the 13th hole is one of several traps sporting new features, while the fairways are mown wider than most locals can remember, with a new addition — a first cut — surviving into the summer.

Really, the biggest upgrade has nothing to do with the golf course: It is the tremendous, temporary tent city that now links the golf course from first tee through to the 18th. The renovations are not complete — the biggest buildout, the one that will actually surround the first tee box, is slotted for after the course’s public closing later this summer — but you can understand the general state of affairs.

I have always been struck by Bethpage’s enormity. When I played the course for the first time in 2020, I imagined it as a kind of mythical beast. In many ways, I still do. But now, with hospitality and grandstand construction in full swing, it is far larger and more daunting than I can ever recall it.

The result will be one of golf’s biggest and grandest events when the United States team and their Europe counterparts arrive in town — a spectacle befitting one of the largest and most global events in the sport.

Until then, though, the hubbub has generated something far simpler for those who fill the parking lots and fairways each night: excitement, the kind that never wanes at Bethpage, but that has amplified to new heights in 2025.

You can feel it in the air as dusk turns to darkness each evening in the great asphalt parking lot at Bethpage State Park — and again each morning as darkness turns to dawn. It is then, at least six days per week, that a new crop of rookies arrives on Bethpage Black.

It is a grand, beautiful, glorious bargain. And somehow, it’s only getting better.

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