2025 Ryder Cup: Insider's hole-by-hole guide to Bethpage Black - ESPN

Forget the cheap $130 green fees or the fact that Tiger Woods won the U.S. Open here in 2022. The first thing any amateur golfer in Farmingdale, New York, will tell you about Bethpage Black is to check out for the warning sign.

It reads: «WARNING — Bethpage Black is an extremely difficult course which we recommend only for highly skilled golfers.»

It is an omen to any player out on one of the most unique courses in the U.S., and none more so than the stars on Team Europe and Team USA battling it out for the 45th 2025 Ryder Cup this weekend.

Not many courses are made like this one. For a start, it is a publicly owned municipal course, one of five in the Bethpage State Park, meaning that when it was designed, they didn't need to make it super playable — everyday members wouldn't want to play a course like that every week.

Instead, the joy here is in the design. «There's a lot of thinking players have to do, especially off the tee,» Rees Jones, a famed golf course architect who has re-designed Bethpage on multiple occassions over the past two decades, said.

«That's not the case for some of these championship golf courses, where they've taken out the trees and widened the fairways to 50 yards. Quite often, courses are penal. This is a penal golf course, but there's also a lot of strategy.»

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How each team attacks Bethpage Black will go a long way to deciding who will win the 45th Ryder Cup.

ESPN spoke to Jones to get an inside look at each of the holes and how things are likely to play out this weekend.

Pro tip: «We moved the tee for this year's event from