The unique “Brooklyn Open” golf tournament was featured in America’s newspaper of record. The event is held at Marine Park Golf Course, an original design from ASGCA founding member Robert Trent Jones, Sr., and renovated by Stephen Kay, ASGCA.
From the New York Times:
The sun was just starting to rise over the marinas and box stores of South Brooklyn on Monday as Sam Maurer, a bartender at Lucky Jack’s on the Lower East Side of Manhattan, wriggled his foot into a golf shoe.
“I’d be going to bed right now on a normal Monday morning,” said Mr. Maurer, 25, who typically works till 4 a.m. He had just arrived at the Marine Park Golf Course, a city-owned facility built in 1963 atop a former landfill, to play in the Brooklyn Open.
The tournament, by turns sporting competition and block party, has become a rite of early fall for a wide swath of urban golfers. An unofficial event — it’s not sanctioned by any ruling body of golf — the Brooklyn Open welcomes anyone who pays its $175 entry fee. Players of all ages compete in different divisions depending on their skill level. Befitting a borough of immigrants and dreamers, their backgrounds are as varied as their golf swings.
Mr. Maurer, who grew up in Fairfax County, Va., took up the sport as a boy. After graduating from the Culinary Institute of America in Hyde Park, N.Y., he moved to Brooklyn two years ago to get his start in the hospitality business. Since then, he has played Marine Park about 50 times, although this was his first Open.
“New York City public golf is some of my favorite golf I’ve ever played, just for the people you meet,” Mr. Maurer said. “In Virginia, even at the public courses, it’s a pretty stuffy game still, and it’s not very inclusive. But in New York that couldn’t be further from the truth.”
Rich McDonough, who founded the Open 11 years ago, described its 108 participants this year as coming from all walks of life: “From a fashion model to an HVAC guy, and probably everything in between,” he said.
They included Vijay Sammy, a 56-year-old native of Guyana who lives in Morris County, N.J., and owns an accounting firm. “My first tournament ever,” said Mr. Sammy, who had stayed overnight in a nearby hotel to spare himself an hour-plus drive from his home the morning of the Open.
Another newcomer was Diana Villabon, 43, who works for a real-estate management firm in Manhattan. “The nerves will wear off probably in like three or four holes,” Ms. Villabon said. She signed up for the Open after meeting Mr. McDonough — a former head pro at the Marine Park course who now works at an indoor golf facility on Long Island — on a flight home from Tampa, Fla.
About an hour before the tournament’s 8:30 a.m. start time, the sky started to brighten and the course’s parking lot began to fill. Players lifted their clubs out of their cars and traded their sneakers or slides for golf shoes.
Matt Restrepo, 32, a tattooed New York City firefighter who grew up in Bay Ridge, Brooklyn, and lives in Rockaway, Queens, wore a crisp olive-green ball cap that matched his shorts. Dress codes, he said, are more relaxed at Marine Park than at some other courses.
“Here,” Mr. Restrepo said, “they really don’t bust your chops too much. You can tuck your shirt in, you can untuck your shirt. No one’s going to tell you anything. But some other places, they will — tuck your shirt in, wear your hat forward. Things like that.”
Brad Saville, a 44-year-old writer, filmmaker and driver for the ride-hail company Revel, cut a more classic figure in his beige cashmere sweater and tortoiseshell sunglasses.
Matt Restrepo, 32, a tattooed New York City firefighter who grew up in Bay Ridge, Brooklyn, and lives in Rockaway, Queens, wore a crisp olive-green ball cap that matched his shorts. Dress codes, he said, are more relaxed at Marine Park than at some other courses.
“Here,” Mr. Restrepo said, “they really don’t bust your chops too much. You can tuck your shirt in, you can untuck your shirt. No one’s going to tell you anything. But some other places, they will — tuck your shirt in, wear your hat forward. Things like that.”
Brad Saville, a 44-year-old writer, filmmaker and driver for the ride-hail company Revel, cut a more classic figure in his beige cashmere sweater and tortoiseshell sunglasses.
The scene at the tournament is “a good sort of fruiting of the golf community in Brooklyn,” Mr. Saville added. “Golf is the grand uniter, man. It’s like food.”
