Shinnecock Hills: More Than Just a Golf Course, It's a Time Machine
Alright, so we’re talking about Shinnecock Hills. Yeah, *that* Shinnecock Hills. The place where they hold the U.S. Open. It’s not just some patch of green with holes cut in it. This place, man, it’s like stepping into a golf history book. It’s where the game’s past and present collide, and for some of us, it’s where our own golf stories got written.
A Sand Pit by the Sea, Transplanted from Scotland?
You hear people talk about Shinnecock Hills and they drone on about course changes, maintenance updates, blah blah blah. Honestly? This course, it barely *changes*. It’s this massive, rolling, windswept landscape. It’s beautiful, sure, but it’s a grim, timeless kind of beauty. Kind of like golf itself, right? Grim, timeless, and always a damn challenge. You’ve got that still ball, the golfer standing over it, a whole mess of bravado and doubt swirling around. It’s the same for the pros, and it’s the same for us hacks trying to break 100. The clock just seems to drag, doesn’t it? When you’re actually playing well for once, even a simple waggle can feel like an eternity. Crazy how golf messes with time.
They say the game was invented ages ago. Maybe it feels that way sometimes. Golf loves the wind, and this place? It’s practically built for it. Feels like it was airlifted straight from Scotland. John Updike nailed it, talking about this kind of place: “This was happiness, on this wasteland between the tracks and the beach, and freedom, of a wild and windy sort.” One player out of the whole damn field is going to walk away from this U.S. Open, the sixth one here, absolutely ecstatic. Their name etched on a trophy, forever. That’s the dream, I guess.
Echoes of Champions and Typewriters
Back in ’86, on Father’s Day no less, Raymond Floyd took home the Open trophy here. A while after that, I found myself in the press tent, sitting just a row behind Joe Gergen. Gergen, a columnist for Newsday, was tapping away on a typewriter – yeah, a *typewriter* – wearing this short-sleeved floral shirt. He’d pause, laugh with the guy next to him. I was 26. That image, it’s stuck with me. Still makes me smile.
I actually dug up Gergen’s story from that night. His first quote? Floyd: “Quite often, I express my joy with tears.” The whole damn column, it was all about Floyd’s eyes. You find a good angle, you run with it. That’s what you learn. Golf and writing, they were already huge parts of my life, but that night? It felt like they solidified. A few weeks before, Gergen had written this really nice piece about my first book, which was all about my time as a caddie. Now, a 40th-anniversary edition of that book is out. Time, man. It just keeps marching on.
It’s hard to believe, really. It feels like a blink. I can almost see my childhood mornings with crystal clarity. Maybe you’re the same. Papers scattered on the gravel driveway of our house, about 30 miles west of Shinnecock. Our little town, Bellport, had a municipal course. For fifty bucks a year, I could play all the golf I wanted on weekday afternoons, through high school and college. We used to play fast, just to get our rounds in.
The Seeds of a Golf Obsession
My brother and I, as kids, we devoured the sports pages of the New York Times. Dave Anderson, Red Smith. Russell Baker on the Op-Ed. William Safire’s “On Language” column. You name it. Even Cap’n Crunch on the cereal box seemed to be watching everything. Then there was this 8th-grade gym teacher who ran an intro-to-golf class. Plastic balls, aiming at basketball hoops. That class? It changed everything.
My first real taste of the U.S. Open – well, sort of – was in ’74, at Winged Foot. Mostly through the newspapers and TV. Watson, Trevino, Palmer. Hale Irwin won. Watson went on to win the British Open the next year. I was completely hooked. Mesmerized.
Good luck, huh? It feels like it lasts forever, doesn’t it?
Mentors, Editors, and the Road Less Traveled
There was this junior golfer, a bookworm from Western Pennsylvania. He read my little caddie memoir when he was 12. Fast forward, and as a thirtysomething, he became my editor. Yeah, my good luck. This new edition? It’s all thanks to him, and Brad Faxon, who wrote the intro.
At that ’86 Open at Shinnecock, Faxon was the first alternate. Ready to jump in if someone dropped out. I caddied for him during the practice rounds on Tuesday and Wednesday. When no one pulled out, he jetted off to Chattanooga for a smaller event. And he won. I swapped my caddie badge for a press pass and got to see Joe Gergen in action that Sunday night. A few months later, I landed a gig as a high school sportswriter for The Philadelphia Inquirer. My editor said, “I like how he got around the country on the cheap, doing that caddying thing.” Cheap flights on People Express – that was my ticket to a big-city paper. Suddenly, I had colleagues who actually *knew* Joe Gergen and Dave Anderson. My deadline heroes.
Hero worship, it’s barely a thing anymore. Maybe we expected too much. Tiger Woods, he was always good at fixing his game’s weak spots. You can apply that to anything, really. The other stuff? That’s just… the other stuff. Think about Paul McCartney, the sheer joy he gets from music, his own and others’. How inspiring is that? At 24, 44, 64, you could see that pure joy on his face. And you still can, even with 84 knocking on his door. McCartney says you don’t *work* music, you *play* it. Makes sense.
Roger Angell, that incredible baseball writer, he was still at the top of his game in his 90s. An inspiration. Gary Player used to say, “The harder I work, the luckier I get.” There’s a whole universe in that sentence. And yeah, yeah, I know, it’s a lot of XY chromosome talk. But forgive me for shouting with my glowing cellphone in hand for this foursome: Susan Orlean, Kate McKinnon, Bonnie Raitt, Meryl Streep. (Writer, comedian, musician, Meryl Streep.) Just the names alone make you want to crank up the volume, bust a move, raise your own game. Don’t they?
The Enduring Magic of Shinnecock
So, the first U.S. Open at Shinnecock Hills? 1896. I was there for the next four: 1986, 1995, 2004, and 2018. And wouldn’t you know it, I’ve got a press pass – a media credential – for this one too. Lucky me. Forty years on, Joe Gergen’s example still fires me up. This whole typing life.
We were playing a quick nine holes earlier this year, on some of the old U.S. Open ground. One of my regular playing partners asked if I’d read my first book. I told him, “Please don’t.” He was confused. “Why?” he asked. “It’s terrible,” I said. “Well, then why are they bringing it out again?” “It’s got… a certain charm,” I managed.
Back in 1985, when I was trying to make it as a professional caddie, the Pebble Beach Pro-Am was still sponsored by Bing Crosby. By ’86, Bing was out, AT&T was in. I feel like I caught the PGA Tour right at the end of its mom-and-pop era. My caddie mentor, a guy named Killer, he won the ’79 Open with Hale Irwin at Inverness. When my pro missed the cut at the U.S. Open at Oakland Hills in ’85, we spent the weekend parking cars on our host’s front lawn. At the B.C. Open in Endicott, N.Y., I stayed in a boarding house for five bucks a night. I was this recovering English major, trying to survive as a vagabond caddie. The stakes might sound small now, but they were huge then. They were huge to *me*.
I had no clue what I was doing. Not as a caddie, not as a writer. But damn, I loved it. All of it. The golf, the whole scene, that electric buzz, the attempt to wrestle it all down into typed words. Forty years later, nothing’s really changed. Except now I get what most people figure out eventually. George Bernard Shaw said youth is wasted on the young. That’s spot on. This isn’t as pithy, but it’s painfully, beautifully true: It all goes by too fast. This week will fly by. It all flies by. So, you gotta dance while you can.
You can reach out to Michael Bamberger at Michael.Bamberger@Golf.com.