Town Rankings / New York

The Best Golf Courses in Farmingdale

Five golf courses. One state park. Farmingdale, New York, is the only town in America where the argument is not which club to join or which resort to book, but which colour to play. Bethpage State Park holds five 18 hole courses, and the most famous of them has hosted two U.S. Opens and a Ryder Cup while charging public golfers public money. The warning sign on the first tee of the Black Course, recommending it only for highly skilled players, is the most honest piece of writing in American golf.

This ranking is unusual because access is level. Everyone here is public, everyone can queue, everyone can book. So we score almost purely on the golf, then the day, then value, and the park gives us a clean fight: one giant, one locals' favourite, and three courses fighting for the bronze and for your second round of the trip.

1Bethpage Black Course

The Black is No. 1 and the debate lasts about four seconds. Two U.S. Opens and a Ryder Cup on a municipal course that any golfer can play is a combination that exists nowhere else in the sport. The course earns its reputation the hard way: it is long, it is bunkered like a fortress, the rough is a negotiation you lose, and the walk, there are no easy rides on the Black, is part of the examination. The famous sign is not marketing. It is a disclosure statement.

What keeps the Black from being a mere brute is the quality of the questions late. The closing stretch demands committed shots when your legs are gone, and the par 4s on the back nine have broken better players than you in front of television cameras. The concession is that the experience around the golf can be a grind: the booking system, the crowds, the five hour round, the sense of being processed. All true. Play it once, early, on a weekday if you can, and the grind becomes part of the story you tell. The best public championship course in America does not apologise for being popular.

2Bethpage Red Course

The Red is the locals' real favourite, and locals are right about it more often than visitors admit. The Red gives you most of the Black's virtues, serious length, strong par 4s, honest bunkering, at a fraction of the circus. Its finishing hole, a long par 4 that plays back toward the clubhouse, is one of the best closing holes in the park, and the Red's best holes would not embarrass the Black's middle stretch.

Why second, then? Because the Black's ceiling is higher and its history is unmatched, and this list ranks courses, not value for money. The concession, happily made: on a pure enjoyment per dollar and per hour basis, the Red might be the best course in the park, and the golfer who plays Red twice while the tourists queue for Black once has not lost the trip. They may have won it.

3Bethpage Blue Course

The Blue is the park's solid middle child: a full size, full test golf course that would be the headline act in most state parks in America and is third here. It has length, it has teeth in places, and it plays as the natural step down from Red for a group of mixed ability who still want a real course, not a pitch and putt with delusions.

Its concession is identity. The Blue is nobody's favourite Bethpage story. It lacks the Black's legend, the Red's cult and the shorter courses' charm. But a ranking needs a third place and the Blue takes it on substance: more course, more challenge, more golf than the two below it.

4Bethpage Green Course

The Green is the park's original soul, the course that predates the park's championship ambitions, shorter and friendlier and routed through the same handsome ground. For beginners, seniors, and anyone playing with their kid for the first time, the Green is Bethpage as it was meant to feel before television arrived. It ranks fourth on golf and would rank higher on grace.

5Bethpage Yellow Course

The Yellow is the gentlest of the five, the beginner's door into the park, flatter and more forgiving than its siblings. Last place at Bethpage is still a state park 18 on Long Island that thousands of golfers love, and the Yellow's real job, getting new golfers hooked without humiliating them, is a job somebody has to do. It does it well. It just does it with the least golf of the five, and this list pays for golf.

Five courses, one park, one queue. The last light at Bethpage falls on golfers walking in from five different first tees, all of them convinced they picked the right colour. Four of them are wrong. That is the fun of the place.