Design Notebook: (Can We Really Know) Who Designed Bethpage Black?

Hello, Fried Egg Golf Club members, and welcome back to Design Notebook, your monthly dispatch from the world of golf architecture.

In this edition of DN, I delve into the thorny issue of who deserves primary credit for the design of Bethpage Black, the site of this week’s Ryder Cup.

Before swan-diving into that particular void, though, let me draw your attention to three things the Fried Egg Golf team has unveiled recently: 1) our video documenting Bethpage State Park’s efforts to get ready for golf’s wildest event, 2) our Ryder Cup hub, and 3) our new Fried Egg Guides. We’ve been busy!

Okay, let’s get into it.

Bethpage Black and the Dark Art of Architectural Attribution

Whenever we publish a new course profile in Fried Egg Golf Club, we do our best to credit the right architects. This is not always as simple as it sounds. Sometimes the process leads down fascinating rabbit holes of golf history. 

For instance, who is the original designer of the 2025 Ryder Cup venue, the Black Course at Bethpage State Park?

The architect of record, according to the park itself as well as nearly all media coverage of any event held at Bethpage, is Albert Warren Tillinghast, the Golden Age giant also responsible for Winged Foot (West and East), Baltusrol (Lower and Upper), and Somerset Hills. Tillinghast signed on with Robert Moses’s Long Island State Park Commission in December 1933 to create Bethpage’s Black, Red, and Blue* layouts, and he completed his work between early 1934 and spring 1935. A large labor force provided by the Works Progress Administration carried out construction. The Red and Blue courses opened in 1935, while the Black debuted on July 2, 1936.

(*In the 1950s, architect Alfred Tull helped to split the Blue Course into two 18-hole layouts, today’s Yellow and Blue.)

This official narrative took an unexpected torpedo to its hull in June 2002, on the eve of the first U.S. Open to be staged at Bethpage State Park, when Golf Digest architecture editor Ron Whitten published a story called “The Real Man Behind Bethpage Black.” Whitten contended that Joseph H. Burbeck, the superintendent of the park from its inception to 1964, was chiefly responsible for the design of the Black Course, while Tillinghast served as a mostly absentee consultant. Just as striking as the revelation itself was Whitten’s confidence in it. “[Burbeck] did design Bethpage Black,” he wrote. “The evidence always has been out there, if anyone had bothered to dig for it.”

What evidence? Whitten, a former attorney, presented several pieces to the jury:

• Interviews with Burbeck’s son, also named Joseph, who remembers his father spending long hours at the drafting table and his mother expressing bitterness that Tillinghast had received credit for designing Bethpage’s courses.
• An official history of the Long Island State Parks published in 1959, which states, “The four golf courses constructed as work-relief projects were designed and constructed under the direction of Joseph H. Burbeck, the Superintendent of the park, with A.W. Tillinghast, internationally known golf architect, as consultant.”
• An April 1934 Golf Illustrated article in which Tillinghast writes that he was “honored by being selected as the consultant in the planning of [the Bethpage] courses.”
• An August 1937 PGA Magazine article in which Tillinghast admits that Burbeck came up with the concept of the Black: “Now it was Burbeck’s idea to develop one of these layouts along lines which were to be severe to a marked degree. It was his ambition to have something which might compare with Pine Valley as a great test….”
• A July 1937 Golf Review Monthly article in which author Lester Rice refers to Burbeck as “the architect who had designed and constructed three of Bethpage’s courses and renovated the fourth.” (The “fourth” is the Green Course, which began life in 1923 as Lenox Hills Golf Club, a design by Devereux Emmet.)
• The disparity between Tillinghast’s contract, which granted the architect “$50 a day for a maximum of 15* days,” and Burbeck’s full-time, decades-long presence at the park. (*More recently discovered primary-source evidence suggests that Tillie had approval to be paid for 30 days.)
• The fact that Tillinghast’s association with Bethpage State Park ended on April 18, 1935, more than a year before the Black Course opened.
• The following assertion by Whitten: “[T]he four Bethpage course routings were made before [Tillinghast] came on board….”

I’ll address the last point first, because if it’s true, the rest of Whitten’s fact pattern almost doesn’t matter. Tillinghast cannot be considered the lead architect of the Black, Red, and Blue courses if he didn’t route them.

