Bethpage and Me — Playing golf and embracing life: A family affair on Long island

Golf Digest, June, 2002 by Ed Weathers

Scatter my ashes at Bethpage State Park.

In 1949, when I was 3, my family moved from Patchogue, Long Island, to Farmingdale, Long Island. This brought us almost an hour closer to New York City and cut my father's daily Manhattan commute on the Long Island Railroad in half.

The move also brought my family within two miles of Bethpage State Park. My father could have chosen another town. He chose Farmingdale because of Bethpage--because of its (then) four golf courses and its red-clay tennis courts and its baseball field, and maybe even a little because of the everyman polo fields and the picnic grounds.

Long Island at the time was undergoing a transition that prefigured what was to happen all over America. Between World War II and 1964, when I went off to college, the population of Long Island grew from about 600,000 to more than 2 million, making it the fastest growing region in the country. The postwar boom and the GI Bill helped hundreds of thousands of middle-class families afford homes for the first time. Over that period, potato fields and duck farms gave way to Levittowns and malls. Parents wanted their baby-boomer children to be the best-educated, least-deprived kids in the history of the world. As a result, the public schools on Long Island in the '50s and '60s were shrines to learning. For my parents' generation, which had been mugged by the Depression, it was a time of profoundly tentative hope.

My father was part of that. He had grown up in a world of country club values. He admired gentlemen golfers, natty tennis players, shrewd card players and anyone who was "well-rounded." When he was a boy in Louisville, he once had seen Bobby Jones play and never forgot it. But like most postwar middle-class Long Islanders (Dad worked a mid-level white-collar job for AT&T), we couldn't even dream of joining a country club. For millions of us over the decades, Bethpage State Park was our country club, our affordable green piece of the American dream.

As for me, if it is a cliche to say that a person is the product of a place, then I am a cliche and the place is Bethpage State Park. So please understand if this month's U.S. Open on Bethpage's Black Course leaves me and a lot of other Long Islanders sending out a mixed message to the golfers of the world. On the one hand, welcome to our place and thanks for helping spiff it up. On the other hand, when the party is over, please fold up your corporate tents, pick up your plastic cups, head on home and give the memories--and the tee times--back to us.

DAD

My earliest memory of Bethpage is of the driving range on a warm, bright Sunday when I am 7. That makes the year 1953. My mother is sitting on a bench under the trees behind the range. It will be another 21 years before she will swing a golf club for the first time.

My young father is hitting balls. He's slim, a little like Jimmy Stewart, with rimless eyeglasses. He is wearing a tie, tucked into his long-sleeve white shirt. He is the only person on the range hitting hooks, but he's got a pretty good swing, I realize now. Between shots, he offers tips to Mr. Priest, a good-natured, baldheaded family friend who has a classic lunge of a slice swing. Even at 7, I think I know that my father is probably happier hitting balls and helping his friend here on this Sunday afternoon than he will be for the rest of his hot, commuter-whipped week. I am happy because he is happy.

Also hitting balls are my brother Bobby, 16 years old, and my brother George, who is 11. Bobby's swing is already more impressive than my father's, long and graceful and powerful. The packed dirt of the range--there is almost no grass--yields a lot of roll on his big drives.

George and I are taking the first swings of our lives outside of our backyard. The range mats are made of hard black rubber strips that resemble the insides of tires. The rubber tees are mostly broken. We stick our own wood tees between the strips to hit drives. We use my father's clubs, which have names on them: "brassie," "spoon," "mashie," "niblick." (I cannot believe I am old enough to have played with a niblick, but I did.) The clubs all have wooden shafts, mostly stiff as baseball bats. But the brassie shaft has a wonderful whip to it, like a forsythia branch. I will use it right through high school in my rounds at Bethpage, and I will never again play with a driving club that lets me feel the clubhead so well. The spoon's whipping is coming unraveled. Within two years, the clubhead will be held on entirely by black electrical tape.

Serious baseball players, George and I have the hand-eye coordination to make contact most of the time, though we often make violent 360-degree swings. Success is getting the ball airborne off the elevated tee. Great success is hitting the round 100-yard target marker with a bang!

My mother watches from the shade. I like to think that she is happy, too.

I remember many Sundays on the Bethpage range in the years that followed, but in fact there were not that many. Maybe five or six times a summer we went. At a driving range even today, I become a child again.