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LIer aims to play all 140 courses on Island

Mark Herrmann

September 18, 2008

They stretch from Inwood, near the Queens border, out to Montauk Downs. Some are as public as you can get, others are as exclusively private as you can find. Some are right on the water, others are covered with woods. Someday, the disparate Long Island golf courses will have one thing in common: Jerry Wood will have played there.

He is on his way to playing all 140. "I'm down to seven private ones that I haven't played, and I have 30 public ones left," he said the other day when, admittedly, his project wasn't his top priority.

Wood's Long Island golf tour is on hold, which is understandable given that he is a managing director at Morgan Stanley. Like everyone else on Wall Street, he found that getting through this week has been one of his great challenges. But he still does hope to be the first one to make it all the way around Long Island's courses.

"If I'm not, that means someone else will have done it, which would be great," he said.

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He always has embraced a challenge. Wood is a former caddie at Huntington Country Club who progressed to caddie master to member to club champion (1982). His financial career began after he attended Manhattan College on a caddie scholarship.

A 1 handicap who is a member at Garden City Golf Club as well as Huntington, Wood took early retirement in 2005, before a friend took over at Morgan Stanley and implored him to come back. During that year off, it occurred to Wood that he had played many good courses on the Island, going back to his Holy Family High School matches at Mill River, Brookville, North Hills and Brentwood. He figured he would just go ahead and play everywhere else.

The obvious question is which courses he likes best. His answer, basically, is all of them.

"We get spoiled, being here in this region, with the quality of golf courses and the condition they're in," he said. "For instance, we have Eisenhower Red, a public course, which is in as good a shape as any course in the world."

Among the places he probably would not have visited had it not been for this project is Fishers Island, which is technically part of Suffolk. "Fishers Island has 18 signature holes. If you put any one of them somewhere else, that's all people would talk about," he said, adding that on the way out, he stayed with a friend on the North Fork. And while he was there, he played Island's End in Greenport and came away, like everyone does, amazed by the par-3 16th hole on the bluffs.

He raves about Sands Point's three holes on Roslyn Harbor, the view on the back nine at Crab Meadow, the fact Maidstone "is one of the prettiest courses anywhere." Just before the market crisis hit, he was able to get on Friar's Head ("One of the spectacular golf courses, good from beginning to end," he said). He has good things to say about Timber Point, the Links at Shirley, Tam O'Shanter, Pine Hollow, Muttontown, you name it.

The hard part is getting on. Sometimes, he plays in an outing being held at a course that is on his list. More often, he has to know someone who knows someone - a friend of a locker room attendant, an acquaintance of an assistant pro.

Scheduling gets tricky, what with his work, family and philanthropy (he and his wife Monica helped the Companions in Courage Foundation open a high-tech play room at New York Presbyterian's children's hospital).

Now that he is toward the end of his project, he sees that the joy of it is in every little step. "I've always played Bethpage Black and Red, but then there's Bethpage Blue, Green and Yellow - they're all great courses but I don't know if you'd play all of them if you didn't have the incentive," he said.

"It's pretty cool, the friendships you develop. And it keeps the marriage intact because you're not traveling to Nebraska for a golf trip."