No Laying Up - Golf Podcast - 945: NLU Special Projects - The Mystery Behind Why Bethpage is Always Booked

Episode Date: January 22, 2025

For our second edition of NLU Special Projects, we continue to look at the unbelievable difficulty of booking tee times at certain public golf courses as we head to Long Island and Bethpage State Park - the host of this year's Ryder Cup as well as the 2002 & 2009 US Opens and the 2019 PGA Championship. Support our sponsors: Rhoback The Stack GolfPride Subscribe to the No Laying Up Podcast channel here: https://www.youtube.com/@NoLayingUpPodcast If you enjoyed this episode, consider joining The Nest: No Laying Up’s community of avid golfers. Nest members help us maintain our light commercial interruptions (3 minutes of ads per 90 minutes of content) and receive access to exclusive content, discounts in the pro shop, and an annual member gift. It’s a $90 annual membership, and you can sign up or learn more at nolayingup.com/join Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Be the right club. Be the right club today. That's better than most. How about the end? That is better than most. Better than most. Expect anything different? Better than most. Expect anything different? Ladies and gentlemen, welcome back to the No Laying Up podcast. Sala here. We have another edition of NLU special projects coming your way. It's part of our continuing spotlight on public golf in America and beyond.

Hopefully caught our last installment about the ongoing tee time scandal in Los Angeles. Our guy Kevin Van Volkenberg is jumping back into a similar pond in this episode, but this time on the opposite coast at Beth Page, the People's Country Club and host for this year's Ryder Cup. Why has it become such a nightmare to snag a tea time at Beth Page's five municipal courses? Kevin did some real digging here. I'm not going to spoil it. It's just, it's just as

scandalous as Los Angeles. I really enjoyed this one. I know you will too. Without any further delay. Here's KVV. I want to begin today's episode with an ode to the most meaningless sign in all of golf. In fact, I'm not sure the word meaningless accurately captures the message the sign ultimately delivers because it's the rare cautionary declaration that backfired entirely. I'm talking, of course, about the warning sign that hangs on the iron railing overlooking the first T at Bethpage Black. The sign contains just 17 words, and for some reason, every one of them is capitalized. There is no punctuation, no commas, periods, or semicolons.

The first word is red, all caps, like you're being shouted at, and the next 16 are in black. In my head, I like to imagine James Earl Jones reading them, and I actually thought about asking AI to give me a rendition of Darth Vader here, but I used to work for Disney, and they're notoriously litigious, so you're going to have to settle for me trying to sound as menacing as I can here. Warning! The Black Course is an extremely difficult course which we recommend only for highly skilled golfers. You've probably seen the sign even if you haven't been to Bethpage State Park in Farmingdale, New York,

because it received more airtime during the two US Opens played on the black course than half the guys in the top ten. You can buy posters of it, you can buy head covers, t-shirts, hats, yardage books, pillows, ball markers and posters of the sign. A few years ago, our friends at Footjoy even put out a limited edition pair of shoes with the sign embroidered into the heels. I guarantee there is someone, probably some Long Island hack who is also admittedly kind of a badass with the sign tattooed on his forearm or his meaty calf.

I'm not immune to its charms. When I played the black a few years ago I snapped a picture with the sign then went out and shot something in the 90s, a dance that is familiar to thousands of golfers every year. The truth is I probably shouldn't be playing the black horse. Typically I don't have much interest in handing over money just so I can get my teeth kicked in but the challenge is essentially the allure. A few years ago Josh Burhow, the managing editor of golf.com, tried to track down an origin story for the sign. It felt like an easy admittedly SEO friendly feature. Instead he waded into a murky debate with no

clear answers where two Bethpage historians adamantly disagreed on pretty much everything. One said it had been there since the 60s. Another insisted it didn't arrive until the early 80s. Supposedly, the tale goes, a husband was trying to give his wife a playing lesson on the black, on Memorial Day of all times, and the pair's pace of play was infuriatingly glacial. A fight nearly broke out when the foursome behind hid into them, and eventually the police were called. The course superintendent wanted to dissuade beginners from challenging the monster, so up went the sign.

The one thing that everyone Burhaw talked to is willing to agree on is that it did not have the intended effect. The sign essentially backfired. I think it was put up as a legit warning, you know, that this course is hard, everyone knows it's hard, but at the same time, I think it's done and it was supposed to deter less skilled golfers from playing there. But I think in a way it's done the opposite. And now people just want to play it. How many people want to play it? A lot of people, about 45,000 a year, according to the New York State Parks Department. If you expand that to other

courses, the red, the yellow,. If you expand that to other courses, the red, the yellow, the green, the blue, roughly 300,000 rounds are played at Beth Page every year. You can argue it's the most important golf complex in the United States, a smashing success that in many respects could serve as a model for metropolitan golf all around the country. For somewhere between $80 and $150, any hack can stand where Tiger Woods stood in 2002 on the left side of 13 Fairway and try to recreate this shot, maybe the sexiest two iron someone has ever hit

into a par five in a major championship. Back to 13, 63 yards to the hole. Wow. He likes it. Boy, it's just right in the hole. Wow, he likes it. Boy, it's just right of the hole. This is new. So much for the cars. I'll tell you, that's just terrific. I mean, what a magnificent drive on the last two holes and that shot there.

There's just one caveat. It's become borderline impossible for normals to secure a tee time there. Now, I know what you're thinking. Recreational golf has become super popular, especially with the COVID boom. And the New York and Long Island area is one of the most population dense areas of the country.

Throw in the fact that Bethpage remains a great deal, just 80 bucks on the weekends for New York state residents to play a course that is going to host the Ryder Cup this year, and of course demand is going to outpace supply. New York golfers are pugnacious in spirit, and as we know from the famous sign, Bethpage is where they want to go to test their metal. Why should anyone care if times are hard to get?

