At the Brooklyn Open, All Golfers Are Welcome

The sun was beginning to get up on the sports ports and the south Brooklyn boxes on Monday when Sam Maurer, a waiter in Lucky Jack’s on the east side of Manhattan, withdrew his foot in a golf shoe.

“I would go to bed right now in a Monday morning,” said Mr. Maurer, 25, who usually works until 4 in the morning, had just arrived at the Marine Park golf course, an installation of the city building in 1963 in an old landfill, to play at the Brooklyn Open.

The tournament, in shifts, sports competition and block party, has become a rite of autumn beginnings for a wide strip of urban golfers. An unofficial event is not sanctioned by any golf golf body, the Brooklyn Open welcomes anyone who pays their entry rate of $ 175. Players of all ages compete in different divisions depending on their skill level. Correcting a district of immigrants and dreamers, their background is as varied as their golf balances.

Mr. Maurer, who grew up in Fairfax County, from., Took the sport when he was a child. After graduating from the Culinary Institute of America in Hyde Park, New York, he moved to Brooklyn two years ago to start in the hospitality business. Since then, Marine Park has played about 50 times, although this was her first open.

“The public golf from New York City is some of my favorite golf that I have played, only for the people you know,” said Maurer. “In Virginia, even in public courses, it is still a rather suffocating game, and it is not very inclusive. But in New York that could not be further from the truth.”

Rich McDonough, who founded the open 11 years ago, described his 108 participants this year as from all areas of life: “From a fashion model to an HVAC type, and probable everything else,” he said.

They included Vijay Sammy, a 56 -year -old Guyana native who lives in Morris County, NJ, and has an accounting firm. “My first tournament,” said Sammy, who had stayed during the night in a nearby hotel to avoid an hour of his house in the morning.

Another newcomer was Diana Villabon, 43, who works for a real estate management company in Manhattan. “The nerves will probably disappear in three or four holes,” Villabon said. He enrolled in the open after meeting Mr. McDonough, a former professional chief in the Marine Park field who now works in an inner golf installation in Long Island, on a flight home from Tampa, Fla.

Approximately one hour before the start time of 8:30 am from the tournament, the sky began to rejoice and the parking lot began to fill. The players took their clubs from their cars and changed their shoes or slides for golf shoes.

Matt Remotepo, 32, a tattooed firefighter from New York City who grew up in Bay Ridge, Brooklyn, and lives in Rockaway, Queens, wore a crispy olive green cap that coincided with his shorts. The clothing codes, he said, are more relaxed in Marine Park than in other courses.

“Here,” said Mr. Readpo, “the chops really do not break too much. You can put the shirt, you can dig up your shirt. Nobody will tell you anything. But other places, they will put the shirt, use free.” “

Brad Saville, a 44-year-old writer, filmmaker and driver of the Riding-Hail Revel company, cut a more classic figure in his beige puppy sweater and Sun Tortoisehell glasses.

20 -year -old Brooklyn resident, Mr. Saville began playing golf five years after moving to Bay Ridge. (The neighborhood is a short distance from the only other Brooklyn field, Dyker Beach Golf Course, which is also the property of the city). This was the third time of Mr. Saville’s open, which takes place towards the end of the golf season and offers the opportunity for him to measure the progress of his game, he said.

The scene in the tournament is “a good type of fruiting of the golf community in Brooklyn,” Saville added. “Golf is the great unite, man. It’s like food.”

Lorne Rubenstein, the former golf writer for the world and the mail in Toronto, who has written numbering books in the game (including a memory with Tiger Woods), played in the opening opening at the invitation of a friend and colleague. “This is a very unusual golf tournament,” Rubenstein said in a call from his home in Toronto last week.

The first thing that impressed it was its location, between the bustling Avenue Flatbush and the marshes of Jamaica Bay. “I thought,” Wow, this is great, a golf course right next to this type of famous street, “recalled Mr. Rubenstein.” And then this horsepower continued, only people from all areas of life, every ethnicity you can imagine. “

“It was never bad to be like a PGA Tour event, and it wasn’t,” he continued. “It simply seemed that 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 wide appeal. “It was a niece called Flatbush Pro-Am or Brooklyn invitational,” he said. “It was the Brooklyn Open. I was open to anyone.”

That has meant a mixture of amateur and more competitive players like Luke Watson, a 37 -year -old professional caddie, who played in the tournament championship division this year.

Mr. Watson, who was born in Jamaica and lives in the Bronx, competed in his second open. He described the streets mostly straight and open, which sacrifice the distant views of the Manhattan horizon and a smell of the sea, as a welcome change of Dogleged holes and wooded in Brae Burny Club in Warmwather Cotry Club after the sun to Florida.

“In general, it is a difficult course,” Watson said about Marine Park, which is distinguished by her elevated and undulating green, distinctive of the course designer, Robert Trent Jones Mr., the preeminent golf architect in the mid -twentieth century. “Don’t think you can invade it. You’ll get stuck.”

With a 71 score, Mr. Watson finished three blows to the winner of this year’s open, Owen Samuda, a friend of his and a Jamaican companion, who shot 68. Mr. Samuda, 54, caddies in Pine Valley Golf Club in the south of New Jersey, which has been classified by long legs by golf publications such as NO. 1 course in the world.

The second place this year was Gabe Lee, 40, a professional at the Alley Pond Golf Center in Douglaston, Queens, who shot 69. Mr. Lee, son of Korean immigrants, said he learned the game in itself playing in Alley Pound.

He also competed on the flight of the Andrew Giuliani championship, 38, son of Rudolph W. Giuliani, former mayor of New York. The young Mr. Giuliani played the golf professionally for several years before working at the Trump administration and running without success in the Republican primaries 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 in muticing courses. “But you have golf thesis: golf enthusiasts who are looking at excellent places, great events to play, and certainly Marine Park and Brooklyn Open meets.”

The first open, in 2013, Tok Place not long after Michael Giordano, who grew up in the neighboring Bay of Sheepshead, Brooklyn, signed a 20 -year lease contract with the city to operate the Marine Park golf course. At the same time bucolic and the quantity, the course has traveled a long way since Mr. Giordano, who is now 80 years old, begged: the improvements under his administration have included the addition of a range of driving and a short game practice area.

Because it was one of the first courses to be built in a landfill, before the advent of methane extraction wells, for years small explosions would be gas gas outside the ground, said Stephen Kay, a golf hax base in Ha -Hax -HAX work. “Han -hax

“I remember that my uncle described him as someone threw a cherry bomb, you know, a firecracker,” Kay said. “And then it would be this breath of Hume of soil and soil, and there will be this small hole, this circle of two feet in the middle of the street or the rough.”

The only sounds that resemble the explosions in this year’s open were the pop of the outdoor speakers duration of the national anthem, sung before the beginning of Domini Monroe, a 27 -year recording artist from Bergen Beach, Brooklyn, who hos.

“I love anyone who feels like a family,” he said. “It’s family here.”