White/Blue at Glen Oaks Club

It’s always exciting to see a new tournament venue on the PGA Tour calendar, the more so when it’s part of the season-ending FedEx Cup playoffs and there’s something on the line beyond prize money. In this case, we’ll watch the top 125 on the FedEx Cup points list compete for one of 100 places to tee it up the following week near Boston.

The scene this week is the Glen Oaks Club in Old Westbury, 24 miles east of Manhattan’s Times Square. That’s a 35-minute commute without traffic, but because the club’s entrance abuts the notorious Long Island Expressway, the drive can sometimes take two hours.

Old Westbury is one of those comfortable, leafy communities carved out of the sprawling country estates that used to dot northern Long Island. The golf neighborhood is equally upscale, with the likes of Meadow Brook Club, Garden City Golf Club, Piping Rock Club, The Creek Club and Nassau Country Club all within eight miles of Glen Oaks.

The is a relative newcomer to the area – a 1971 design by Joe Finger. The club’s 27 holes were treated to a major overhaul of bunkers, surrounds and tees in 2011-13 by architect Joel Weiman and the construction firm of McDonald & Sons, Inc. A key participant in the work was superintendent Craig Currier, who presided over U.S. Opens at nearby Bethpage State Park’s Black Course in 2002 and 2009 before moving to this ultra-private club.

Tour pros accustomed to sumptuous treatment might feel even more spoiled by the service at Glen Oaks. The club’s legendary buffet is one of those meals where there’s more food on display at the end than at the beginning. The club’s sprawling, 60,000-square-foot clubhouse might look like a modernist corporate campus, but the quality of custom cars parked in the circle out front (detailing available by the staff) suggests that a far more relaxed culture abounds here.

Recent tree work reducing years of accumulated clutter has revealed the club’s rolling, 260-acre grounds as a lovely piece of landscape. There’s 60 feet of elevation change across the site, with three nines maintained to the same nearly flawless standards. For the Northern Trust on Aug. 24-27, a composite course was stitched together comprising White Nine 1 & 2, Red Nine 4 & 5, White 3, and White 6-9, followed by the entirety of the Blue Nine. The result is a par-70 layout measuring 7,344 yards.