I mean, you care about corruption, like misuse of tax dollars. There's plenty of evidence that there's corruption going on at the course. The voice you just heard belongs to Eric Benyak, a Brooklyn resident and avid golfer who I connected with earlier this year, right around the time I was looking into the tee time scandal in Los Angeles. Everything that was going on in LA sounded all too familiar to New Yorkers. It didn't matter how much you planned ahead, how fast you were with a click of a mouse, you could not secure a tee time at Bethpage until late in the day, even if you started trying the microsecond

they became available to New York state residents. There's many, many nights where we have four, eight, 12 people trying to book a teatime and all are striking out. And that's kind of the state of, that's kind of the name of the game at Bethpage now. What started as a joke in Benyak's Discord eventually morphed into something neighboring on an obsession. The more we talked, the more intrigued I became. With a little sleuthing and teamwork, we managed to find brokers, bots, even hackers who admitted

to abusing the BethPage teatime portal. We touched base with dozens, if not hundreds, of furious golfers, many of whom have essentially given up on playing Bethpage. To put it in the plainest possible language, something has effed up in the Empire State, and it feels like it's time to do something about it. I mean, it's the lack of action on anyone's part that this is going on. This isn't new. You know, these rumors and frustration has existed for a year. Nothing's been done. I am working part-time on this and managed on covers.

The brokers exist, the cancellation bots exist. We're seeing irregular data on these courses. Like where, who is the person that can do something about this and why are they not looking into it? And I think that's kind of why we're here. In this episode of NLU Special Projects, we're jumping back into our series about public golf in America with a couple of questions in mind. What responsibility do municipalities have to treat golfers fairly? And how do you stay ahead of people who are smart enough, or from another perspective, unscrupulous enough to cheat the system? We'll dig in right

after the break. You all know rollback best fit best feel it's a new year, but we still love rollback the rollback hoodie is still the single best piece of clothing we own I go through maybe five to seven hoodies in a single week I'm wearing them almost every single day simple as that trust us if you haven't already 2025 is the year for you to try a row back hoodie they just also released their new Fulton hybrid jacket we love it it's great it's got insulated quilting on the front and back panel stretch knit sleeves's warm and flexible. I literally put the twins in my little twin carrier and put that, it's so flexible, I can stretch the jacket all the way over them. It's super clean, comfortable,

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q-zips, hoodies and more with code NLU. Back to KVV. As most of our regular listeners know, I live in Maryland, Baltimore to be specific. I'm not particularly good at golf, but I'm enthusiastic about playing it. The public courses in Charm City remain something of a hidden gem. They might be a little scruffy in spots, but they're never so busy that I can't snag a Saturday teatime before noon, and it's rare they're more than a 30-minute drive from my house in any direction. My pedestrian brain can't comprehend the patience and planning required to play golf in the New York metropolitan region, so I dialed up my colleague Neil Schuster to try to get a little

insight into why hacks living in and around the Big Apple have a larger burden to bear when it comes to playing a regular weekend NASA. As you might be able to tell from his elongated opening sigh, one does not just waltz to the first tee of a New York area golf course. To quote Jerry Maguire, it is an up at dawn pride swallowing siege. Oh, Kevin, first, thanks for having me on your program. No, it is the word I keep coming back to and I mentioned this in our video when Randy came to visit in Brooklyn is friction. Friction is like you have to want to play and you have to be, it's like anything else in New York, you know, if people commute, they use the subway,

you start to get your plan dialed. And so there's some things that I've learned about playing golf in the city. First, you have to want to do it because it's going to be kind of a hassle. Two, you got to get up early. There's going to be, especially if you're planning a weekend, you want the traffic to be on one side, not both sides, both the to and from. And it doesn't really matter. There's no really definition of moving away from traffic in New York. It's just kind of like the BQE is going to have traffic both ways pretty much from, I'd say, like

8 a.m. to 8 p.m. So I think you have to play early and I think you just have to be prepared if you're going to play on a weekend for it to take a really long time. It's an all-day affair in New York City, I guess is the best way to put it. It's no exaggeration to say that some of the best golf in the world exists within a couple hours of New York City. Most New Yorkers just don't have access to it. Winged foot, Sleepy Hollow, Shinnecock, Sabonic, Maidstone, National Golf Links, and I could keep going, might as well exist in a different solar system than the daily feed New York golfer. in a different solar system than the daily fee New York golfer. People who aren't hedge fund managers or captains of industry are going to end up at places like Marine Park, Dyker Beach, Van Cortland Park, Pelham Bay, or Split Rock. And if you're willing to pay a premium, you could probably get a tee time at Ferry Point.

But for the true Munis, the quality of the course might sometimes make you question the required time investment. For Neil, that's Diker Beach. It has its flaws, but it's a net positive, most of the time. It is a city run course, and you can tell. Not the best golf course, but it is golf. It is 18 holes. I always walk away away saying I'm happy I did that. But that's the perfect example of you want to get there at 6 a.m. and you're going to basically queue up and the, you know, the starter is not going to really have control. People are kind of jostling for position off the first tee.

They might send a single out in front of you when you're making the turn. Just random single goes off on 10 at, you know, 10.45. Like, oh, okay, I guess that's what we're doing today. But I think Diker Beach is a good example. It gets the job done and it's like, I'm glad it exists. I do not want it to go away. And I think they've made an effort to improve the greens and some of the conditioning of Diker Beach. In talking to some other people that play out there a lot longer than I have, the place has gotten a lot better, which is funny.

If you went out there and saw it, you're like, oh, so it was worse than this, really? OK, that's interesting. The exception to New York's municipal golf paradox, of course, has always been Bethpage State Park. There's a reason that for nearly 100 years, it's been marketed as the People's Country Club. Its combination of history and conditioning and cost is a modern miracle, and for that,

New Yorkers have Robert Moses to thank. Moses, if you're unfamiliar, is one of the most influential, albeit controversial, figures in the history of New York. He was an urban planner who more or less played God when it came to reshaping or green lighting infrastructure in the state. He never held an elected office, but he was a shrewd and skillful political tactician, securing the funding to build bridges, tunnels, parkways, housing developments, and here's the part that's relevant to our story, state parks. His life was ultimately the subject of one of America's most famous non-fiction books, The Power Broker by historian Robert Caro. Most people generally agreed after The

Power Broker came out that Moses, for all his accomplishments, was kind of corrupt and almost certainly a racist. But Moses is undoubtedly the person most responsible for the creation of the Long Island State Parks and in turn Bethpage. In the 1930s, a picture of Moses sitting on a tractor on the day the State Parks Commission broke ground at Bethpage ran in the newspaper The Brooklyn Eagle, and the caption has Moses referring to Bethpage as the People's Country Club. There's a whole rabbit hole we could go down here about who actually designed the Black Horse. For years, it was credited to A.W. Tillinghast, a famous architect who designed Wingfoot, Baltasaral, San Francisco Golf Club,

and Baltimore Country Club, among others. More recent evidence suggests that maybe Tillinghast, at the very least, ought to share credit with another man, Joseph Burbeck, the longtime superintendent at Bethpage State Park. There's a couple articles you can read, one by Ron Whitten at Golf Digest and another by a friend of the program, Jeff Shackleford, with dueling points of view. But for our purposes, what matters is that the Black Horse was intended to be a daunting test of elite golfer skill. Deep bunkers, tight fairways, vicious rough, numerous elevation changes.

