Once Upon a Time on Long Island

It was the first golf course I ever saw. Where I picked up one of my first loops. Where I was introduced to golf-course architecture and felt its impact. Where I fell hopelessly in love with the game. 

I’ve spent my career traveling the world as a PGA Tour caddie, an author and a course-design consultant, yet 60 years past my first visit, Inwood Country Club still provides a kind of emotional aquifer. When my keyboard clacking hits a dead end, I often transport myself back to that day on Long Island’s South Shore when, as a wide-eyed grade schooler, I snuck past the gate and onto Inwood’s grounds. I can still feel the jolt from watching the sun glint against a club’s shaft in motion, then following the trajectory of a ball butterflying through the air. By the time it landed softly on the perfect fairway, I’d been transformed for good. Today, a memorial stone marks that very spot along the right side of Inwood’s 18th hole. It feels like my plaque, but it has nothing to do with me.

I grew up in Rosedale, Queens, in the far southeast corner of the borough. Technically, it’s both part of New York City and on Long Island, so my youth was always oriented to both areas. We lived in a mostly white enclave of single-family homes, which rose quickly in the 1950s to cater to the working class of Brooklyn, Queens and Manhattan, who were now first-time homeowners. Our two-story Cape Cod occupied what was then called one-tenth of an acre, exactly 40 feet across and 100 feet deep. The house faced south, toward what would have been a view of Jamaica Bay—except that in between us and its salty waters were six more blocks of identical two-story homes. Beyond that last street sprawled a half-mile-wide morass of swampy tidal muck. Past that was Idlewild Airport; it would not be renamed John F. Kennedy International until after the president’s assassination in November 1963.

It was a childhood filled with neighborhood picnics (often interrupted by roaring planes overhead), adventures to the Green Acres mall on my 20-inch Schwinn bicycle, bus rides to the central Queens libraries, winters shoveling snow and summers playing Little League. I’ll never forget my first trip to Yankee Stadium—a midweek matinee in 1963, when tickets were 50 cents for left-center field bleacher seats. I couldn’t believe how green the outfield was, or the size of the façade dangling from the stadium’s perimeter rafters.

By 1965, I was 11, and our family was taking regular summer excursions to nearby Rockaway Beach, a sandbar off the southern coast of Queens. We would pile into the car—a turquoise 1957 Studebaker—early on a weekend afternoon and drive the 6 miles to the lockers, steam bath, sand and waves by Beach 30th Street. The route was always the same: Brookville Boulevard took us across the marshland, then a left turn onto Rockaway Boulevard, then the right turn at Sherwood Diner onto Sheridan Boulevard, which took us to the coast. At some point during these rides, I began noticing that as Sheridan made a sweeping left turn, there was a brief glimpse of a huge green field through the trees. My father’s Hagstrom atlas told me it was Inwood Country Club.

My curiosity became too much. Before that summer ended, I set out on my bicycle to see more of this place. The roads were busy and tight, without many sidewalks, and I was frightened, but too determined to turn back. Finally, I turned onto Oak Lane and found the entrance.

***

A massive iron gate separated the club grounds from the residential area immediately outside. I parked my bicycle by the gate, locked it up and walked up the main drive toward a big building on the hill. Golf holes opened up on both sides of the roadway. I passed a small pond on the right, then came to a second pond traversed by a little stone bridge. There were golfers scattered all over, and I knew just enough about the game to keep my mouth shut and stay out of their way. I waited for a green to clear, walked over the bridge and kept to the side of the fairway. At some point, I stopped, looked back toward the tee and saw two golfers there, preparing to hit. I stepped back under a tree canopy and watched as one of the players swung. It was a sunny day, bright-blue sky, and my eyes widened as they both hit majestic tee shots.

I was done. It was over. Enraptured. The feeling I’d never lose.

I had to see more. I watched them hit their approaches into the green, then wandered (floated?) down another fairway because I could see a body of water in the distance, with JFK and its main runways on the far side of it. At the water’s edge and perpendicular to the shoreline was another golf hole, this one much shorter than the others. When I got to the green, I took my sneakers and socks off and walked over the putting surface. I had never felt grass cut so short, nor a feeling so indulgent.

