It is only fitting that the person in charge of all the fairways, greens, tees and roughs at Bethpage State Park is a grassroots story in his own right. Andy Wilson was a Bethpage kid whose idea of an interesting summer job was working on a golf course.
"The job was outdoors, it was a nice atmosphere to work in. The people were great," he said, thinking back to his first days at the park in 1989. Jumping ahead a few years, he recalled, "I graduated from Fairfield with an English degree and I wasn't sure what I was going to do with it. I guess I was doing some good work in the clubhouse and people here thought I had a future ahead of me."
He was convinced to go to Rutgers for a turf degree and, after it became public that the U.S. Open was coming to the Black course in 2002, joined the golf maintenance crew in 1997. Wilson worked his way up to being superintendent Craig Currier's assistant, then his successor when Currier left for the private Glen Oaks Club in 2010, a year after a second Open.
