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At 2 o’clock on a blustery Sunday afternoon, the last
foursome of Ephs staggered off Bethpage Black’s elevated
eighteenth green, completing a pilgrimage begun two days earlier
and hundreds of miles away. Among the number of ways to score
a tee-time at Bethpage’s Black Course, home of the 2009 U.S.
Open, there is one historic and straightforward option:
sleeping as foursomes in your car in the course’s parking lot
the night before you want to play. The eleven recent Williams
graduates that played Bethpage Black this past May chose this
option, a tradition that has been embedded in Bethpage Park’s
unwritten rulebook since the 1960’s.
The trek to Long Island and Bethpage’s parking lot began
with Ned Wydysh ’04 leaving work at Johns Hopkins chemistry
school in Baltimore at 5pm on Friday afternoon. Ned had
originally planned to stop in New York City for the night and
travel out to Bethpage on Saturday, but having heard only 24
golfers could play Bethpage each morning in the weeks leading up to
the U.S. Open, he decided to drive straight to the course. To
his surprise, when Ned arrived in the parking lot at midnight
Friday night, he wasn’t first in the car line to play on
Sunday morning! In fact, three of the six allotted car spots
to play the Black Course filled up quickly after Ned arrived,
prompting Ned to call up Matthew Slovitt ’06 and Brendan
Conley ’08 at 3am Saturday morning and urge them to drive out
to the golf course as quickly as possible. Driving on little
to no sleep, Matt and Brendan arrived prior to 5am and backed their
cars into the sixth and seventh slots in line. So as dawn
broke over the parking lot, it appeared only two of our three Eph
cars would be privileged to play the Black course, but fate
intervened. Among the many rules of the “car
line” is that you may not leave your car for more than an
hour at a time. By 8am Saturday morning, the occupants of the
fourth car in line had broken this rule and been kicked out of line
by Bethpage’s staff for leaving their vehicle
unattended. With the rest of the cars moving up one space
each, our third and last Eph car slipped into the precious sixth
spot in line, and all of us were guaranteed to play the Black
Course only weeks before the U.S. Open tournament.
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| "Drive for show, put for dough." |
As Saturday morning progressed, a rumor began spreading that NBC
and their golf commentator Roger Maltbie were going to film a TV
special on Bethpage’s unique tradition of golfers camping out
in the parking lot. By early afternoon, as the final Ephs
arrived from Buffalo, Boston, and Washington D.C., the many NBC
video cameras, television trucks, and luxury RVs scattered around
the lot made it clear that we had picked a special day to camp
out. NBC cameras videotaped our every move: grilling
hamburgers and sausages, playing cribbage, throwing beanbags, and
swapping stories in lawn chairs spread across the parking lot
median. The NBC Sports crew couldn’t have been nicer
– they are headed by Sam Flood ’83, and when they
learned of our Williams roots, we were invited us to use the
bathrooms in their trailers instead of having to trek a
quarter-mile to the nearest facilities! Interviews with NBC
reporters were interspersed amongst the grilling and games, and
many of us including John Kildahl ’06 ended up having sound
bites on the TV telecast. The NBC crew even encouraged one of
us to challenge their golf analyst Roger Maltbie to a putting
contest. Zach McArthur ’05 volunteered, walked over to
Roger’s RV, and laid down the challenge, which Roger
laughingly accepted. What ensued can only be described as a
half-hour that none of us will ever forget, and will remain a
golfing highlight of our entire lives. Once on the putting
green, Roger Maltbie, the eleven of us Ephs, and about a dozen
others from the car line each put a dollar bill into one of the
holes on the green. Roger refused to putt first, and instead
insisted the order be youngest to oldest. And who was the
youngest putter? Don Wieczorek ’08 stepped up into the
face of the NBC cameras, drew back his putter, and sent the ball
rolling across the green and directly into the cup of money 50 feet
away! When everyone else missed the putt, Don had won the
first round of the putting contest. We ended up playing three
rounds of the putting contest, and in the last round three people
made the initial long putt: Mike Dougherty ’04, Robbie
Bergan ’06, and Roger Maltbie. While Roger won the
playoff round over Mike and Robbie, it was amazing watching two in
our Williams group go head to head with a golfer who had almost won
the Masters.
The rest of Saturday evening back in the parking lot consisted of
more interviews and being invited to the NBC Sports truck for free
pizza and beer. We stayed up in a big circle of lawn chairs
until past midnight, playing cards and meeting some of the other
people in line, including a father and son that were in the
Army. A huge rainstorm rolled through at 1am, ending all the
card games, awakening all of us that were passed out under the
trees, and sending us scrambling to the dry interiors of our cars
for a few hours of rest and prayers the rain would pass by
morning. An NBC reporter startled a couple of our cars by
sticking their camera through our windows around 4am on Sunday
morning for interviews; one great quote that aired during U.S. Open
coverage was from a clearly tired Tim Evans ’06 talking about
being terribly uncomfortable trying to sleep sitting up in the
passenger’s seat of a car.
The final leg of finding our way onto the first tee at Bethpage
Black started at 4:30am Sunday morning as a very curt member of the
golf staff woke us by rapping on our windows. What followed
was a sequence of getting handed numbered bakery tickets, getting
bracelets attached tightly to our wrists, stumbling half-asleep
into the clubhouse to pick out tee times, and having another
bracelet wrapped around our wrists. After more than a day of
hanging out in a parking lot, we had secured three tee times on the
amazing Black Course! As dawn broke in the parking lot (for
the second time for half the group!), we unloaded our distinctive
purple and yellow Williams golf bags from the trunks. After
grabbing a very early breakfast, hitting some shots at the driving
range, and watching Roger Maltbie hack through the deep rough en
route to making at least a triple-bogey on the first hole, our
first foursome ventured carefully onto the first tee.
We would all agree the course was all we could handle and
more. Among our eleven players, we made only 2 birdies (out
of 198 total holes played) and Kurt Brumme ’05 came in with
the low round, an impressive 84 given that the course plays over
7400 yards, and we played the majority of the holes from those way
back tees – amazingly, five of Bethpage’s par fours are
longer than the longest par four at Taconic, the 470-yard
11th! Finding your ball in the rough was a real challenge, as
you had to be essentially standing directly on top of it looking
straight down into the 6-inch deep rough. From there, it took
a massive hack with a wedge just to muscle the ball 100 yards back
into the fairway! When the PGA pros played the course three
weeks after we did, they actually played under significantly easier
conditions than we did – much of the hay-like rough we faced
had been cut down, so balls we could only swing at with wedges and
advance a few yards, they could fly up to the greens! All in
all, it was an unforgettable experience to play a U.S. Open course
and then watch how the pros played the same holes only a few weeks
later. Most of us will never forget teeing off on the
spectacular par-five fourth hole, or hitting a long-iron at the
seventeenth green surrounded by deep bunkers and four huge empty
grandstands. And hey, some of us can even say we beat Tiger
on certain holes with a birdie or par! Sharing the weekend
with close friends from Williams made every moment at Bethpage that
much more special – and to have NBC Sports capture our entire
experience was a thrill none of us Ephs will soon forget.