The problem is, I have not seen, nor has Whitten ever presented, any documentary support for this claim. As Thomas MacWood details in this well-researched 2009 piece for Golf Club Atlas, we only have evidence that the Blue Course had been routed prior to Tillinghast’s involvement. The 1959 history of the Long Island State Parks maintains that work began on the Blue in the summer of 1933, a few months before Tillie joined the project. This implies that a preliminary routing of the course had been done. There appears to be no reason to believe, however, that construction on the Black and Red started any earlier than 1934.

In spite of writing a 2009 follow-up to his 2002 article and giving a handful of interviews on the controversy over the years, Whitten has never, to my knowledge, addressed his apparent fumbling of the known timeline of Bethpage’s construction.

The remainder of Whitten’s case rests on the testimony of Burbeck’s son—which is vulnerable to the vagaries of memory and tinged by an obvious, though understandable, personal bias—and various contemporary accounts and characterizations of Tillinghast’s role as consultant. Let’s look at the latter.

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In golf architecture discourse these days, the word “consultant” has an almost pejorative flavor. One thinks of Jack Nicklaus at Harbour Town or Justin Thomas at Panther National—a big name, usually a professional golfer, spending a day or two on site, posing for photos, making a few suggestions (seldom implemented), and giving the project a shot of publicity. Such a consultant rarely gets much real credit for a design, even if his or her name appears on the website.

It is through this modern lens that Whitten seems to understand Tillinghast’s scope of influence as a consultant at Bethpage. I believe that to be a mistake.

As MacWood explains, the title of consultant had a specific meaning in the context of 1930s and 40s public works in New York. Parks commissioner Robert Moses often hired prominent architects to oversee major infrastructural projects, called them “consultants,” and paid them a weekly rate. Since the profession of architecture had been hit hard by the Depression, even big-leaguers like Gilmore Clarke and Aymar Embury II were happy to accept this work and, presumably, the status of consultant. But they were not mere figureheads. No one doubts that Clarke deserves recognition for designing the Garden State Parkway, or that Embury was the primary creative force behind Bryant Park.

At Bethpage, A.W. Tillinghast and Clifford C. Wendehack were Moses’s handpicked consultants. Tillinghast was to design the golf courses, Wendehack the clubhouse. Joseph H. Burbeck, as superintendent, supervised the design and construction of both in the midst of his many other duties across the park. (Curiously, there has never been a push to recognize Burbeck over Wendehack as the true architect of Bethpage’s lovely English manor-style clubhouse.)

Now, until someone turns up a 1934 plan of Bethpage Black, Red, Blue, and Green with either Tillinghast’s or Burbeck’s signature on it, we will never know who contributed what to each course. But I don’t buy Whitten’s insinuation that Tillinghast was involved with the project too briefly to exert a meaningful influence on the design process. In the 1920s and 30s, golf architects often worked quickly, visiting properties, drawing up plans, and rushing off to the nearest train station within a matter of days. At Bethpage, Tillinghast was allowed to be paid for up to 30 days, and he was employed by the park from December 1933 to April 1935. That was plenty of time to perform the era-appropriate responsibilities of a golf course designer. At the very least, he was on site long enough that, in 1937, he was able to describe the conception of the par-5 fourth hole at the Black Course: “In locating and designing the green, which can only be gained by a most precise approach from the right, I must confess that I was a trifle scared myself, when I looked back and regarded the hazardous route that must be taken by a stinging second shot to get into position to attack this green.”

If we want to hold Golden Age architects to a higher standard than Tillie apparently met at Bethpage, fine. But we would need to take a lot of design credits away from Harry Colt, Donald Ross, Seth Raynor, and Alister MacKenzie. That said, just because Tillinghast could have designed the Black, Blue, and Red courses doesn’t mean he did. The specifics of his collaboration with Burbeck at Bethpage will probably always remain a black box.

This is where interpretation and speculation can step tentatively into the breach. As I mentioned in our recent profile of Bethpage Black, I see Tillinghast’s fingerprints all over the tee-to-green design of the course: the huge, diagonally oriented Sahara-style hazards; the continually slanting, curving, jogging fairways; the billowing bunkers (in their late-1930s forms; less so in Rees Jones’s clumsy reproductions); and the clever use of ridge-top green sites, often approached from oblique angles. There is even a Great Hazard hole, a Tillie staple.