And for a long ass time, not that many people wanted to play the damn thing. AJ Vopel grew up right near Bethpage, and he's probably played the Black Horse somewhere in the neighborhood of a hundred times, maybe more. He even made a documentary about sleeping in your car to play the Black Horse for Calloway back when he was the company's creative content manager. Even though all the bookkeeping is done online these days, BethPage still reserves a handful of tee times each day for walk-ups, in some ways an ode to the tradition that dates back to the mid-90s.

But there was a time when the idea of sleeping in your car just to get in line to play the black would have seemed absurd. If you showed up in the 80s, you could often walk right from the pro shop to the first tee. KVB, when I was like five or six years old, my dad who grew up playing the black chorus, we grew up in the same house and my dad grew up, all he would do is tell stories. Him, my uncle Joe, all they would do is tell me stories. You know how easy it was to get on the black chorus when we were younger? Nobody wanted to play it. It was so hard, you know, so like they were they would just tell us stories from

Literally, I'm almost 40 now so literally been telling stories for 25 years about how hard it is to one like how hard the golf course is and To like how easy it was to get a tee time by the mid 90s Rumors began to circulate that David Fay then the executive director the USGA, was pushing to hold the 2002 US Open at Bethpage Black. It would be the first time America's national championship had ever been held at a municipal course and back then it cost $20 to play. History awards most of the credit to Fay, but it's actually a rabbi and Bethpage Black regular Mark Gilman, who planted the

idea in Fay's head. What I wanted was a way to honor the working-class golfer, Gilman told the New York Times in 2002. They are the ballast of the ship of golf and deserve their own open. I call them golf rats, people who get up at four in the morning and get their weekend tea time at the Muni. I was a golf rat playing the black and I just asked David Fay to consider it. The black was, to put it bluntly, in pretty awful shape in the 90s. According to a story in Sports Illustrated, the tea boxes were half dirt,

the greens were uneven, bushes and even trees were in some places growing in the sand traps. Even if you hit what was supposed to be the fairway, you were lucky if you found your Bushes and even trees were in some places growing in the sand traps. Even if you hit what was supposed to be the fairway, you were lucky if you found your ball sitting on grass. The state didn't have the money to renovate, but somehow, in a deft bit of populist maneuvering, Fay convinced the other USGA board members to pump $3 million into the course. It sparked what can charitably be described as the biggest reputational glow-up in golf history. By the time Volpelle and his brother were teenagers and ready to lock horns with the black, the only way to get on was to

pull into the parking lot after midnight and wait until dawn. If you've never been, the way it works is this. You park in a numbered parking spot and everyone has to be in their cars when they hand out tickets. There are roughly 60 to 70 parking spots. Around 5 a.m. an employee from Bethpage comes out and starts handing out numbers all the way down the line and that's when the mayhem starts. People peel out of the parking lot and park in front of the clubhouse. They start calling out numbers and golfers walk up to what is basically a board that

feels like a DMV. Some days you're lucky and you can get an 8 a.m. tee time depending on what the people in front of you did. The parking lot, which literally starts to fill up at sunset when tee times are ending the day before, is a bit like the base camp of golf's Mount Everest. There's two kinds of groups that are always there, right? There are the locals and there are the people that are traveling, you know, from far and wide to get there and to play the black. You know, it had this aura to it. The people that weren't locals that were there, they would be barbecuing, there'd be tents set up, like they would be

partying, like they would treat it like almost like a tailgate, right? So like, we would show up, normally, like after we'd work, we'd be working like a double at like you know the restaurant that we're working at or whatever so like you know we'd be pretty tired but we'd see them set up all of a sudden we'd start talking to them all of a sudden you're having a beer with them all of a sudden all of a sudden it's like four in the morning and you're like i didn't get any sleep like what the hell am i doing and then you go in your car for like a half hour right like you said uh depending on what time of the year, freezing cold, just like people with blankets, we had blankets in our trunk always. But it was always great because the people that traveled

for it, they really appreciated us just kind of talking about it. Nobody hyped it up more than us. I became my dad, KBB. I'm like, now I'm hyping it up to like other people. I'm like, Jesus, AJ, like you sound like your dad now, like just talking about like the mystique of the black. You know what I mean? And I'm just like, wow, like how quickly that happened, you know? Bethpage State Park originally had an automated phone system

that you could call to try to get tee times. But as you can imagine, it was kind of like trying to redirect the Hudson River with a funnel and a garden hose. Volume quickly overwhelmed capacity. Everyone was looking for a way to carve out an advantage, a way to find an angle. There was theories that like certain payphones worked better than other payphones. So you'd see guys lined up at payphones or using payphones at seven o'clock at night. There were theories that like, oh, out of staters would get in before, because this is a phone system, obviously, out of staters would get in, you know, out

of state lines would come in because like the local lines were all jammed up, whether or not any of those theories were true or not, who knows. That voice belongs to Michael Altabello, an artist and photographer who was a BethPage Black regular in the 90s. And with his arrival, we begin to wrap up our history lesson about BethPage and start to pivot towards its more broken present. Because even though Michael didn't personally hack

the BethPage phone system, he was part of a group of regulars who managed to secure the same tee times every weekend, back to back to back on whatever course they wanted. When we return, Michael is going to tell you the story of the original Bethpage Hustlers, whom he affectionately calls, and I swear I'm not making this up as part of some Long Island cliche, Tony and Frank. You guys have heard me rave about the stack. I got a full disclosure. I have taken almost two months off from doing it because of other priorities in my life,

but I got back into it today and I am stoked. I've really missed having this thing in my life of a program to keep me working on my flexibility, working on my mobility and adding very, very serious speed gains to my golf swing. I didn't fall as far off on my pace as I thought I would have after taking a couple of months off but it has been transformative. It honestly has. We got the rest of the crew working their way

into the program, just being amazed. DJ is still sending me screenshots, showing me 163 mile an hour ball speed, which was like pretty much where I started at when I started this journey. So you can recognize the incredible gains that he's made there. And I can't wait to get back into it. I'm taking this into tournament play here pretty

soon as well. It's just been awesome. The stack system.com you can use code no laying up to get 10% off. It's so totally worth it. It is the best way to improve your golf swing on a permanent basis for busy individuals. It takes maybe an hour a week total to do this thing twice a week. And it's fantastic. TheStackSystem.com, code no laying up, back to KBB. Here's a cliche about New Yorkers

that I think is actually true. If there are weaknesses in a system, they are going to find them. Then they're gonna come up with a workaround. And that's exactly what Tony and Frank did for the Nassau Players Club. At Frank did for the Nassau Players Club. At the time, the Nassau Players Club was probably one of the only clubs in the country that was legitimate. We had gin, we were recognized by the USGA, and we were one of the only clubs in the country that didn't own property.

