BAYONNE, NEW JERSEY | Twenty years ago this summer, the Bayonne Golf Club opened for business. Located on New York Harbor in this city of 70,000 people, the links-style course that serves as its centerpiece boasts sweeping views of the waterway as well as the Statue of Liberty, the Manhattan skyline and the massive Port Newark marine terminal. It also provides glimpses of the Verrazzano-Narrows Bridge and cruise ships from the Royal Caribbean and Celebrity lines sailing in and out of local piers.
Designed by a Norwegian-American real estate developer and R&A member named Eric Bergstol, the layout features two miles of water frontage, man-made dunes rising as high as 90 feet and swaths of blond-brown field grass. Holes are both long and short and bend left and right, with fairways full of hills and hollows. As for the well-contoured greens, they vary in size and shape and are generally receptive to run-up shots. Some are quite well-guarded by revetted bunkers of the Old World variety.
In addition to demonstrating a deft design touch, Bergstol augmented the golf experience here in many other ways.
For one thing, he made Bayonne “walking only” and established a first-rate caddie program. In addition, he built a pair of practice areas. One is for short- and mid-iron shots and the other for those wanting to hit longer irons, hybrids and woods, with the city that never sleeps serving as a backdrop. Set by the 12th and 17th holes, the so-called aqua range allows golfers to hit specially designed balls into a section of the harbor, where they float on the water’s surface until a course worker scoops them up with nets from a skiff.
The club’s sole proprietor, Bergstol also offers a free ferry service between the property and lower Manhattan. Called Heaven’s Gate, it makes the 20-minute trip several times a day.
And he operates a helipad on the grounds for those golfers who prefer to travel to and from Bayonne by air.
But what really separates Bayonne Golf Club from other places to play in and around New York City is the site itself. Roughly 150 acres in size, it was for several decades a repository for the sludge the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers dredged from the bed of one of the biggest and busiest ports in the United States. Actual construction took some six years to complete, as bulldozers and backhoes shaped every hump and bump on the property and crews capped the dredged material with clean sand and topsoil to ensure that the property drained well – and that the grasses planted on the grounds flourished.
And one can only imagine the complications that accompanied the permitting process.
But Bergstol was able to finish the job in time for a June 2006 course opening.
All told, he used roughly 7.5 million cubic yards of material in the building of Bayonne, with workers delivering an average of 200 truckloads of soil to the site six days a week for almost six years.
As for the cost of the project, Bergstol puts it at $130 million.
Bottom line, Bayonne Golf Club is a special place, so New York with its Big Apple locale but very Irish, too, with a course that feels as if it has been airlifted clear across the Atlantic Ocean.
A couple of years after bringing the course on line, he erected a clubhouse in the middle of the property. Painted white and boasting a light brown roof, it features a plethora of picture windows as well as a rotunda and a lighthouse-like tower. And the 40-by-70-foot American flag that is raised each morning on a 150-foot-high pole by the 18th green adds a sense of the majestic as it flutters in the breezes that regularly blow. So does the Freedom Tower rising in the distance from the site of the World Trade Center that al-Qaeda destroyed in the terrorist attacks on 9/11. The flag honors friends of Bergstol’s who perished that day.
Bottom line, Bayonne Golf Club is a special place, so New York with its Big Apple locale but very Irish, too, with a course that feels as if it has been airlifted clear across the Atlantic Ocean. Even the planes on final approach to Newark International Airport evoke Eire and the jets that pass over the courses around the Irish capital as they get ready to lower their landing gear.
“Eric wanted the place to look like Ireland,” said Rudy Virga, who started working for Bergstol as an assistant golf professional at the first club he ever opened more than three decades ago and is now the general manager and director of golf at Bayonne. “And he spent years traveling there and to Scotland to check out the different clubs and courses and learn about the things that made them special.”
Clearly, Bergstol was a good study, and Bayonne is one of the better modern links in America. It is also a first-rate hang, thanks to the scenic setting as well as the robust roster of local, national and international members and a low-key culture that simply asks them to respect each other as well as the staff who serve them as they have a good time.
Bayonne also ranks among the most interesting golf-development stories of the past two decades and perhaps the crowning achievement of Bergstol’s career in the game.
The oldest of two sons, Bergstol grew up in the Rockland County town of Ramapo, New York, some 40 miles north of Bayonne.
“Both my parents came here on a boat from Norway when the Nazis were occupying their homeland,” he said. “They were searching for a better life, and this is where they met. My father was an electrician and then became a home builder. He was a workaholic. My mom raised the children and took care of the family.”
Given his father’s occupation, it is no real surprise that Bergstol followed him into real estate. What was unusual, however, was how Bergstol found his way into golf.
“I was a basketball player in my younger days and did not really get into golf until my 30s,” he said. “For some reason, I became fascinated by the game and the thought of building a course.”
That concept became a reality in 1989 when Bergstol acquired the property on which he created the Minisceongo Golf Club in Ramapo. Roy Case designed the 18-hole layout, and it opened as a private club in 1994, with Virga one of the assistant pros.
Bergstol found himself getting deeper into golf, not only as his business through a firm he founded called Empire Golf Management but also as a player, working his handicap down to the low single digits.
“It was an interesting process, and I did all I could to educate myself about the golf-development business along the way,” Bergstol said. “I made a lot of mistakes and spent a lot more money than I should have. But I also learned a lot.”
Two years later, Bergstol built his second course at the Hudson National Golf Club. This time, Tom Fazio was the designer, and what he fashioned in the Westchester County village of Croton-on-Hudson, New York, made many of the most reputable top-100 course lists.
“Tom taught me so much,” added Bergstol. “About how to build a course and what type of course to build and how to make it both challenging and fair.”
At that point, Bergstol found himself getting deeper into golf, not only as his business through a firm he founded called Empire Golf Management but also as a player, working his handicap down to the low single digits. He built another track with Case in 1997 (at New Jersey National Golf Club in the town of Basking Ridge) and had a second go-round with Fazio at Pine Hill Golf Club, just down the road from Pine Valley in southern New Jersey. Bergstol also got into the design game himself, acting as architect for two other Jersey tracks at Pine Barrens (1999) and Hollow Brook (2004) as well Branton Woods (2001) in New York’s Hudson Valley. Then came Bayonne, which has turned out to be the coda for his course design and development career.
“In a 12-year stretch from 1994 to 2006, I built 11 courses,” said the now 69-year-old Bergstol, who still lives in Rockland County and is the father of five children, the youngest of whom is a girl he and his wife adopted from China. “Then, the world blew up with the Great Recession. And that came after the golf industry began correcting itself from all the course overbuilding that went on in the late 1990s and early 2000s.”
Not surprisingly, Bergstol seriously downsized in the wake of that downturn.
“Of those 11 courses, two were equity clubs, Hudson National and Bull’s Bridge in Kent, Connecticut, and the others I owned myself,” he said. “The equity clubs still exist and are doing very well. But I ended up selling five of my own properties, including two to Donald Trump, with Pine Hill now Trump National Philadelphia and Branton Woods, which I designed and named after my son Branton, now called Trump National Hudson Valley.”
That leaves Bergstol with four clubs and courses in his portfolio, Bayonne among them.
Twenty years after opening, it continues to prosper.
It might also be the best thing Bergstol has ever done in golf.