Lorne Rubenstein, the former golf writer for The Globe and Mail in Toronto, who has written numerous books on the game (including a memoir with Tiger Woods), played in the inaugural Open at the invitation of a friend and colleague. “This is a very unusual golf tournament,” Mr. Rubenstein said on a call from his home in Toronto last week.
The first thing that impressed him was its location, between bustling Flatbush Avenue and the salt marshes of Jamaica Bay. “I thought, ‘Wow, this is great, a golf course right off of this sort of famous street,’” Mr. Rubenstein recalled. “And then this cavalcade of golfers kept coming in, just people from all walks of life, every ethnicity you could imagine.”
“It was never meant to be anything like a PGA Tour event, and it wasn’t,” he continued. “It just felt like it was more representative of the world we live in and a place like New York.”
Mr. Rubenstein said the name of the event reflected its broad appeal. “It wasn’t called the Flatbush Pro-Am or the Brooklyn Invitational,” he said. “It was the Brooklyn Open. It was open to anybody.”
That has meant a mix of hobbyist players and more competitive ones like Luke Watson, a 37-year-old professional caddie, who played in the tournament’s championship division this year.
Mr. Watson, who was born in Jamaica and lives in the Bronx, was competing in his second Open. He described the course’s mostly straight, wide-open fairways — which offer distant views of the Manhattan skyline and a whiff of the sea — as a welcome change from the doglegged, tree-lined holes at Brae Burn Country Club in Westchester County, where he caddies in warm-weather months before following the sun to Florida.
“Overall, it’s a tough course,” Mr. Watson said of Marine Park, which is distinguished by its elevated and undulating greens, hallmarks of the course’s designer, Robert Trent Jones Sr., the pre-eminent golf architect in America in the mid-20th century. “Don’t think you can overrun it. It’s going to run you over.”
With a score of 71, Mr. Watson finished three strokes behind the winner of this year’s Open, Owen Samuda, a friend of his and a fellow Jamaican, who shot 68. Mr. Samuda, 54, caddies at Pine Valley Golf Club in southern New Jersey, which has long been ranked by golf publications as the No. 1 course in the world.
Taking second place this year was Gabe Lee, 40, a pro at the Alley Pond Golf Center in Douglaston, Queens, who shot 69. Mr. Lee, the son of Korean immigrants, said he learned the game himself by playing at Alley Pond.
Also competing in the championship flight was Andrew Giuliani, 38, the son of Rudolph W. Giuliani, former mayor of New York. The younger Mr. Giuliani played golf professionally for several years before working at the White House in the Trump administration and running unsuccessfully in the Republican primary for governor of New York in 2022.
“If you think about it, New York City is not known for its golf,” said Mr. Giuliani, who learned to play on municipal courses. “But you have these golf nuts — golf enthusiasts that are starving for great places, great events to play in, and certainly Marine Park and the Brooklyn Open fulfills that.”
The first Open, in 2013, took place not long after Michael Giordano, who grew up in neighboring Sheepshead Bay, Brooklyn, signed a 20-year lease with the city to operate the Marine Park Golf Course. At once bucolic and bedraggled, the course has come a long way since Mr. Giordano, now 80, began running it: Improvements under his stewardship have included the addition of a driving range and a short-game practice area.
Because it was one of the earliest courses to be built on a landfill, before the advent of methane extraction wells, for years small explosions would occur when gas rose out of the ground, said Stephen Kay, a golf architect based in Egg Harbor City, N.J., who has done renovation work on the course and whose uncle, a New York City police officer, played there in its early days.
“I remember my uncle describing it as somebody threw a cherry bomb, you know, a firecracker,” Mr. Kay said. “And then there would be this puff of soil — smoke and soil — and there’d be this little hole, this two-foot circle in the middle of the fairway or the rough.”
The only sounds resembling explosions at this year’s Open were pops from the staticky outdoor speakers during the national anthem, sung before the start of play by Domini Monroe, a 27-year-old recording artist from Bergen Beach, Brooklyn, who has performed at the tournament for nearly a decade.
“I love being with anyone that feels like family,” she said. “It’s family here.”