Liberty National’s unique setting with the Manhattan skyline and the Statue of Liberty will serve as a fitting backdrop for a made-for-TV event to air on the 250th anniversary of the founding of our country.
Liberty National has partnered with the Veterans Golf Association for an event called the Liberty Cup, in which five service branch teams comprised of top VGA competitors representing the United States Army, Navy, Marines, Air Force and Coast Guard compete in a match-play tournament, to be broadcast from 3-5 p.m. on Golf Channel.
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The broadcast will also showcase a pro-am in which celebrities and former athletes such as John Smoltz, Urban Meyer, John Starks, Ron Harper, Gary Sheffield and Josh Donaldson participated.
“I was first invited to be part of the VGA about five years ago,” Meyer told Golf Digest. “I really do understand what our men and women and our veterans go through. Before I really didn’t, before I went on the VGA trips, I thought I did. But like anything, until you experience it with our troops, you know, you really don’t know. The whole concept of VGA is through golf, have a community for like-minded veterans to be around each other, lean on each other. And I sat with a group of fifteen Marines, I’ll never forget this the rest of my life. And I was talking and we have a couple had a couple of cocktails.
“And three of them shared that they would took their life if it wasn’t for VGA. my gosh. I put my drink down, I walked over to Josh Peyton [CEO of the VGA], I gave him a big hug and said, ‘I’m in, whatever I can do to help the VGA,’ and I can’t get enough.”
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Liberty National Golf Club, previously ranked among Golf Digest’s Second 100 Greatest Courses, will also host the 2027 BMW Championship and serves as the annual site of the Mizuho Americas Open. The club, ranked 10th in our most recent ranking of the Best Courses in New Jersey, also hosted the 2017 Presidents Cup and previous FedEx Cup Playoff events.
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- Best In State
Like Bayonne Golf Club to the south, Liberty National Golf Club was a reclamation project, a super-expensive Superfund clean-up of New York harbor, replacing a putrid assortment of oil refineries and storage tanks with an intriguing combination of green grass and golden rough. By spreading 2 million cubic yards of fresh soil over the capped toxic wastes, architect Bob Cupp and pro-consultant Tom Kite started building something meant to be a major tournament venue. It has narrow bent-grass fairways, just 25 to 27 yards wide, and tiny, flawless bent-grass greens, averaging just 3,400 square feet. With several hundred mature hardwoods transplanted along the fairways, a couple of rock-lined streams edging greens and winding cart paths fashioned from brick, Liberty National looks like what Central Park might be if it were a golf course Liberty National sits just three miles southwest of the tip of Manhattan, so the views of the NYC skyline, and the Statue of Liberty, are tremendous. View Course
The Veterans Golf Association is a competitive golf league serving more than 46,000 veterans and family members nationwide with more than 2,500 local annual events.
“We’re very thankful to Paul and Dan Fireman for rolling out the red carpet for our players to experience one of the most patriotic golf courses on the planet,” says VGA CEO Josh Peyton. it has a lot of intrinsic value for myself and [VGA secretary Joe Caley], you know when we served it was right during the middle of the global war on terror and that started right across the Hudson Bay with the attack on the Twin Towers, right? And so when those World Trade Center towers fell, our lives changed overnight.
“So this event is special because where it’s located, overlooking the new Freedom Tower that that looms in the New York skyline, a reminder of the sacrifice made by so many, and what it means to be doing this on the 250th anniversary of our country.”
Listen to podcast interviews we recorded with Smoltz and Meyer after their participation in the Liberty Cup pro-am here: Our chat with John Smoltz Our chat with Urban Meyer
This article was originally published on golfdigest.com