So we were just tournament players. Like in New York City and in Long Island,, you can't be a member unless you work, unless you're a finance bro. I was playing with cops and firemen and teachers. Even businessmen can't afford to be members on Long Island anywhere or choose not to afford to be members. We had just a bunch of tournament players that were really, really good at golf, former college players. And we were just all grouped together. And thankfully, they let me

join up in, I think it was 2002 or so, and I started playing with those guys. So it must have been around 2004-ish that Frank and Tony unlocked the system for us and that made life really good because we could just play whenever we wanted. I need to pause and point out here that Tony and Frank aren't their real names, they're aliases and that is what Antobello called them when he first told this story in the golfer's journal last year. Even though this stuff happened a long time ago, Antebellos still isn't sure if any laws were broken or if any laws were broken what the statute of limitations might be.

So just to be safe he asked if we could keep it covert. So Frank and Tony, if you're listening, I don't approve, but I do remain fairly impressed, and your identities remain a mystery, even to me. Here was the gist of the operation. At some point, Tony or Frank, don't know which one, maybe it was both, figured out that even though the phone lines opened at 7.30 a.m., seven days ahead of when you wanted a tea time. The system actually started accepting calls at 7.15. If you could figure out a way to somehow not get kicked out of the system for 15 minutes,

you'd be first in the queue when the system started handing out tee times. The next part, I'm gonna quote directly from Michael's Golfer's Journal essay because it's complicated and I wanna get it right. Frank and Tony determined that you could punch in an incorrect driver's license number twice before entering a legitimate one,

and that you could stall for exactly 10 seconds between entering each digit. Two wrongs and a right took 10 minutes. From there, they calculated how many seconds they could pause between each prompt. On what day would you like to play? Which course would you like to play? How many holes would you like to play? Which course would you like to play? How many holes would you like to play? It all added up to almost exactly 15 minutes.

Once they had the system gamed, they programmed it all into an autodiler and hooked it up to eight separate phone lines. I actually think it was just trial and error from my understanding. And that is that is insane. Because like the amount of trial and error to figure out what you can do to navigate a system for 15 minutes without it kicking you out for entering wrong information, it must have taken days and days and days and days and days. And I can see them together in my head, unlocking a new morsel and just being giddy. Because when you figure out that... The New York State driver's license is 9 digits. I even know mine to heart because of punching it into the damn system for so many years.

But when you figure out that you can type in 15 numbers, that must have been a key that they were, oh my God, you can type in 15 and you don't get knocked out. You don't get knocked out until 16. And when you figure out you have seven seconds between inputting each number, so it's like nine. And then you're just stalling for time. So it was, from my understanding, it was trial and error. And I don't, I I mean they weren't bots back

then they were able to program it into an auto dialer into a computer but these were software guys. The subterfuge if you can believe it went on for 15 years even after Frank left the Nassau players club and gave up golf. Tony kept things going and everyone involved kept their secret. The Nassau players club mostly stuck to the red course rather than get beat up by the Black. They never had to sleep in their cars. As Michael was telling me this story, there was one element that didn't make sense to me. How was there no uproar? So when you guys would show up on the Red Course with all the tee times in those mornings,

would people be pissed? Would they be like, how are you guys figuring this out? This is bullshit? What was the kind of attitude? Yeah, people would ask. And there were also other regulars. There are many other regulars that were there and they would ask, but nobody... Unlike the LA story, I don't think anybody really story, I don't think anybody really knew about this until I wrote that article. Like any outsiders, it never really cracked or anything. We just had it going forever. And even the people in the club didn't necessarily know how we had all the tee times. Back then, I think it was with a Yahoo! Liftserv. so like all week long, the Liftserv would just be pinging like four spots available on the red two spot like all these games were just

available. And like you would just jump in and we would change IDs. And but I don't think there were many people in the club that didn't know that this was happening. The party more or less came to an end when Bethpage teatime system transitioned online during COVID. It felt to the Nassau Players Club, a bit like the final weeks of high school. They knew they would never have a stretch of golf

like that again. Michael lives in the Hudson Valley these days and belongs to a private club where he can get around in about three hours. But a piece of his heart remains at Bethpage. I think of Bethpage as a as sort of a national museum. I mean it is kind of a special place. I know the course gets a lot of shade and it's probably you know for good reason and had I come to it much later in life I probably would throw a lot of shade at it but it holds a special place in my heart just because I've done so many laps around that place.

And it really made me the golfer that I became at the time, at least, because when you're just getting beat up or you're having to hit these shots, you're forced to get better. So to have access to those courses, not just the black course, but the trickle down effect on the other courses was incredible. You also never knew who you were going to get paired with. When I asked Michael about his most memorable Bethpage rounds, he brought up someone who he played regularly with before he joined the Nassau Players Club. I played a lot of golf with this kid named James Costello before I was a member of the

club. And little James played a lot of golf and I never knew what he did. He was like a street graphic designer, like a graffiti artist, but he played a lot of golf. I'm a black. I played a lot because I was a single. We hooked up and played with him for like two years. This was probably right before September 11th. Then he disappeared and I didn't know why. This is kind of pre-Google-ish, and then months and months later, my friend Zoram was like, you know, he killed his mother. And I'm like, what?

