BREAKING NEWS: Bethpage Black is REALLY hard.
Well, particularly, if you’re a gangly 6ft 3ins, fair-weather high-handicap golfer feeling very nervous with no warm-up in front of a Ryder Cup hero.
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As Team Europe and Team USA prepare to tee it up at the notoriously beastly course in Long Island, SunSport tried its best to see what some of the world’s best golfers are in for.
What followed was nothing short of an embarrassment, a humiliation and serious question marks hang over me even being allowed on site in New York to cover this tantalising Ryder Cup as a reporter.
Much has been made of the selection for the upcoming Ryder Cup – both the location in New York and also the notorious course.
Two years on from Europe’s victory in the shadows of the Colosseum in Rome, Bethpage Black will provide a thrilling amphitheatre for the 45th edition of one of sport’s great battles.
Host of the three Majors, Bethpage Black is – remarkably – a public golf course, with hundreds of golfers arriving on the site before dawn each morning to try and secure a tee time.
There are five courses on the complex, but Bethpage Black is the most savage of them all – so much so that there is a famous sign warning that it is an “extremely difficult course only recommended for highly-skilled golfers”.
Regardless, I headed down to Pitch Soho – a trendy bar decked out with golf simulator bays – where I could blissfully ignore that warning.
And better still, I was joined in the bay by my very own caddie – none other than two-time Ryder Cup winner David Howell.
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With the Trackman set up for the 389-yard par-four second hole – apparently the third-easiest on the course as one of only two par fours less than 400 yards – I confidently told David how I’d played really rather well in a media golf event the previous day and was hoping of just putting a few nice shots together.
The reality, unfortunately, was far from that.
My knees were already knocking – I’m a 3-wood off the tee man and my driver just sits in the bag looking pretty for 18 holes.
But under David’s encouragement, I reluctantly dug out the big stick.
In my head, I crushed a beauty of a drive 310 yards down the middle of the fairway.
In reality, I spooned a mishit shank which careered off into the trees.
Forget baby fade, this was a slice Domino’s would be proud of. Not ideal.
That left me 230 yards in – ambitious at the best of times – so we opted it would be best to lay up.
Lay up gone wrong
By lay up, David didn’t mean I fumble a 7-iron 48 yards, dribbling along the floor across the fairway and into the first cut on the other side. Apparently.
Now the head was going and I had yet to get the ball higher than about six feet off the ground – much to David’s amusement.
As I lined up my third, he quipped: “This ball is allowed to go in the air.”
And boy did it do just that – sailing not-so-beautifully back to the right and into the trees and coming to rest beside a trunk as I continued my unorthodox zigzagging approach.
Needing to hole out from 100 yards to make the most improbable of pars, the inevitable happened.
All I had to do was clip the ball over the bunker and I was on the dance floor…
Saved by the simulator
But my ball clearly had other ideas and preferred a trip to the beach than the nightclub, plonking itself rather selfishly in the sand.
I was out at the first attempt – albeit if there was any actual sand I may well have missed my flight to New York – but still, somehow, it had landed on the fringe.
That meant I had a relatively routine chip from the edge of the green with my SIXTH shot – but I even messed that up as the ball refused to roll more than a couple of feet and stopped 25 feet short of the hole.
Thankfully, the simulator took pity on me and spared me the blushes of having to putt – maybe it had seen my abomination of an attempt when “playing” the 12th at Augusta earlier in the year.
And so it auto-finished the hole for me, announcing my quadruple-bogey eight.
The only positive was that the nightmare only lasted a couple of minutes as I didn’t have to walk the hole – nor spend an age looking for my ball in the rough.
‘Couldn’t be worse’
As I hung my head in shame, Howell reminded me that the Ryder Cup is matchplay golf… I think I may well have lost the hole.
Shaking my hand in pity, he observed dryly: “I don’t think you could have done any worse.”
Luke Donald will be hoping the likes of Bryson DeChambeau and Scottie Scheffler endure similar fate as me on the real second hole at Bethpage Black.
Something tells me they may fare slightly better…
Speaking of which – and I know this is hard to believe – but I followed up my eight with an actual PAR on the par-three fourth once my coach-turned-heckler Howell headed off.
Fear not, though, as normal service resumed on the par-five fifth with another rough eight – or as SunSport golf legend David Facey would say, another snowman.
And just penning my memories of my Bethpage horror show has brought me out in a chill…
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