These Long Islanders made their own country club. Membership is booming

If you are a young man of suitable age and substandard nutritional dignity living on Long Island, it is possible — if not likely — you’ve developed an affinity for the finest ramshackle pizza joint in America: Rose’s Pizza.

Rose’s sits undignified in its cubbyhole between the grime-filled corridors and general bustle of New York City’s Penn Station. Its vibe is seedy. Its service is stridently rude. Its conditions are almost certainly unsanitary. Its pizza is aggressively average. And yet anyone with the great fortune of visiting its fluorescent interiors after several libations knows it is also one of New York’s most vital culinary institutions.

Each day, 650,000 people stream through Penn Station. Many of them are headed to Long Island — an amalgam of rich accents and beach-dwellers who have shopped at the same delis and bitched about the same traffic for generations. Many more stop at Rose’s.

If you ask them, Rose’s customers will tell you they’re there for a quick bite or a cold beer, but that’s a half-truth. A visit to Rose’s gives Long Islanders the thing they cherish most and experience least: A place where time stands still.

Perhaps because they live in the shadow of the fastest-moving city on Earth, few things are more precious to Long Islanders than tradition. Rose’s is a tradition. As is the journey to and from Penn Station on the Long Island Railroad. As is the golfing tradition at the center of our story — one that occasionally arrives after a late-night visit to Rose’s and the Long Island Railroad: Beers on the Back Nine.

I arrived at West Sayville Golf Course long before dawn on one spring morning anticipating a reflection of golf’s soul. The Beers on the Back Nine, as the group is called, began as a gathering point for Dads from the town of West Sayville on weekends lost to travel soccer and little league. At a distance, the central premise that has endeared so many to golf — the shared bond between men — seemed pure with this group.

It did not take long to learn these guys were not golfing purists. At least, not in the sense of white belts and carefully tucked shirts. As the cars (and Ubers) streamed into the parking lot, it became clear the gathering was about much more than the golf. One attendee had not slept before arriving, owing his tiredness to a long night at the bar (it was unclear if this meant as an employee or a customer). Another filled a cooler as dutifully as one might clean their clubs. A few more were obviously battling the previous night’s demons.

“And we’re on best behavior today,” one of the competitors told me with a laugh. “Sal and Gio made sure nobody got after it too hard last night.”

Sal, the group’s founder, is a short, quiet, genial man. He began the group’s Sunday morning tradition years ago by approaching the local muni, West Sayville Golf Course, with an offer. He could bring enough guys to host a 24-man, back-nine shotgun before the first groups arrived at West Sayville each Sunday morning — and they could have the revenue from six foursomes’ worth of greens and carts fees.

The golf course agreed, and soon the tradition grew from a 6 a.m. hit-and-giggle into pre-dawn rite of passage involving nearly every dad in town. These days, the text goes out each Wednesday at 8 a.m. sharp. The tee sheet is filled by 8:05.

“If you don’t say ‘in’ within 45 seconds, you get shut out, or you have to be an alternate,” says Gregg Giannotti. “There’s teachers that set alarms, there’s people who give their phones to other people to make sure they get in.”

Giannotti — who everybody calls Gio — is my spiritual shaman into this group. He is the closest thing to a celebrity here, a local media personality known as one-half of WFAN’s Boomer and Gio, a popular morning sports talk radio show.

Gio invited us here because he loves golf, and because to him, these guys are golf. Not in the ritzy, private club way that defines so much of Long Island golf’s perception, but in the no-frills, blue-collar way that defines so much of its reality.

“Well, today we had a real celebrity: The Suffolk County Police Commissioner,” Giannotti says with a grin. “We got some retired corrections officers, retired police officers, an insurance guy, a painter, a couple of teachers out there as well. Oh, and a sports talk radio host.”

On a typical Sunday morning, the vibe among this group is joyous. Bruce and Billy Joel rip on the speakers. Head covers bearing the crests of the local sports teams vastly outnumber those bearing the crests of the local country clubs. The competition is at once deeply serious and filled with rib-cutting laughter. Golf course etiquette is followed with militant diligence. The pace of play is blazing.

The game is a nine-hole Nassau, and the stakes are high. Victory and you return to the group’s parking lot hangout a hero; defeat and you’re a chump.  

“When I’m telling you I’ll be thinking about missed shots from today for the rest of this week, I will,” Gio says. “You would have thought we just walked off the back nine at Augusta the way we’re talking about these holes and pin placements.”

Giannotti is joking, but not really. Many of the participants have begun to call their Sunday morning tradition “West Sayville C.C.” — codename for the muni they have coopted into their own private club.

The setup here is nothing nefarious, just a group of buddies willing to do what others aren’t to sneak in nine holes on the weekend. After all, this is how many of America’s first private clubs started right here on Long Island: An incorporation of like-minded individuals hoping to hack it around. The years that followed turned golf membership into an entity that conferred status and wealth, but many of the founding fathers just wanted a place to play.

Among those who compete, a similar tradition follows the day’s efforts: trash talk in the parking lot under the rising sun, followed by coffee and bagels at home.

“I squeeze nine holes in and usually get home before [my kids] are even up,” a competitor says.

By the time the sun finally emerges from beyond the clouds on the Sunday morning we visit, the group has already encircled the asphalt. The golf is over, and the skewering has reached a fever-pitch.

It is here in the parking lot that I wonder what this golf tradition says not about these men, but about Long Island more broadly. What is it about the New York City suburbs, downwind of the city’s upheaval, that leads Long Islanders to traditions like these?

Gio knows the answer almost intuitively.

“It’s everything that we are in one spot,” he says. “Our personalities, our competitiveness, our cynicism, our humor — it all comes together out here.”

Public golf, Gio says, is a microcosm of life in New York: A steady swell of change. In the face of the city’s constant churn, it can be hard to remember where your feet are. Traditions are one of the few things anchored to the ground.

“No matter who’s winning, who’s losing, who you’re playing every week, every bit of your personality that you acquired growing up here is out on that golf course,” Gio says. “It’s like if you were a goose that never saw another goose, and then one day you saw a flock of geese. You’d be like, this is what it’s supposed to be like.”

NOT LONG after my visit to West Sayville, I stumbled into Penn Station in a hurry.

The terminal has been renovated extensively in the last several years — the fruits of a public works project several decades too late. Rose’s disappeared behind a wall of scaffolding as the work reached a fever pitch, and for a time there was some concern the restaurant would never return.

But as I descended below ground into the terminal, I was delighted to see my old friend resting right where I’d left her, sitting dutifully in a cubbyhole against her gleaming new competitors.  

In the aftermath of the Penn Station renovation, Rose’s is different. It is larger, cleaner, and in most ways better — but it is also missing a piece of its original soul. (The cashier rang customers up on the same Bush-era cash register that has existed inside the restaurant for decades … then dutifully accepted tap-to-pay.)

Nevertheless, it was late and I was a little buzzed and in a rush, so I ordered a slice of pizza. It arrived in my hands not more than two minutes later, and as I smelled the glorious stew of bread, sauce and grease, I felt the world slow around me. I sat there for a moment, transfixed in a wave of nostalgia, and I thought about my friends in West Sayville.

The men of Long Island’s great Sunday morning country club have changed. The story has changed. The spirit has changed. But like Rose’s, the tradition is exactly the same.