So sure enough, New York Times article, kid from Queens, kills his mother for an inheritance, was acquitted. I played like two years with a murderer. Yeah, like this is Beth Page. And like, he was like, he had my back. Like, because it got like, Beth Page gets chippy, like even in the bar and stuff. Like little James was like, don't fuck with Mike. That's New York. I don't know how you include this in the pod or if it goes in the pod, but that's, that's, that's Beth Page. Of course, just because the system went online doesn't mean the scheming went away. Remember what I said about New Yorkers being hardwired to stress test a system of rules until they can find a weakness? After the break, I'll tell you a story about Bill and John, as you

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Okay. Before we dive in here, I want to be clear. I do know Bill and John's real names. Bill reached out to me after our Los Angeles teatime pod with an admission. He and his friend John used to run a similar operation at Bethpage, and they'd be happy to talk to me about how they did it. I was welcome to share how they did it for this story as long as I didn't use their real names or voices. And while this isn't exactly Bob Woodward meeting up with Mark Felt in a parking garage, I agreed to give them aliases.

Their story seemed worth listening to. The first time Bill and John played Bethpage, it was essentially in a monsoon. We're talking biblical rain, animals marching two by two down the southern state parkway kind of stuff. But they loved it. They had been building it up in their heads for years, and somehow it lived up to their expectations. But they quickly ran into the problem that most golfers encounter with Bethpage.

Unless you're willing to drive out to Long Island and sleep in your car to join the walk-up line, it was hard to secure a tee time by phone. After Tiger won the US Open in 2002, it was almost like trying to win the lottery. Sure, you have a chance, but come on. There were always rumors, Bill told me, of ways to talk your way into some primo tea times. One prominent one? Slip a couple rangers tickets to the woman behind the counter and you could have any foursome on the black you wanted. He swears he never tried it. There were big signs behind the plexiglass stating, no bribes shall be accepted under

New York state law. Which, to be honest, seemed like pretty good evidence that bribes shall be accepted under New York state law. Which, to be honest, seemed like pretty good evidence that bribes certainly had been, at a minimum, attempted in the past. Instead, John, who works as a data scientist, got them in the auto-dialing game. He developed a computer program that would essentially act like a hundred phones were calling the line on their behalf at the same time. It didn't require the deception of Frank and Tony's method, but for a couple of years, it worked. I can't remember how long it lasted, Bill told me, but we were able to get weekend morning tee times pretty consistently.

Can we pause for a second here and imagine what it must've been like for a Long Island hack of this era who doesn't know shit about auto dialers or computer programming, but would diligently get up at the crack of dawn seven days in advance to try to secure a tee time at Bethpage simply with his own fingers. I remember my dad used to do this at Larchmont Golf Course in Missoula, Montana when I was growing up, and how annoyed he would get when he couldn't get through the automated system.

I would not describe patience as the virtue that my family possessed an abundance of. I wonder if my dad has any idea how lucky he was that he didn't have to go to battle with the Franks and Tonys of the world. Anyway, back to our story. The phone thing worked for a while, and then it didn't. Who knows how many auto-dialing battalions are out there, engaging in theoretical knife fights every week inside the phone portal. Things really clicked, however, when John wrote a script for the online portal that could click on tee times around a million times per second the instant they became available. The program, which John described to me as a headless browser, needed to wait for the

screen to load, but as soon as the state park system released the tee times to the public, boom, the program could grab them. Bill and John were back in business. They didn't have to sleep in their cars. They could plan ahead and juggle their work and parenting obligations accordingly. When people asked them how they kept getting such great tee times, they bluffed like the best poker player.

Yeah, we just start dialing at 7 a.m. Same as everybody else. Their secret society, unlike the Nassau Players Club, consisted of roughly two people. If each of them wanted to bring a friend along, that was about as far as it extended. They never sold their teatimes, so it never felt like a major ethical breach to them. Besides, it was clear to them that there were all kinds of secret handshakes going on. It wasn't political corruption, Bill told me.

He never got the sense that, say, Andrew Cuomo could get anyone a tea time. It was, hey, my buddy from high school works behind the counter at Bethpage, and this is his retirement job, and I'm a retired cop, and our sisters are married, and maybe these two people used to go to the same synagogue, or whatever. At some point, their script stopped working. The software either became harder to crack, or, they speculated, somebody developed a better, faster program. It didn't matter because both of them moved out of the New York area and didn't need

Beth Page to find a regular weekend game. At one point, I asked Bill a strange question. How would he prevent people from executing these kind of hustles if he were sitting on the side of the state parks? It's pretty simple. He said you just have an authority figure stand on the first team start asking hard questions with the threat of penalty Behind them. Hey, how did you get this tea time? Can I please see your receipt and confirmation email? How many times you played the black course this month? When Bill and John gave up their New York State driver's licenses, it seemed pointless

to try to grab Bethpage teatimes, even if they were visiting friends in the area. Out-of-state residents can only book teatimes five days in advance, not seven, and every teatime now disappears in seconds, not days. So what would even be the point? Well, as it turns out, there are still plenty of ways to game the system. When I first connected with Eric Benyak, he was kind of treating this investigation into Bethpage Tea Times a bit like a hobby. He played college baseball at SUNY Rockland for a couple years, then realized he wasn't going pro and transferred out to focus on school. It wasn't much

of a golfer until COVID. But once he started going to the range to stay sane, he was hooked, just like millions of people around the world. He played about 100 rounds in his first year, and he quickly went from shooting in the 110s to where he is now about an eight index. I think growing up as an athlete, I think you hear this a lot from people who started playing during COVID. It's like it fills that gap that you had previously. One, the

competition of it to the consistent practice it takes reminds me a lot of what it was like playing baseball in college. It's like if you're not doing it every day, you're not getting better. And if you're not getting better, you're not having more fun, depending on how you look at it. Benyak lived in Westchester County for much of the pandemic, but he moved back to Brooklyn in 2023, where he works for a dog food company in customer retention and analytics. He tried to keep up his golfing habit, despite the inconveniences of city life that Neil mentioned

earlier in this pod. And he frequently played rounds at Diger Beach and Marine Park. For years, friends told him he had to check out Bethpage. And by some stroke of luck, he was able to snag a tee time, and he planned his whole day around it. It's a hilarious story of the first time I went there. I wasn't playing the black, I was playing the red. And I showed up to the range, and you know, I had been to golf courses before. I wasn't the best golfer,

but I'd seen tons of public golfers. And I looked around and every single guy on the range was striping the ball. And the two guys next to me were having a conversation about the corn fairy tour and Q school, and they had Titleist bags. And I thought to myself, I was like, wow, like I've never seen a public golf course like this before. Like they must really bring the players in here.

