Golf_Digest_USA_-_May_2019

pga preview 2019 | gd 93

all started in the

early 1990s, in the wee small

hours of weekend mornings,

in the parking lot of Bethpage

State Park. Before the age of on-

line registration, golfers drove

from across Long Island and

all the way from New York City

to camp out in the dark, some-

times all night, to be the first in

line to sign up for tee times at

Bethpage’s five public courses.

In those days, the shortest

line was for the Black course,

because it was so notoriously

difficult but also in such atro-

cious shape, with lumpy greens,

scruffy fairways and thin layers

of gravelly sand dumped over

black plastic liners that barely

qualified as bunkers.

Yet a group of game weekend

warriors regularly lined up to

pay green fees for the Black,

▶Members of

‘ ’

’

share a

with each

other and

of the

2019

Championship

started playing together and

became 19th-hole drinking and

poker buddies. They ranged

from Long Island cops, firemen

and small-business owners to

Jon Silverberg, a back-office

city government manager who

drove out every weekend from

his home in Brooklyn. They

began to think of themselves as

a club, and in 1993 one of them,

Sean McGowan, an industrial

salesman from Williston Park,

became determined to make

it official. He invited seven of

the guys over to his mother’s

house for a meeting around

her kitchen table to discuss

how they could apply to the

USGA and Metropolitan Golf

Association for designation as a

“club without real estate.” They

named themselves the Nassau

Players Club—after the county

where many of them lived, and

the betting game they played

T he

Photographs by Walter Iooss Jr.

on the course—chipped in $20

apiece for membership, and

memorialized the founding by

signing their names on one of

the bills.

In the early years, they were

as far from the private country-

club set as you could get. One

of the first presidents was a

retired police officer named

Mike Finnegan, which came

in handy when two members

got into such a savage fistfight

that the cops were called, and

Finnegan talked them out of

making disorderly conduct ar-

rests. (“We had police officers,

▶ these guys are good

Bethpage’s Nassau Players Club

has 106 members, a quarter of which

carry Indexes of 2.6 or lower.