Eisenhower Park: Red

You’re aware of Bethpage Black’s importance as a public course hosting a major championship. But another New York City municipality hosted the PGA Championship 76 years before Bethpage did. Eisenhower Park’s Red Course, then part of the Salisbury Golf Club, was the site of Sam Snead’s 1926 PGA victory, the first of three PGA Championships for Slammin’ Sammy. Eisenhower Park, now a 54-hole facility part of the Nassau County Park system, also hosted a senior tour event up until 2008. Designed by Devereux Emmet, one of the most strategically brilliant architects of his day, there are bones of his interesting bunker complexes and philosophies, though decades of lengthening and the loss of green size show just signs of the great design. A significant renovation would reveal a course thought at one time to be among the best championship layouts in New York—and perhaps bring tournament golf, though at 7,100 yards it’d be too short for the highest levels of the men’s game, back to another storied NYC public golf course.