And I was so intimidated. I basically just put my clubs there. I was like, we're just going to go to the tee. Like I don't need to hit balls in front of these guys. And I get to the tee and it turned out they were running the New York State Am on the black course that day. And that's why so many of these players were there. And I took a huge sigh of relief because I thought that they just took all the

best golfers in New York state and put them at Bethpage every day. Like so many other golfers, I. And I took a huge sigh of relief because I thought that they just took all the best golfers in New York state and put them at Bethpage every day. Like so many others before him, the allure of the black horse was too strong to resist. Benyak wanted to see how his game might hold up. He connected with a friend, Chris, and the two of them landed a tee time. It went about how you might expect.

I think I left my soul, Chris jokes about this all the time, I left my soul in the bunkers on 10 and 11 and I don't think I've ever quite recovered. But had a blast. I mean, it's extremely difficult course to play. And as we've discovered now, extremely difficult to get on for a variety of reasons. Benyak gravitated away from the black course over the next few years, deciding, like many New Yorkers, he actually preferred the red, and even the blue or the green. Really whatever was available. The pedigree of the course mattered a lot less than getting four friends together for

a teatime. But things started to change during the last two years. It wasn't a big deal that he and his friends couldn't get Times on the Black. But then Times on the Red disappeared. Times on the Blue became scarce. And even the Green became entirely booked. Everything, even the Yellow was getting snatched up the second that Times went live.

Sure, golf is popular and true, New York has a lot of golfers. But something about it didn't make sense. Every night, he and 11 of his friends were logging on, ready to pounce the millisecond that tee times seven days from now were available. And every single one of them was getting shut out. Who the hell was eyeballing a 2 p.m. time on a Wednesday

on the green course seven days in advance? If we could come out and say, hey, there is half a million golfers buying for, you know, five courses, five tee timesying for, you know, five courses, five tee times an hour, eight hours, right? You can do that math and maybe it adds up. But the sheer speed and consistency of these tee times just never being available, just starts to pose the question of,

is there things in the backend going on that we're not aware of? Basically, the only way to play golf at Bethpage, other than to sleep in your car, was to constantly monitor the cancellations the night before, refreshing the site over and over and over, and then immediately try to snag one the second you see it. But over time, it became clear to Benyak

that there were cancellation bots hunting those teeimes as well. The park's stance has been these bots don't really exist. They don't, they haven't seen evidence of them. They've acknowledged some of the companies that are selling these times on the black market. To the full extent that it's occurring, I think they're kind of taking a blind eye. So I think the frustration is two folds, right? There's the lack of ability of tee times. Okay, the game has grown substantially in

the last couple years. I understand tee times are difficult, but to have 12 people trying to get one tee time and being unsuccessful, what are you even supposed to do at that point? It has basically made them unattainable, right? And then the second piece of it is though, it's a publicly run institution where all 12 of those people or whoever it is that are logging on every night, seven days in advance are verified New York state residents who are paying taxes to this institution to run this facility that has

suddenly become completely unattainable to them. If we were talking about a privately run course who might be, you know, restricting amount of play there, sure, private business, that's your job, that's your call. But when we're talking about a state run institution that's using tax dollars to run it, the question becomes a little bit bigger of how is this not available to the people helping fund it. When Benyak read Michael Antebell's essay in the golfer's journal, well, let's just say it set some things in motion. So what initially began as more of an internet bit of railing against Bethpage probably about,

I would say a year ago, the joke started. And it kind of ran as a joke that Bethpage is, Bethpage is hacked, Bethpage is spotted, you know, there's no tee times that Bethpage can't play golf there. That probably, it started about a year ago, and that was a consistent joke in our Roost chat. Until about, I would say, six months ago, give or take, when I read the article in the Golfer's Journal about the Nassau Players Club botting the system for 10 years or eight years, whatever it may be, hacking the phone systems to have every Saturday and Sunday

morning tea time, is when I started to think like, oh, well, if it's happened before, what's to say it's not happening today? He started casually asking questions, both online and in person. When Benyak would get tee times as a single through the walk-up line, he'd wait a few holes and then gently start to probe his playing partners. According to the state park's own rules,

you're only allowed to play the black horse once every 28 days. It became clear that was not being enforced. I walked up on a Saturday morning by myself and I played with three guys who had played black 21 times this year. This was on July 4th weekend and they had played black 21 times. When I prompted them with the question, how did you, how are you doing this? Oh, we just know how to do it.

So I'm not trying to get into a fight in the middle of a fifth hole, but when you hear someone say that, you know, I have some questions for you, fellas. Benyak decided to get more serious. He sent emails and made calls to the state attorney general. He got no response. He decided his next move was to start filing

open records requests with the state of New York, which are called Freedom of Information Law Requests or FOILs. He had no idea what he was doing, so he cracked open a few beers and fired up chat GPT and asked it how to write a FOIL request. Who was getting these tee times? How often were they playing? Were they checking in? How many cancellations were happening on each course per day? His first three foils either got rejected or went unanswered.

In the meantime, while he waited, he continued sleuthing. On Reddit's golf subreddit, he started searching for Bethpage mentions. Let's see if I can find someone who is botting their system. Like someone has to openly admit to it, right? And so I did find a guy. I found multiple actually, and I picked one out. Golden Eagle, I believe, or Double Eagle

is your Reddit username. Here's your five seconds of fame. Found him on the golf subreddit, sent him a DM. Hey, I want to play Bethpage next Tuesday, 9 to 10 a.m. What can you do for me? Message back, no problem. Like pick a specific time, it's yours. Well then that opened up some questions in my head of one,

how can he be so sure that this is going to work? Two, like any other details here at Double Eagle that you need from me or we just stop rating on a handshake deal. And eventually went back and forth with them and what he said to me was, all I needed was any account at Bethpage, send in my login info and the tee time is mine,

PayPal me 50 bucks per time you want. So that's what we did. I created a fake account of a resident in Texas, which would make you a non-verified resident in the New York, in the Bethpage booking system, sent my login details to Mr. Double Eagle and seven o'clock the next day or seven o'clock and five seconds the next day, I had nine thirty on the black time. He was, in his own words, astonished. Eric and I had been trading emails by that point for a few months and I woke up to a flurry of them sent late at night, full of Reddit screenshots.

