Before they were pros, sneaking on was the only way these promising golfers could play some out-of-reach courses
For three-plus years as a member of the St. John’s University men’s golf team, Keegan Bradley enjoyed the undeniably great perk of being able to play Bethpage Black Golf Course, the famed municipal golf course on Long Island, where golfers sleep in their car for the chance to play the site of U.S. Opens, PGA Championships, and, this fall, the host of the 2025 Ryder Cup.
But only 12 of the holes, nicknamed “The Short Course.”
Every Monday, when the course was closed, the superintendent allowed Bradley and his Red Storm teammates to park by the maintenance shed near the 3rd tee and play the inside loop, the holes east of Round Swamp Road consisting of Nos. 3–14. There was one hard and fast rule: Don’t cross the road. The remaining six holes were off limits. The reason: security cameras on those holes would catch them.
Bradley adhered to the rule laid down by Coach Frank Darby, but like the Sirens in the tale of Odysseus—whose irresistible song lures sailors to their death—holes 15–18 and 1–2, kept calling his name. One Monday during his senior year, he and fellow teammate George Zolotas could no longer resist temptation.
“We were frothing to play them,” recalls Bradley. “We said, ‘Screw it, we’re going over.’ Imagine you’re in college and you’re looking at 15 through 18 at Bethpage Black for four years and you can’t play them. It was brutal. So, we did it—and yes, we got caught. And we got in so much trouble. The police were called. I’ve never seen my coach so mad.”
Bradley will have a full-circle moment when he returns to Bethpage Black as captain of Team USA. And while he’ll be welcomed ceremoniously this time, Bradley insists he has no regrets about trespassing in the past. It was well worth it.
That’s a sentiment many, if not most, golfers can share. After all, what avid player hasn’t snuck onto a course at some point in the name of hitting just a few more shots in the gloaming or tiptoeing across forbidden fairways? Whether it’s the lure of playing a marquee track or the thrill of illicit risk-taking, it’s difficult to resist when the game beckons. As Bradley’s story proves, Tour players aren’t immune.
Take Lee Trevino, the six-time major winner, who endured the kind of hardscrabble upbringing that would have made Charles Dickens blanch. Trevino was raised in a sharecropper’s house without electricity or plumbing. But it was situated roughly 100 yards from the 7th fairway of the Dallas Athletic Club and young Lee walked through the course to get to school.
“It was by more than five miles the most direct route, so I got permission to pass through,” Trevino says.
Soon, the course would become a magnet he couldn’t resist. First, he found an old golf club and used to swing it at horse apples in the pasture around his house. “That’s how I picked up the game, and I never let it go,” he says.
Then he discovered something better to swing at than chunks of hardened manure. Golf balls were often lost in the high rough along the 7th fairway. One day, a golfer asked him if he had any for sale. Trevino fished in his pockets and pulled out a handful. The golfer slipped him a dollar bill and warned, “Don’t spend it all on comic books.” Recounting the triumphant joy of his first profitable transaction in golf, Trevino said he had the epiphany that “Maybe I can make some money in this game.”
Soon, Trevino began trolling the rough for balls. With out of bounds lining the right side of most of the front nine, he worked what he called “slicer country.” Showing an entrepreneurial flare, Trevino spliced two rake handles together, attached a chicken-wire scoop to one end, and fished for balls in the water hazards. Other times, he’d apply Vaseline to his body as a makeshift wet suit and dive in; the money was that good. “It fed the family, and that’s the truth,” Trevino says.
With the boldness of boyish enthusiasm, Trevino would sneak onto the course for a few holes in the gathering dusk. Explaining why he always played so fast, he said he was trying to squeeze in as many holes as possible before the green superintendent caught him. Sometimes he would play under a full moon or when the course emptied due to rain or lightning. One time it even snowed, and he and a friend sprayed Mercurochrome—a topical antiseptic used to treat minor cuts and scrapes—which turned the balls red so they could find them in the white powder. Gotta respect that level of dedication.
The same could be said of Gary Player, who made a habit of sneaking on to South Africa’s Royal Johannesburg Golf Club until he got busted for skipping school. Player boasted how he did this on multiple occasions to the disgust of his father, who worked underground in a gold mine, often at a depth of 12,000 feet. But one Friday, young Gary’s plan to play golf backfired when he let a friend pen a note and forge his father’s signature: Please excuse my son from being absent as he has a bad dose of the flew. “Spelled F-L-E-W!” Player says. “My teacher caught on and said, ‘Now who wrote this?’ So, I told her the truth.” Maybe honesty is the best policy: Player would go on to win three of his record 13 South African Open titles at Royal Johannesburg.
Before Graeme McDowell became a U.S. Open champion in 2010, he cut his teeth at Royal Portrush Golf Club, site of the 2025 Open Championship. The golf pro cut McDowell’s father a special rate: a season ticket for 10 pounds for him and his brother Gary to play the club’s sister course, the Valley. (Earlier this year, its par-four 7th hole was named “McDowell’s.”)
“I think we must have played eight rounds on the first day,” McDowell says. “We were dropped off in the morning with a packed lunch and picked up again at 5 o’clock. We’d come home for tea, then head back down in the evening for another nine holes. We were just obsessed with it.”
By the end of that first summer, both McDowell boys dropped their handicaps from 40-plus to 15, which was the magic number required to move from the ladies’ tees to the men’s—and play “the big course,” Dunluce, where Scottie Scheffler won the Claret Jug this July.
When pressed, McDowell admitted that he’d already had a “sneak preview” of the Harry Colt masterpiece. Late in the evening, his dad would drive his sons to the old 10th tee via the back gate, park, and they’d walk down to the 4th hole, which to this day remains McDowell’s favorite hole.
“We were just crazy for the game,” he says. “For me, it was the equivalent of being at Augusta. It was this hallowed turf, the forbidden fruit, if you like. It really was a very special feeling the first time I hit a few shots on the Dunluce course.”
Another pro with a full-circle adventure is Luke Clanton, the former world No. 1 amateur, who had his own forbidden fruit: PGA National Resort’s Champion course in Palm Beach Gardens, Fla. Clanton came from modest means and learned the game at Country Club of Miami, a public facility despite its exclusive sounding name. But he had a friend who was a member at PGA National, home of the PGA Tour’s Cognizant Classic and a past host to both the PGA Championship and Ryder Cup. Once Clanton was old enough to drive, he’d meet his buddy there, they’d practice, then sneak out onto the 3rd or 4th hole.
“This is probably incriminating me, but we’d play about 40 holes,” Clanton says with a smile.
Fast forward a handful of years, and it was only fitting that PGA National would be where Clanton locked up his PGA Tour card this past March.
Without sneaking on.
