How Bethpage Black Is Getting Ready To Host the 2025 Ryder Cup | All Grass Is Local

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Bethpage Black, site of the 2025 Ryder Cup, is no stranger to hosting big events. Having previously held the 2002 and 2009 U.S. Open as well as the 2019 PGA Championship (and two FedEx Cup Playoff events) Andrew Wilson (Head of Agronomy), Michael Hadley (Superintendent) and Vinny Herzog (Construction Superintendent) are veterans of big golf tournaments. But the Ryder Cup is the biggest of them all and we stopped by six weeks before the start of the match to see how things were shaping up.

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I think it’s just that, you know, maybe there’s restaurants that you may go to with your friends or your pals, like, you know, every month you maybe your favorite like, you know, burger and burger and a beer bar and then you have like the Black Horse is more of that elevated restaurant that you go to once or twice a year for special occasions. Yeah. I was thinking if the Black Horse were a restaurant, it would be like a hot sauce challenge. Oh, maybe. Yeah, you might be right. It could be a hot sauce challenge. Like, yeah, hot ones. It’ll Yeah, it’ll beat the bomb. Like when they get to that one sauce that always gets people when their eyes start watering. That would be climbing the hill going up to 15 green. It’s It’s going up to 15 when people start like, “Oh my goodness, like what did I what did I sign up for? [Music] This is uh when I first started working here, this was actually like a dump, like a wood chip uh dump. I mean, there were even like stop signs and shopping carts in here. And so, we’ll clean that all out. And then our horiculturalist, his name is Victor, he took it over. So, that’s called Vicks Valley. So, it’s our little song bird kind of pollinator garden area. So, we don’t let the We’ve never let any of the tournaments touch it, so it gets roped off during the events. Uh there’s even some beehives in there. So, we have some honey bees on the barn, too. So, it’s a pretty cool spot. Like our ecologist had a picture from 2019 and you can see with the honey beehives and then you can see up through the trees, Brooks kept his team off on number five, you know, for the final round of the PGA Championship. My name is Andrew Wilson and I am the director of aronomy here at Beth Page State Park. Well, I grew up in Beth Page about 10 minutes from here. And I I didn’t play the black until, you know, I was probably, you know, 20 or so. Like I’d usually play we’d play the green course kind of like the green course back then. You had to walk the green course. There were no carts. So that was always the weight was usually a little shorter for the green course. You’d walk past the first tea of the black and you see the warning sign and then just you could see how how just how big everything was, the bunkers and everything else. It was just it was noticeably different than the other courses. I started working here in 1989 and I was working mainly around the clubhouse. I worked on the tennis courts then just general landscaping getting ready for outings and I even cashiered for a year. I’ve been a starter, a ranger and then the the sea change at Beth Page State Park happened in 1997. And that’s when the announcement was made for the US Open. So that was great. Huge news. Coincidentally, the Greenskeeper at the time was retiring and that’s when best decision the park made was uh the hiring Craig Courier to be the superintendent. When I first started working in the golf maintenance team, the superintendent of the courses were good guys, but it was like a retired sanitation worker, retired electrician, retired fireman. It was more like guys who were interested in golf and but didn’t really know the aronomy that well and you know Craig had it down pat. We kind of got into working at a pace that most people here didn’t weren’t used to, didn’t know about. You know, we wanted to go from acceptable to try and get into exceptional conditions and especially with the black horse, we had to hit the ground running as the first true MUN to have a US Open. We were kind of in that, you know, a little bit of a chip on our shoulder to prove ourselves to the world. So, yeah, it was a good time. It was a lot of work, but it was it was a lot of fun. Clay, so the soil here in pockets, it’s pretty uh heavy clay. Like the the road that cuts through the golf course, brown swamp road, so it’s swampy. Especially on one and 18 in of the black, you dig down a foot, it’s this gray gross clay. And if we get inch and a half thunderstorm in this kind of heat, grass will just like melt out just these little tiny sections. So, we’ve been amending the soil for 25 plus years. So, we’re just trying to get down a little further just to it’s fine margins, but the water can perk just a little bit lower and let the roots dry out. But the fairways look great. We’re happy with how the fairways look. So, the main difference in the courses now, um, while it’s a little bit of, you know, maybe patting ourselves on the back, it’s really the the maintenance. [Music] I won’t go back 50 years, but 25 years or say 30 years, it was very overgrown. A little unckempt where it kind of passed that sort of rustic unckempt wild look to just almost unmaintained behind a green. You couldn’t even see the ninth tea. It was just a half a forest. And it wasn’t like they were desirable trees either. They were kind of invasive weedy trees. If you’re on the black horse now, you can see we have like forest around most of the golf course. On the second hole, we literally had two 50 foot oaks like 10 feet off the green. And then every August, we started struggling and struggling. You’d start having like bear patches and things like that. And then you’d have to wait for recovery in the fall. So in 1997 when the USGA made the announcement, McDonald and Suns was the company that was chosen to do the renovations. So Reese Jones came in and all the TE’s were redesigned and rebuilt. All the bunkers were redesigned and rebuilt. The 