Just so many questions of how this is possible. And the first being, if you understand the context of the account system at Bethpage, there's three types of accounts. There is a non-resident, which is the type of account that I gave him, which should only have five-day booking windows. So you can book five days in advance of when you want to play. Those accounts today are basically useless because they're all booked by verified New York State resident accounts, which have seven-day booking windows and are booking everything up every single night. So what it opened my eyes to was there's an ability in this system, in the 4Up software, to change what type of account you're

booking with to give you seven-day booking access. So that's the first big thing uncovered here, is that these account parameters that they've set in place simply do not work and are can be changed. I've had some conversations with people on how they can be changed and it doesn't seem that difficult. It's something that can easily be learned from YouTube and chatGVT And the implications of this are basically it opens up the door to people like this. So out of state residents, brokers. So I mean, this guy is a broker, right? He's selling his tee times to out of state residents to brokers, to basically what I would call bad actors. In this instance, to be booking at times when they shouldn't be,

which would then up the volume of people trying to book seven day times and limiting access to New York state residents, who are supposed to have preferred booking here because we pay fucking taxes. So then when you think about, you know, across the spectrum, like this arguably is happening more on black, right?

It's a more desirable course. When you think about the spectrum, like this arguably is happening more on black, right? It's a more desirable course. When you think about the spectrum of what is five tee times, six tee times an hour, and you wonder, okay, well, what portion of those tee times per day are being booked by these brokers? Is it 10%, is it 20%? And if getting tee times from them is reducing, if they're getting tee times is reducing total capacity

by 20, 25%, and then you add in the influx of extra golfers wanting to play the course before the Ryder Cup, like, you get to the point we're at where nobody's getting ties. Unless you're paying double Eagle on Reddit 50 bucks per person. For Benyak, it was like Nicolas Cage in National Treasure, finding proof that he wasn't crazy. It was the whole world had been lying.

Please humor me for a second and imagine Eric as Nick Cage in this scene and me as Justin Bartha. But instead of the U.S. Constitution, we're talking about Beth Page. Of all the ideas that became the United States, there's a line here that's at the heart of all the Bethpage. right, it is their duty to throw off such government and provide new guards for their future security. People don't talk that way anymore. Beautiful. No idea what you said. It means if there's something wrong, those who have the ability to take action have the responsibility to take action. Okay, back to reality. A month later, we got another break. The state of New York decided to grant Eric's fourth FOIL

request. The state wouldn't give him names, but it did release booking information related to 60,000 tee times on all five courses during a four month window of 2024. Suddenly, we could see how often tee times are being canceled on each course. So I cut the data into times booked between 7 and 730, which would be that initial booking window when they're released the night before. And then I looked at cancellation rates by course. To me, theoretically, the black course should have the lowest cancellation rate,

right? Like you just got this. Bethpage Black US US Open, Ryder Cup course, T-time. Like, why would you give that up? Black has almost 2x the cancellation rates of other courses at Bethpage. Like I'll give up a Bethpage Blue time if it's raining. I'm not giving up a Bethpage Black time for anything. So then why is this cancellation rate out of control on the black versus the other courses in the park? Why try if you're not going to play?

Is it because you're trying to sell those times? In August alone, there were almost 2000 cancellations on the black course and a similar number on the red. The state parks position has been that users like Double Eagle are rare and don't represent widespread malfeasance. But the more Benyek dug into the numbers, the more he became convinced that can't be true. For example, 20% of the tee times being booked every month on the black were being made by out-of-state residents, according to the state's own data. How does that even make sense when every tee time is gone in seconds,

yet out of state residents are supposed to wait two extra days to book? So breaking it down from a numbers perspective on focusing on the black course, because we think this is where it's happening the most. If you look at the black course, there's about 40 tee times per average between the months of May to September.

The black is closed on Mondays, so you're looking at 26 days of play so 42 times times 26 days of play gives you 1022 times give or take per month. What we found was 466 tee times booked-of-state accounts seven days in advance on the Black Times, which is about 116 teatimes per month, which comparing to that 1,020 equals out to 11% of the teatimes on Black are being hacked and bought by these out of state accounts. So when we're talking about people who can't access t-times, you're talking about t-times that are really never existing for the public customer. These are booked in an instant by an account that never should be able to book them and are not available to the public. Just consider them not available. So we've now gone available to the public. Just consider them not available. So we've now gone from 100% of the t-sheet down to 89% automatically. And then I sit here and I wonder, okay, if these people are doing

them with out-of-state accounts with no repercussions, how many people with in-state accounts have figured this out as well? There's clearly no repercussion for doing this. I would bet the house that anywhere from another 10 to 20 to 30 percent of these tee times are being bought by in-state accounts that just don't care if they get caught. The issue is the FOIL data and the state of New York refuses to give me any sort of data on who is booking these tee times. They will not give me PII data, which I'll concede I probably shouldn't know the names of these people, but even the ask for anonymized booking data, give me a number, give me a six digit number to represent these people, was also denied by the state. So I can't really get into

who with an in-state account is doing this, but if we're seeing over 10% being bought and hacked by out-of-states, it has to be occurring with in-state accounts as well. So now we're talking about like anywhere from like 10 to 40% of the tee times on Black are gone in an instant. You don't have a chance, which would result in I think the frustration that we're seeing from folks on the ability to get a Bethpage tee time. Benyak is hardly alone in feeling frustrated with the state. AJ Vopel told me his brother, an attorney who lives right next to Bethpage is livid with the current state of

things. His regular group hasn't been able to play black in more than a year. Piss is like an understatement. Like they're fucking irate. Like they're like, they're like, because my, you know, my brother's like actively trying not to join somewhere, right? Like he's he because he loves Bethpage. That's where we grew up playing. That's where we played high school golf. That's where we played college golf. Like he he's like Bethpage through and through just like where we grew up playing. That's where we played high school golf. That's where we played college golf.

Like he's like Beth Page through and through, just like everybody I grew up with. Like we love the courses and the fact that like they can't get on without either like going up there and walking on. If he wants to play the black, like still sleeping over. But like the fact that he like seven days in advance and going on at the time, you know, like it's like, you know, he's just like, yo, it's ticket master, man. It's important to note that in June of this year,

