Waiting Game : The best way to get a tee time at Bethpage is to spend a night in the parking lot. Just don't expect to sleep

Golf Digest, June, 2002 by Chang-Rae Lee

There are the salty regulars, mingling with tallboy Buds and smokes--night-shift guys and retirees who've known each other for years, this their only country club, and who group up in the lead cars for the first tee times of the day so they can rip through in three hours and get back home for breakfast and a nap. There are also tourists here: a foursome of lanky young Swedes making a yearly pilgrimage, some natty-looking dudes from the Bay Area, and a father-son twosome visiting from Indiana, Mom and Sis back at the hotel in Manhattan sleeping off a sweet NYC evening of La Caravelle and "The Lion King."

It must be that time, because here comes the guy with the flashlight. Everybody gets back in the cars, and we roll out and form the conga line. When I finally park again and get called inside to the clubhouse window, I'm nearly overcome by a repeating wave of the jitters, the way I used to feel in college when I'd attempt an all-nighter and succeed only in making myself ill from too much coffee and too many Tootsie Rolls. Though there's an open spot at 6:08, I wonder if I'll be able even to hold a club, so when the lady asks again, I say the 12:36 is just fine with me, already warming with the thought of seven and a half good hours of sleep. See you later, guys. It's been real.

Postscript: Glorious day, excellent course condition, three nice fellows as partners. The one with the ugliest swing beat us silly. Suspected he was using an illegal ball, as he never let anyone mark it on the greens. I shot 83, which on any other day would have been 93. The course is long. On most of the par 4s, I was hitting a 3-wood for my approaches, but I was pure magic with the 60-degree wedge, saving pars when I should have made doubles. Best 18-hour round of my life.

Chang-rae Lee is the author of two novels, Native Speaker (1995) and A Gesture Life (1999). This article is excerpted from The Ultimate Golf Book, edited by Charles McGrath and David McCormick, [C]2002 by Houghton Mifflin Company, 272 pages, $40. Reprinted with permission.