18th green was uh reshaped a little bit. A lot of the bunkers had turned into circles. I think 14 was kind of called the Mickey Mouse bunker. So, it was a lot of that. There was just a lot of lack of definition and things like that that really needed improvement. And then for me being on the crew and the experience of that was acing all that construction take place and seeing how to level a tea, how to, you know, how to install drainage in a bunker, soding and soding and soding. I mean acres and acres of sod that we were installing. It was it was rewarding to see in that way. Like things were getting much better every day. That was probably our bigger winter project. There’s a lot of residing of uh bunker fingers. For championship golf though, it’s getting to like that those kind of levels of champagne problems where we’re worried about the bunker edges and say the whole course is, you know, 175 acres and we’re worried about 20,000 square ft. Percentage-wise, it’s pretty good, but um it’s still a big concern. Still, don’t have a place look as good as it can. Like in May, in June, when we’ve had the other major events, the the grass is really still on like the upswing and now we’re in that that trough and we’re just kind of heading to the weather where it’s kind of back on our side for cool season grasses. So, the grass is on the black horse. Um we’re a poa. I don’t want to say a poa factory, but maybe I do. Maybe maybe we are. Yeah. So, our greens are pretty much poa greens. The fairways and te’s we seed a lot of ry grass into them. Um but there’s also a lot of poa out there as well. Uh the rough is always sort of legendary too that you know we we usually cut the rough 3 in. Our rough is sort of a hodge podge of grasses. We have rye, Kentucky bluegrass and poa. Uh we usually seed into the rough with the mix. So if there’s uh one particular grass shines in one particular area, we’ll let that happen. We don’t try to achieve a monoculture of grass anywhere. So sometimes that different type of grass can lead to different lies. Cool season grass course here, I think the balls tend to settle down to that rough, you know. Then of course we have the high rough. Right now it’s August 12th, so the end of September when we get to mid70s, low 70s during the day, high 50s at night. That’s the time of year when poa shines and yeah, poins are great. They’re a little needy in July and August, but good staff, you know, a lot of constant hand watering and and monitoring and we have a lot of experienced crew, so they kind of can keep an eye on them. It also helps that the we have fantastic superintendent on the black horse, uh, Mike Hadley, you’ll talk to him later. Uh, my name is Michael Hadley and I’m the superintendent of the black horse at Beth Page State Park. to do po, right? I mean, you just have to baby it and you have to be on top of it. We can get really short roots here in the in the summer. So, we have to be on top of handwatering, vigilant on what diseases or problems could occur, but then when you get to the fall or in the spring on the shoulders of the season that there’s nothing better than a good po green for the championships, you know, you’re you’re kind of part of that test, too. you have some kind of influence over how the course is going to play. I mean, that’s very fun and very interesting, you know, to be a part of and then to see to see it play out, you know, in a major is is really fun to see. For a championship, obviously, every detail is is looked at for every day of the tournament. You know, we can’t have that standard every day of the week on a Wednesday in, you know, June. We have more, you know, hands on the staff with volunteers for the championship week. I can’t keep bunkers raked every day. We have nine acres of bunkers. But obviously for a tournament, they’re raked every day and as pristine as can be. So, the Beth Page Black has held uh three majors. We had the 2002 and 2009 US Open and the 2019 PGA Championship. Uh we’ll sneak in a few Barkclays, FedEx Cup playoffs in 2012 and 2016. Uh now the Ryder Cup coming in 2025. New elements that were introduced for the Ryder Cup compared to our past majors and specifically the 2019 major. The first T comes to mind immediately. So we built a new T uh mainly to accommodate the grandstand that number one. Uh the grandstands there. They’re about 2/3 done with it now. Uh it’s going to be about 5,000 people and you can see the first tee and the 18th green from pretty much every seat in the house. So, we had to build a new tea to uh just for the Ryder Cup. Two years ago, there was a decentsized oak tree on the eighth hole that had been sort of failing. It kind of made it through 2019. And so, really for for safety and just to, you know, make sure that we could grow grass back in that area. That tree came down. The 13th hole, two fairway bunkers. We kind of leaprogged the bunker so to accommodate modern driving distances. I made some fairways a little wider on number six, seven, 10, and 11. With the length of the rough, it sort of isolated some of the fairway bunkers. If a ball was kind of hit offline and rolling into that rough, it was just going to die in the rough. And the bunkers were sort of unless you were hitting the bunkers on a fly, they were they were just sort of there. Sometimes they might have been there a little more for show. So now, if a ball’s hit offline, like, you know, maybe there’s a little more rub of the green involved where it might maybe it’ll stay on the fairway and hey, great. Or maybe it’ll just keep going and and gently fall into the bunker. So the scale of the buildout, let me see. I should have printed it out or had it a little more handy. I have a sheet where it’s, you know, the whatever it is, you know, 10 miles of fences, the most ever. You know, the buildout for the corporate hospitality is in insane. You know, we have double-deckers, triple deckers. I think the corporate hospitality is more than they’ve ever done. If you’ve been to a major like the US Open PGA Championship and haven’t been to the RDER Cup, if you walk through the gate, it’s I