Back home at dinner that evening, I tried telling my parents and brothers about this otherworldly experience, but I did not quite have the vocabulary to explain it, and my account proved no match for the usual shouted banter at the table. As I went to bed that night, however, I knew something had changed.

About a quarter of a century later, I was visiting my parents in Rosedale. At some point, I asked my then-11-year-old daughter if I could show her the spot where I had fallen in love with golf. “Sure,” she said. So we drove the 3 1/2 miles to Inwood. I parked by the clubhouse, and we crossed over what I had long ago recognized as the club’s rendition of the Swilcan Bridge from St. Andrews. We walked down the player’s right side of the 18th fairway until we reached the site of my youthful epiphany. “It was right here,” I told her. As I spoke, I saw a stone marker that had not been there during my previous visit. The inscription read:

In 1923, Bobby Jones clinched the first of his four U.S. Open titles by hitting a two-iron from this spot to within six feet of the hole during a playoff with Bobby Cruickshank.

Presented to Inwood Country Club 
by Golf magazine
September, 1987

My daughter, who has never lacked for words to express her thoughts, looked at me and made it clear with her eyes that she understood the moment. “Cool,” she smiled.

***

In 1968, I turned 14 and started caddying at private golf clubs in the Five Towns area of Nassau County, immediately to the south of Rosedale. My first season was at the Woodmere Club. It was an easier trip than Inwood, thanks to a safer bicycle ride and the appealing alternative option of taking the Long Island Rail Road on the Far Rockaway line. My friends and brothers also tried looping, but gave up on it after a few rounds. I was the only one who loved the feeling of being on a golf course, getting paid for the labor and for indulging my fascination with the landforms. I began spending my time at home hunched over large oaktag sheets at our shared homework desk, redrawing holes I’d walked or imagining new ones.

Soon I was carrying at Woodmere and Inwood, because caddies could play on Mondays at the former and Tuesday afternoons at the latter. I loved the access to a new world of monied people, fancy cars and beautiful golf holes—none of which, as a working-class kid, I would otherwise have been able to experience.

It helped that Woodmere and Inwood were known as Jewish clubs, founded by those who, however wealthy and respected they were in their immediate communities, were not otherwise allowed into the patrician realm of metro-area elite social life. Being Jewish myself, I identified with the penumbral social status of those who were accomplished and successful but still considered outsiders looking in.

Back then, caddying paid $6 a bag for 18 holes. I double bagged and double looped most weekends, earning a cool $48 for the two days in season (the equivalent of $425 today, adjusted for inflation). Weekdays, I’d do a single round, sometimes single bagging it if the tee sheet was quiet. Inwood’s caddiemaster was a gruff, taciturn old fellow named Al Peppe. He was in the second half of what would be a 50-year run in that post. He knew every member—their golf game, how they treated their caddie, their business and, quite often, their private life.

Inwood also had a legendary golf pro—a tall, lanky Oklahoman named Jimmy Wright. He was a three-time All-American at Oklahoma State and played the PGA Tour part-time in the late 1960s and early 1970s, teeing it up in nearly 50 events. He played in 21 majors: a Masters, an Open Championship, six U.S. Opens and 13 PGA Championships. His fourth-place finish at the 1969 PGA at NCR Country Club in Dayton, Ohio, only three shots behind winner Raymond Floyd, remains the highest-ever finish for a career club pro in the PGA Championship’s stroke-play era (which began in 1958). Wright also was a force regionally, with four wins each in the Long Island Open and the Metropolitan PGA Championship among his 12 career professional victories.

Wright was the first real golf pro I got to watch up close. He hit the ball differently than anyone I’d ever seen—a powerful, high draw, each shot launched on the same arching trajectory. Early in the summer of 1969, I was caddying at Woodmere when Wright showed up for a round. The caddiemaster handed me Wright’s red-and-white Wilson bag and said, “You take the big guy.”

