Beth Page State Park (Black Course) - New York, U.S.A.

Bethpage State Park's Black Course on Long Island is the crown jewel of public golf in the United States. The Black, and its sister courses, the Red and Blue, were built beginning in 1934, during the height of the Depression, as a Work Relief project, employing as many as 1,800 men (at the same time, an existing course was redesigned to become the Green Course). The entire project was overseen by the legendary golf course architect A. W. Tillinghast, who would shortly move to California to become an antiques dealer in Beverly Hills, having been driven out of business by the Depression. Tillinghast intended the Black to be a "man-eater" and he designed some of the biggest, baddest, and most carnivorous bunkers in captivity on the rolling, sandy site, with fescue grasses rippling through the waste areas. In 1996, the USGA selected the Black Course to host the 2002 U.S. Open, the first municipal course ever to stage the event. Rees Jones, the "Open Doctor," was called in to restore the course, and burnished it into a glorious test for the game's best. Tiger Woods won the Open at Bethpage, and the event proved such a success that it will return in 2009. Bethpage can trace its history back to 1695, when an Englishman named Thomas Powell purchased a large tract of land on the road near Jericho and named his property based on the passage from the book of Matthew (21: 1): ''And as they departed from Jericho, a great multitude followed Him, and when they drew nigh unto Jerusalem and were come to Beth'phage unto the Mount of Olives."

Friar's Head Golf Club - New York, U.S.A.

Friar's Head opened in 2003 near Riverhead on Long Island's North Fork. From the road that runs by the course, the site appears to be an unprepossessing piece of farmland that was sold by the Talmadge family, who were among the first settlers of the East End, to the course developer, Ken Bakst. The far end of the 350­acre property, however, opens on the sand dunes above Long Island Sound, which are anchored by a dwarf maritime beech-oak forest that dates back 10,000 years. Bakst, a leading amateur golfer who won the 1997 U.S. Mid-Amateur, hired the team of Bill Coore and Ben Crenshaw to design the course. Crenshaw and Coore quickly recognized the need to meld the very disparate topography of the site. Over time, they did just that, developing an ingenious routing in which Nos. 2,7,11, and 14 serve as transition holes between the sandy moraine and the former potato farm. The coastal holes feature great swirling ridges of sand freckled with sea grasses and the broad fairways of the farmland holes are punctuated by the irregularly edged bunkers that have become a hallmark of Coore and Crenshaw's work.