don’t think it takes 5 minutes to realize, wow, this is this is huge. This is bigger than any other golf event. So, my name is Vincent Herszog and I’m a construction superintendent at Beth Page State Park. Uh, as it relates to Beth Page specifically, my role is to manage any construction project we would have here. There’s five golf courses, so there’s always a need for something to be rehabbed, revamped, retuned. Obviously, we’re not making any major changes uh certainly to the black course right now. So my role is shifted from, you know, course construction projects and irrigation management to the buildout for the RDER Cup. This is the biggest event in golf literally by, you know, board feet. It’s well over a million square feet of build. So trying to manage that company that does this and the 180 guys that are on staff and and minimizing their damage and impact to our infrastructure here to secure all these venues and builds and tents. There’s literally tens of thousands of stakes that go into the ground. So I have to mark all that out and make sure they go in the right way and there’s no lasting damage to to Beth Page. The buildout has been massive as compared to other tournaments, the 19 or the O2, any other championship we have here, it’s probably double or or more. You know, something else pops up every day. It seems like a new tent here and they’re going higher there. And I really started diving into the plans about 2 years ago. It was minimal. It was preliminary. Having conversations with the PGA. So, as we’ve drawn closer and got into 2025, it really ramped up. Conversations every week go to conversations every day, go to multiple conversations every day. So, the whole trajectory is just, you know, as we get closer, it just gets ramped up. Obviously, we’re losing turf and the course is getting a little smaller and maybe new ways to get to greens cuz the old way is blocked by a tent now or a bleacher and just kind of our routing has changed a little bit. Oh, the buildout certainly has an effect on aronomy of the golf course. Uh like currently they’re building a structure on the 14th T that they’re covering some of the sprinkler heads. So, it’s a little more handwatering for the staff or part of the reason it helps to have more of the the laner fleet come in is because we might need a smaller mower to get into a tighter area to keep an area mode that we might have been able to mow in, you know, 5 minutes with a huge machine and now we have to get a smaller machine and take a little more time. You can’t host an event like this without having an impact. So, making sure that my counterparts understand that these guys have a job to do and I am talking to them every day, working with the crew foremans and the managers and this is what we’d like to see you guys do to help minimize that. And then making sure I’m communicative with Andy and Ryan and Mike on the black horse. Here’s what’s going on. Here’s why this is what it is. Things just get a little more complicated because of all the infrastructure that’s here now. As we go through the season, we have, you know, 200 or so, probably more people around the park, on the course, so getting around gets a little tough, but really the golf course itself, we can get on it and do what we need to do. So, definitely keeps the excitement up for everybody around here and and it lets you know how big this thing’s going to be. What are the biggest differences between the black horse in 2019 and the black horse as it’s going to be for the 2025 Ryder Cup? So, just the time of year is the biggest difference. I like to say May is before all the problems that the summer can give you. You’re just trying to get the grass growing by miday. We have to get through the summer first to get to this RDER Cup. And during the summer, you have all the challenges of the weather, different diseases, weeds popping up. You have to go through your whole year basically and then produce the final product at the end and hopefully the best. So that that’s the that’s the biggest challenge. That third week of May when we had the PGA Championship was great. It was great. June was great. You know, the USG aren’t fools. is the reason they choose that you know third week of June or so that that to have that tournament because it’s really optimal for a lot of grass types August stress every single August 100 out of 100 times we’re going to have stress in August when we had our two barcles that was tough cuz that was I mean like I said cool season grasses are not happy that time of year right now uh the course has been like crazily popular I mean it’s just uh there were people here yesterday at you know 10:00 in the morning and they’re waiting to play tomorrow. So, it’s almost, you know, a 36-hour wait basically. And so, yeah, with that popularity comes a lot of wear and tear. And thankfully, the uh the park director had some mercy on us and we’ve been reducing rounds a little bit to about 125 a day uh for the past few weeks. And we’re actually going to close next week, which is nice. You know, one example. So, all the courses here have been affected by the Ryder Cup buildout. The ninth hole, the yellow course is a short game practice for the for the RDER Cup and it’s also where the merch tent is. And the merch tent isolated that 70 or 80 yards of the hole that they’re using. So, it’s been out of play for like 2 months now. And, you know, the approach is perfect. The green has no ball marks on it. Looks looks fantastic. So, we’re hoping, you know, another, you know, five or 6 weeks of very little play and no play means the course will start to really round out, you know, where we can get it perfect. Hopefully, the weather cooperates. I mean, the last thing I want is for us to be on Golf Channel things or anything like that pushing squeegees around. And we’re happy that we’re getting attention and we want to present the stage as best we can, but at some point, you know, people are here to watch the competition and the golf and things like that. And uh we we want to be smiling from the background is is where I’d like to be.