I was ready with all the yardages, and on a few holes he even asked me about the right club to hit. I’ll never forget how he played the par-5 fifth hole, a 510-yard sharp dogleg left with trees on the inside of the dogleg and bunkers beyond that prevented all but the very longest hitters from taking the shortcut. Wright took a line I had never seen before, right over the trees. His high draw worked perfectly, leaving him about 175 yards to the green, which he then reached with a 6-iron. He shot 65 that day.

Forty years later, at a PGA Show in Orlando, I bumped into Wright and reminded him of those two unforgettable shots he hit to within 15 feet of the pin. “Yeah,” he responded without missing a beat, “and I missed the putt.”

***

At that time, I didn’t know much about Inwood’s design history or evolution. All I knew was that it had been home to two famous events: the 1921 PGA Championship, won by Walter Hagen, and the 1923 U.S. Open that Jones captured. But I loved the lay of the land, the way the holes unfolded easily from the small hill upon which the clubhouse sat. I also noticed the unusual routing: The front nine featured three consecutive par 5s, followed by back-to-back par 3s. To this day, I’ve yet to find another five-hole stretch on a regulation golf course without a par 4.

I also loved the little par-3 10th hole, 106 yards across a pond. It seemed a tempting target—until you realized you had to play it over the entrance road, which was sometimes full of cars and delivery trucks waiting on you. The audience swelled even greater with the hole being in the immediate view from the picnic-style dining at the halfway house. Suddenly, a wedge into a convex green that seemed to repel every shot didn’t feel so comfortable. And I loved the look of the 18th green, situated just behind a stone-lined moat, with that arched bridge leading from fairway to green on the right side. While the course never felt flat, I later learned the whole site sits at roughly sea level and rises and falls a grand total of 17 feet from low point to high.

The course dates to a nine-holer in the southwest corner of Nassau County, just beyond the formal boundary of New York City. The initial layout was soon expanded to 18, though no record of that routing remains. It was left to Englishman Herbert Strong (1880–1944) to reveal Inwood’s links character, which soon would draw the attention of the golf world. During his tenure as Inwood’s pro, from 1911 to 1916, he completely redesigned and expanded the course to much of its current routing: holes one through 11 and 16 through 18 today remain his direct handiwork. The critical success of Inwood’s design launched Strong into a full-time career as a golf designer, with such stellar layouts to follow as Engineers on Long Island (1918); Canterbury in Cleveland (1921); Saucon Valley (Old Course) in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania (1922); and Manoir Richelieu in Quebec (1925).

Strong was also active in the newly founded PGA of America, serving as its first secretary-treasurer. No doubt his affiliation with that group helped bring the 1921 PGA Championship to Inwood. Another founding member of the PGA of America, Scottish-born professional Jack Mackie, succeeded Strong at Inwood as head pro; he also went on to serve as PGA president (1919 to 1920) and treasurer (1927 to 1939). Mackie undertook the creation of what today are holes 13 through 15—the stretch that takes Inwood out to the water’s edge and back.

Strong’s bold design plan incorporated vast areas of sandy waste. They formed a seaside, billowy, dunes sensibility rather than one with formal bunkers—more evocative of untamed linksland than of the neatly contained parkland that Inwood would become by the time I first knew it.

That change began in the late 1950s, with the dramatic transformation of the site into a heavily treed inland layout. This design trend was sweeping courses in the U.S. at the time, and Inwood followed the crowd. Its consulting architects during this era championed the then-prevailing view of isolated, tree-lined playing corridors that cut golfers off from the native landforms and vistas across the bay. It also affected bunker presentation, with a shift in the construction of these sandy hazards from natural blowouts and scrapes to formally bound sunken pits surrounded by manicured green turfgrass.

But all design tides eventually shift, and by the late 1990s, the club had brought in a young architecture traditionalist named Tom Doak. He completed a bunker renovation project that infused some of Strong’s original look. Still, the course maintained its tree-lined character.