Bethpage State Park sent an email to all registered golfers in their system, announcing some policy changes, presumably in response to complaints from people like Eric. They were cleaning up their reservation system, deleting users with multiple accounts, and they were reminding golfers that any golfer caught trying to resell a tee time, barter a tee time, or otherwise circumvent the reservation system would have their account suspended

indefinitely. They were also limiting the number of cancellations a user could make to eight a month. Eight. That's fucking useless. I'm sorry, but if you are booking and canceling eight tea times a month, you're either the most unprepared person in your life or something else is going on there. I want to note here that I sent the State Parks Department an email with a detailed list of questions covering most of what you've heard in this podcast, asking for a response. I even invited them to come on the No Laying Up podcast to explain what they're doing to combat this kind of stuff. They did acknowledge the receipt of my questions, but chose to respond by emailing

a statement from Dan Keefe, the State Parks Director of Public Affairs. "'We take concerns about alleged automated reservation bots seriously,' the statement read. Our practices, policies, and systems are designed to maintain fairness. There is no evidence of widespread misuse of bots within the 4-Up reservation system. Our staff is tasked with checking the ID of all reservation holders, whether they are residents or non-residents, and we are vigilant in identifying and addressing any attempts to bypass or misuse the four up system. Benyak and I thought about playing the black together with that tea time that

Reddit user Double Eagle acquired for us. In my head, it would have made for a hell of a soundbite. Hello, folks, I'm Kevin Van Valkenburg, and I'm coming to live from the first tea at Bethpage Black using the tea time that was acquired illegally from an online broker. I felt like a hell of an opener, but ethically, it also felt kind of shitty. I also didn't want Eric to get his account suspended indefinitely. He decided to cancel it and see if he could scoop it up with his real account.

But I bet you can guess where this is going. It was instantly gobbled up by a cancellation bot. Initially, I thought that's where this story would end. But a few weeks ago, a friend put me in touch with what I can only describe as the white whale of this story. A person who is currently using a bot to hack the BethPage teatime system.

They can get teatimes pretty much whenever they want on any of the five courses, and they assured me it wasn't even that hard. It required little more than pretty basic engineering skills. This person was pretty hesitant to talk on the record, but after consulting with my coworkers, I decided to throw out an idea. What if we gave you a fake name and disguised your voice like the news shows used to do when interviewing whistleblowers? It's always been TC's dream to disguise someone's voice on the NLU pod, and here was the perfect opportunity. The hacker, to our surprise, agreed. We could refer to them by the name Taylor. The voice you're going to hear in a minute is Taylor's real voice, but altered by a computer. By the way, TC was elated when I shared this news. He was, you might not be surprised to learn, bouncing between airports when I filled him in. So I asked him for a

quick reaction. KVV, I can't tell you how happy this disguised voice makes me. When we started knowing, actually before we started knowing, there was an ESPN feature on Michael Vick, back when all the dogfighting stuff was breaking. They had this guy on and they disguised his voice and he basically said, he's a pit bull fighter, he's a heavyweight. And they disguised it in just the most funny tone and inflection. So, Solly and Randy and I always got such a huge

kick out of that. And I'd like to think that that's a reason why we started the company was just one day. So we had the opportunity to do this. So thank you. It's my pleasure TC. Back to Taylor. Taylor is another one of those COVID boom golfers. Didn't play the sport before the world turned upside down, but fell deeply in love with it during the pandemic. It was like the one constant over like the last five years of my life.

I think before I started golf, I went through a lot of hobbies, different interests. There's nothing that I loved more than golf over the course of my life, I think. Yeah, I truly, truly fell hard for it. I just love it, it's so fun. There's always something I can be working on. It's so frustrating when you have something. One day you feel like you have it, and then another day you're just struggling to break 100.

Taylor played Diker Beach in Marine Park in the beginning, but like Benyak, the siren song of Bethpage eventually became too strong to ignore. At first, Taylor was able to grab a few tee times through cancellations, but it wasn't long before that route started to feel barren. There weren't even tee times on the yellow course. Rather than give up on Bethpage, Taylor started thinking about it another way.

I'm an engineer. So yeah, now I have a computer science degree. So I was like, oh, like this can't be that hard to figure out. And I think like over time, I was just like noticing that there were patterns, right? And this is like stuff that you learn in like computer science 101. Like in your like first like, probably for like one of your like, first five like ending computer science projects, like you learn how to like build a bot.

like ending computer science projects, like you learn how to like build a bot. Part of what makes BethPage so easy to hack, Taylor explained to me, is that the T-Times open at a reliable time every week. If times open at 7 a.m., Taylor's bot would start clicking at 659 and 55 seconds, often with as many as 10 accounts behind it, all stored in the cloud, all legitimate.

Taylor's friends were happy to hand over their account numbers if it meant they could get tea times every week, and the bot could choose a window where it was trying to book times, say from 9am to 11am. It doesn't always work, but it works pretty often. The reason that the bots can do so well in this environment is that cancellation policy for Bethpage is so loose. There's no penalty to canceling. So you can actually cancel up to 12 hours before you want to play. So given that you have valid accounts that you can grab times with,

I just ask for my friends' login accounts. I had like tens of accounts that I would just kind of try with because this is a probability game, right? And one of them would catch something, sometimes I would have like 40 times for next Saturday and I would just choose choose the time of course that I want to play, which is like, okay, probably not the best thing for everyone else. But, and I would just like, you know, I would like talk to my friends out like,

do you want to play red this week or like blue this week? And then we'd like figure out what time is best for us and then we just play. And then we just cancel the rest of the times. And there was like no penalty to doing that. I wondered on the rare times Taylor's bot does strike out. Does it ever feel like a human, not a computer was quicker on the draw? I always say like, oh, like, I'm not able to get a time. I'm competing as other bots. I'm not competing as other humans. So I just figured like someone smarter than me, like crack it. I think there are ways that you can add smarter actual engineering.

I'm like a, a baby engineer. I'd say, um, smart engineers could definitely have the system a lot better. I would say. If the system was so vulnerable that even a baby engineer could hack it, wouldn't it be easy for the state of New York to hire an expert engineer who could defend it? Probably, Taylor admitted. If I were to actually really put my engineering hat on, I think there are ways that I would be able to think up to stop myself, but I I don't think I'm gonna share that with you.

In the end, I was curious, did Taylor ever feel bad about any of this? Admittedly, yes, sometimes, but also this is Bethpage. It ain't for the faint of heart. They try to warn you how brutal it is. Right there on the damn sign. I'm Kevin Van Valkenburg, editorial director at NoLayingUp. This episode was written and reported by me, with an assist from Eric Benyak.

Sound mixing and music was done by Charles Van Kirk. Additional editing by Chris Solomon, DJ Piehusky and Todd Schuster. If you have a public golf story worth telling, you can email me at kvv at no laying up.com. Folks, solid here again, if you're enjoying these narrative podcasts and want to hear more of them, the best way you can support this kind of content is to join the nest our community of avid golfers. NEST get an annual gift, a 15% discount in our Pro Shop,

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