The Red, Blue, and Yellow courses bear traces of Tillinghast’s influence, too. The split-fairway 13th hole on the Red and the “Reef” 12th hole on the Yellow (formerly the fifth on the Blue) are straight out of his repertoire.

Was Joseph Burbeck, whose only other confirmed experience in golf construction was at an NLE pitch-and-putt course in Jones Beach, informed and talented enough to imitate Tillie’s style so successfully? Was he capable of producing a routing as technically sound and artistically inspired as the Black’s? Perhaps. The history of golf architecture does not lack for unlikely savants. But the simplest explanation, requiring the fewest leaps of faith, is that the A.W. Tillinghast-scented elements of Bethpage’s courses were conceived by A.W. Tillinghast.

Of course, the Black’s pedestrian greens do not pass the same smell test. They resemble Tillie’s greens at Winged Foot West, Baltusrol Lower, and Somerset Hills about as much as the Excalibur Casino resembles an actual medieval castle. There are a number of potential reasons for this anomaly, a few of which Golf Digest’s Derek Duncan outlines in this video. My best guess, though, is that Tillinghast did not make detailed plans for the Black Course’s putting surfaces or direct their construction. Did Burbeck? Equally unclear.

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One certainty is that Tillinghast valued Burbeck’s contributions to the Bethpage project. “Never have I received heartier support and cooperation than from Joe Burbeck, the state engineer who was in daily direction of the entire work from start to finish,” Tillie wrote in 1934.

Like Seth Raynor at National Golf Links and the Lido, Robert Hunter at Cypress Point and Pasatiempo, and Alex Russell at Royal Melbourne West, Burbeck should be remembered for turning design into reality at Bethpage, and for the many unrecorded creative decisions he likely made in the field. Golf architecture is always a collaborative effort, and occasionally highlighting the name of an engineer or construction supervisor or lead associate can serve as a reminder of the dozens or hundreds who make any great golf course project possible.

That’s why our website attributes the original designs of the Black and Red courses to both A.W. Tillinghast and Joseph H. Burbeck. 

Note, however, that Tillie’s name appears first.

Chocolate Drops

→ The PGA of America announced last week that Bethpage Black will host the 2028 KPMG Women’s PGA Championship and the 2033 PGA Championship. Also, Oak Hill Country Club in Rochester, New York, has been awarded the 2035 PGA Championship. The modern PGA of America rota is coming into focus. 

→ Sad news: because of the ongoing water crisis on the island of Maui as well as other logistical issues, the 2026 Sentry—i,.e., the “Tournament of (Mostly) Champions”—will not take place at the Plantation Course at Kapalua Resort. I hope the PGA Tour makes an effort to get back to Kapalua once conditions improve.

→ Shura Links, a Brian Curley-designed golf course on Shura Island in Saudi Arabia, has opened. This project is part of a larger push by the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, which also bankrolls LIV Golf through its sovereign wealth fund, to create ultra-luxury destinations on previously undeveloped barrier islands in the Red Sea. Interesting times.

→ In case you missed it…

• Finkbine Golf Course, home of the University of Iowa’s golf teams, will undergo a reconstruction by Scott Hoffman.
• The Trump administration is eyeing East Potomac Golf Course.
• Napoleon Golf Club has started a low-budget renovation led by superintendent Tom Schwab and FEGC member Evan Baldridge.
• The ambitious overhaul of Cobbs Creek Golf Course is coming along.
• No, Seth Raynor is not chiefly responsible for the routing of Cypress Point.

A Course We Photographed Recently

Shinnecock Hills Golf Club (Southampton, NY)—redesigned by William Flynn in 1931

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Underlined and Starred

“Instead of relying on hazards which extend directly across the line of play we are building them diagonally. It is obvious that these diagonal hazard lines present a much longer carry at one end than at the other, and all carries between the two points vary. In the placement of the short carry we consider the light hitter, and as he stands prepared to play at such a hazard, he is to be the judge of the distance which he may successfully attempt. After a while, as he finds his game improving, it is natural that he becomes more ambitious, and he attempts greater things which he knows will be adequately rewarded, for the hazards guarding the approaches to the green are placed in such a manner as to grade the benefits of length and accuracy. In brief, every player gets exactly what may be coming to him and it is not necessary for anyone to bite off more than he can swallow.” -A.W. Tillinghast