Dan Friedman, a commercial real estate investor who joined the club in 1985, was accustomed to playing the course with what was then known as the Inwood roll. When most drives landed in the fairway, the ball would bounce backward in the soft grass rather than trundle forward. He just assumed that was the way golf was played. However, two pilgrimages to Scotland showed Friedman another form of the game: on the ground, with firm, fast conditions. He learned how decision making and shot selection changed when the ball could roll out as opposed to playing it a few feet behind where it landed.

“It was just more fun over there,” says Friedman, a career mid-handicapper. “I came back looking at things differently, wondering if we could enjoy that kind of golf at Inwood.”

When he became Inwood’s greens chairman in 2004, Friedman started with the simple goal of firming up the course. His first steps were to study Inwood’s design history and turf conditioning. He also read up on classic architecture, including what he considers his bible: Doak’s 1992 classic, The Anatomy of a Golf Course. Soon, he discovered that Inwood’s roots were precisely the kind of golf that he had enjoyed so much in Scotland.

With the consultation of a few other Inwood members who shared his vision, Friedman crafted a six-page manifesto that was circulated first to greens-committee members, then to the board of governors, and finally among the entire membership. This document outlined the virtues of firm and fast, and how those conditions could be reclaimed at Inwood.

Thus began what continues today as a long-term restoration project—peeling back tree cover, improving drainage, abandoning the formal structure of rectangular tees for more natural shaping, reclaiming lost mounding, bunkers and short-grass surrounds. The opening up of previously hidden vistas—both internally, across the course, and externally, to the surrounding areas—allowed the wind and sunlight to work their magic, dramatically improving course conditions.

In an era when many clubs shut down for major reconstruction projects, Inwood undertook its restoration on a one-project-at-a-time basis. A crucial aspect of the steady transformation was the input of consulting golf architect Brian Slawnik, who has been working with Inwood since 1998, initially as an intern for Doak. In 2022, it became one of the highlights of my career when the club asked me to help on a consulting basis.

I’ve spent my career traveling the world as a PGA Tour caddie, an author and a course-design consultant, yet 60 years past my first visit, Inwood Country Club still provides a kind of emotional aquifer.

The initial changes were met with heavy resistance from some members. A minority still feels uncomfortable with the work. However, most of the membership has come to enjoy what has transpired over the past 20 years. When the restoration began in earnest, the club was also struggling to attract new members—a common issue at many predominantly Jewish clubs in an area that had seen dramatic demographic shifts since the 1960s. As Inwood reclaimed its architectural past, it also diversified its base. Today, the club is thriving.

Each time I visit Inwood, I come away more impressed with its setting, its exposure to the tidal marshland and the bay, and its unobstructed views of downtown Manhattan and JFK Airport. When I first saw the place, its holes were isolated from one another by dense stands of trees. It was as if the golf had been separated from the land it sat on, and the members wanted nothing to do with the rest of the course (or each other). But, even then, the fairways exuded an intriguing quality. Over the years, through research, careful work and the enthusiastic approval of members as they’ve experienced more of golf’s ground game, Inwood’s historic character has opened up.

Its history is also no longer solely embedded in a distant pair of major championships. More recently, Inwood experienced a more powerful moment in national history. On the bright, sunny morning of Sept. 11, 2001, the club was hosting the Metropolitan PGA Golf Championship. The first hole, a short par 4, heads due west, offering an unimpeded view of downtown Manhattan and what were then the twin towers of the World Trade Center. From the golf course, there was no mistaking what was happening 14 miles away, and as the smoke billowed and the buildings finally collapsed, play stopped and players sprinted to the clubhouse. Today, a plaque at the club reads, “In remembrance of those who lost their lives on September 11, 2001.”

Two markers and two unforgettable moments—for very different reasons—eight decades apart. I’ve been lucky to see golf courses all over the world, and few have witnessed such a wide swath of the human experience. In far more mundane terms, Inwood has been the site of my own series of personal and professional milestones. It first spoke to me more than 60 years ago, and our conversation still hasn’t stopped.