Golf at Bethpage State Park will be shut down from September 15th through October 3rd to host the Ryder Cup, but it’s already getting difficult to book a tee time, especially at the top-ranked Bethpage Black.
Just a year ago, Los Angeles had to update its reservation policies to combat tee-time scalpers using automated bots to snag up spots, and now New York state’s public golf mecca is facing a similar problem.
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Sprawling Bethpage Black, designed in the mid-1930s to be “the public Pine Valley,” became the darling of the USGA in the early 2000s, when it played the 2002 and 2009 U.S. Opens. Then it became a darling of the PGA Tour as host of the 2011 and 2016 Barclays. Now the PGA of America has embraced The Black, which hosted the 2019 PGA Championship (winner: Brooks Koepka) and the upcoming 2025 Ryder Cup. Heady stuff for a layout that was once a scruffy state-park haunt where one needed to sleep in the parking lot in order to get a tee time. Now, you need fast fingers on the state park’s website once tee times are available—as prime reservations at The Black are known for going in seconds. View Course
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It’s not as if booking a tee time has been easy for the affordable, renowned courses but the online bot problem has gotten so bad that Bethpage is overhauling its reservation system. According to Irish Golfer, the club sent a letter over the weekend, “outlining a series of changes to the park’s reservation system aimed at eliminating tee time bots and restoring equity to the booking process.”
The plan is to implement a non-refundable $5 reservation fee for each tee time booked online, along with a $15 “no-show fee,” aiming to slow down bots and stop bulk bookings.
Kevin Van Valkenburg first reported the issue on “No Laying Up” after noticing that illegal “bots” were flooding the Bethpage site for bookings seven days in advance. Plus, when there was a cancellation, the tee time was picked up almost instantaneously.
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“It was pretty eye-opening. There are actually more tee times canceled than played at Bethpage on every single course,” Brooklynite Eric Bengyak explained to the New York Post. “I mean, that’s, that’s astonishing, right? Who is logging on at 7 o’clock, seven days prior, booking a tee time and then not showing up?”
Through the Freedom of Information Act, Bengyak also accessed public records that showed that in Augusta 2024, 450 more rounds of golf were cancelled at Bethpage’s Black and Red courses than played, wiht just 40% of tee times booked a week in advance actually played. He went on to say that he and his fellow NY golfers see “a system that’s broken.” New York’s Parks & Rec office called the problem a “nationwide concern.”
It’s too soon to tell how valuable these changes are, but at least Bethpage is doing something to fight back. Something tells us that Ryder Cup captains Keegan Bradley and Luke Donald won’t struggle to land tee times this September, but this is great news for the rest of us.
This article was originally published on golfdigest.com
