LOCKER ROOM: The man who designed the Black Course had a colourful background, even in depressing times

THE OUL Brits get more cunning by the year with their fiendish plans to keep us down. Their latest wheeze, like the CIA and Fidel's exploding cigars, is designed to exploit our weakness, well mine anyway. The Guardian, imperialism's liberal organ, has taken to publishing online the best free internet games. I have no doubt the recession was caused by banksters taking their eye off the markets while playing Free Kick Fusion.

Myself, I am going to sit out the bad times by playing the World Golf Tour’s excellent free golf game, the latest twist of which is the chance to play in the Virtual US Open on the Bethpage Black Course.

Now it’s only a video game and I’m giving Tiger Woods a few years and a few pounds but the Bethpage Black course where this week’s US Open unfolds is one monstrous b*****d of a course. I mean it is hideously large. My thumb needs an ice bath after playing 18 holes. It has bunkers the size of Leitrim fairways that a regular golfer’s drive won’t reach. Greens conceived surely by a man in the horrors.

Even LockerRoom, the world's least curious journalist, had to go and find out what was going on. It was worth the effort. Albert Warren Tillinghast, architect of the Bethpage Black Course, is the sort of figure you couldn't invent if you tried.

Tillinghast was born on May 7th, 1874, in Frankfort, a suburb of Philadelphia, and was by all accounts a spoiled brat generally unacquainted with work and its attendant vulgarities. Once as a child he expressed an interest in an elephant ride. His parents facilitated him with the biggest elephant then in captivity, the original Jumbo, who was at the time holed up in London zoo but later became the property of PT Barnum.

Never likely to attempt to eke out a living as a coalminer, Tillinghast found golf much to his liking as a way to put down a day. He made several pilgrimages to St Andrews where he befriended and often photographed Old Tom Morris. He came away with fixed ideas about the way a golf course should look and feel.

Back home he became part of a small group of golfers who would ride the railroad to Atlantic City to play every Saturday morning during the winter months. The group are credited with inventing the term “birdie” after one of them pronounced a huge shot on the 12th to be a “bird of a shot”, Tillinghast loved the phrase and did everything in his power to bring it into circulation. He is also credited as having said, before Groucho Marx ever did, that he had no interest in joining any sort of club that would have him as a member.

The man who boasted, “I never finished a school I started,” was an heroic drinker with a bad temper during bouts of which he would wave a pistol around the place. He loved to entertain Broadway stars and was a friend of Trotsky. He was a fine piano player and raconteur and expert at cricket, polo, billiards and bridge and when in the mood would perform a soft-shoe dance routine, presumably with the revolver safely holstered.

Tillinghast started his life as a golf architect in 1907, when his friend Charles C Worthington asked him to lay out a course on the banks of the Delaware at Shawnee, Pennsylvania. The course was – and still is – a big hit and Tillinghast had a career.

Still, like our own septic isle, whatever he earned, which was millions, he spent more. Drinking and gambling consumed much of his time, as did the financial backing of Broadway musicals. When the mood was on him he would hit the drink and disappear for weeks on end with his chauffeur. A family member, when asked where he went to, said it was safe to assume church wasn’t part of the itinerary.

Then 1929 came along and it wasn’t a lot different in impact or feel to 2009. The Depression had no use for dilettante golf course designers. Some 283 American country clubs shut down in 1934 alone, with a knock-on effect on the makers of prawn sandwiches and fine wines.

Tillinghast was reduced to embarking on benders with handfuls of his wife’s jewellery in his pockets to keep him in supping money.

The PGA, whose charter meeting he had attended, kindly put him on the payroll when things got really bad. He returned the favour by touring America in the guise of course consultant and scourge of frivolously-placed bunkers. Over 7,000 of the things were removed at his insistence from 370 courses. Unfashionably for a man of his means and background, he was a passionate advocate of public golf facilities and his last hurrah as a course architect was with the Bethpage Park Commission in Long Island, New York.

The Bethpage State Park, where the US Open takes place, is the largest public golf complex in the US and hosts about 350,000 rounds of golf a year. The very foolhardy and the very skilful attempt the Black course, the entrance of which is marked with a warning that it is not for the ordinary player.

If there was any hubris in the erection of that sign it was justified by the scoring at the 2002 US Open. Tiger Woods finished a stroke under par, the only player to break regulation.

The Black course is available for Johnny Public to play from April until nearly Christmas and if you arrive at 5am you have a good chance of walking on to the famous course on a first come, first served basis.

Now here’s an idea. Four of the five courses at Bethpage were built as a large-scale Depression-era project, putting 2,400 people to work. And when they opened in 1936 some 800 caddies were employed. (Surely we could turn Sligo or Clare into a big golf complex? Just throwing it out there.) The clubhouse was the biggest building in Long Island’s Nassau County when it was completed but the Black course was the jewel in the crown.

There are only two sets of tees – regular and championship, just as I like it, and from the back tees the thing measures 7,065 yards and plays to par 71. Never mind par fives, it has some epic par fours. Oh and there is a rule about golf buggies: everybody walks.

Tillinghast grew old and more irascible. He set up his own antiques shop, selling largely his own antiques and after his death at 67, was largely forgotten about despite having 60 tournament-quality courses still in use across the States. Bethpage isn’t his masterpiece but it is his most perverse and unusual creation. And my thumb is itching for another round of invigorating exercise.