The Bethpage Black my teenage self played was hardscrabble

The sign on a fence overlooking the first tee at Bethpage Black went up in the early 1980s. Its ominous message: "WARNING The Black Course Is An Extremely Difficult Course Which We Recommend Only For Highly Skilled Golfers."

Where was that sign in the early 1960s? That's when a teenage golfer from Syosset — me — played The Black with friends on a regular basis. We lived 20 minutes away from a massive public golf venue that featured five different courses. The waiting time to get onto the Blue, White, Yellow and Red courses was usually three or four hours on the weekends, two hours during the week.

At The Black, it was never more than 20-30 minutes, and who cared how difficult it was? Who cared how many rocks were in the sand traps, how chewed up the so-called grass on the tees and greens looked, and how loooooong the holes played. Certainly the price was right: about $5 for 18 holes.

That infamous first tee warning sign will stay in place for the Ryder Cup Friday through Sunday, even if it will be totally irrelevant. Teams of the world's finest professional golfers from the United States and Europe will compete at The Black on a far different course from the one I played in high school and college.

The 2002 U.S. Open held on The Black marked the first time the tournament had ever been played on a truly public daily fee course.

That came about due to one man — David Fay, then the visionary executive director of the United States Golf Association. Fay grew up in Tuxedo, New York. He and his golfing teenage pals had also heard about the difficulty of The Black and made it a point to play a round or two on the course every summer.

Before that 2002 Open, I interviewed Fay and others for a long story in The Washington Post.

"It definitely lived up to its billing," Fay said of his summer pilgrimage to the Long Island venue. "Back then, it wasn't in very good shape, but what a magnificent golf course. The place just always stuck in my mind."

Some 30 years later, it was still there. In 1995, he gathered his USGA staff for an outing to play the course and see what sort of shape it might be in. That day, he also invited Rees Jones, the son of legendary golf architect Robert Trent Jones and himself a renowned architect known as "The Open Doctor." Rees Jones had made brilliant renovations on a number of previous Open venues.

Could Bethpage Black serve as a U.S. Open site? At that point, definitely not. A course initially designed by another brilliant architect, A.W. Tillinghast, in 1934 and built during the Depression by 1,800 employees of the Works Project Administration had fallen on hard times. There still was scruffy grass on the tees. Greens were in terrible shape. Sand traps had little or no sand.

But Jones was hardly fazed.

"It's a great piece of land for golf because it's so natural," he told me in 2002. "If you look at it, with all the elevated greens, with older architecture ... they couldn't move any dirt, they didn't have the equipment. That's probably why Till used so much land."

"In this case, we left all the greens the same," Jones said of the renovation. "We basically re-grassed the golf course, re-bunkered it, added some tees, added length, changed angles into holes and reinstituted a lot of features that had been lost or abandoned."

Fay was absolutely delighted with Jones' "re-do."

"I'm not viewing this as a one-hit wonder," he said in 2002. "It may be that it will spur on other publicly owned facilities to think they, too, can host a U.S. Open."

Wonderfully, all of those significant changes will continue to challenge some of the best golfers on the planet this weekend. No WARNING necessary.

This guest essay reflects the views of Leonard Shapiro, who was a sports reporter, columnist and editor at The Washington Post for 42 years before retiring in 2011.