Eisenhower Park Red Course

Here you go:

There are public golf courses, and then there is the Red Course at Eisenhower Park — a layout that has quietly accumulated one of the most extraordinary résumés in American golf while charging green fees that would barely register at a mediocre resort. The story begins in 1914, when Devereux Emmet — a patrician amateur golfer who had reached the quarter-finals of the 1904 British Amateur and spent considerable time absorbing the principles of golf architecture in the UK — was commissioned to build a course for the Salisbury Golf Club, the playground of Long Island's moneyed elite. What he produced on the flat, oak-studded terrain of the Hempstead Plains was a course of deceptive intelligence: not dramatic by the standards of the era's headliners, but precise, strategic, and quietly relentless.

The club's heyday arrived in the 1920s, when the Salisbury complex swelled to five 18-hole courses and attracted the finest players in the game. The Red Course's defining moment came in 1926, when Walter Hagen — then at the peak of his powers and in the process of winning five PGA Championships across the decade — defeated Leo Diegel 5 & 3 in the final to claim the PGA Championship on these fairways. The purse was $11,100. Hagen collected his winner's share and, in all likelihood, immediately found somewhere agreeable to spend it. It remains the last time a major championship was contested at what is today a municipally owned public facility.

The Depression ended the Salisbury Club's private chapter. Nassau County took the property in lieu of taxes, and what had been an exclusive enclave gradually became something rarer and more democratic: one of the finest publicly accessible golf facilities in the United States. The park was formally dedicated in 1949, rededicated as Eisenhower Park in 1969, and the Red Course continued to evolve — extending over time from Emmet's original hickory-shaft-era yardages to the 7,172 yards it now plays from the championship Blue tees, with a rating of 74.4 and a slope of 136 that commands genuine respect.

The course itself rewards the kind of patient, positional golf that Emmet favoured. Four par threes demand every iron in the bag across the round; four par fives offer genuine birdie opportunities for those disciplined enough to earn them; and the ten par fours range from the driveable to the brutally testing, with the 455-yard fourth and the 582-yard seventeenth bookending the back nine as its sternest examination. The mature tree lines that define nearly every hole do the work that hazards do elsewhere — channel tee shots, narrow approaches, and punish the imprecise without theatrics. It is the sort of design that reveals itself slowly, rewarding repeat visits and local knowledge.

In recent years, the PGA Tour Champions brought the Commerce Bank Championship to the Red Course for several editions, and the professionals who played it — Lee Trevino, Loren Roberts, Mike Reid among them — consistently singled it out for praise that went well beyond politeness. Trevino called it one of the toughest they played. Roberts described it as the deal of the century when he learned the green fee. For the thousands of Nassau County residents and visiting golfers who play it every season without a professional tournament in sight, that verdict lands differently — not as surprise, but as simple confirmation of what they already knew.