There is a sign near the first tee of Bethpage Black, and it does something almost no golf course would dare. It tells you to go away. "WARNING," it begins, before explaining that the Black is an extremely difficult course recommended only for highly skilled golfers. Nobody knows who put it there or when. The historian Philip Young went looking and turned up nothing significant. "Not a single person knows," he said. So the most famous sign in golf stands without an author, which suits a course whose own authorship has never quite settled. The Black opened in 1936 as part of a work-relief effort at Bethpage State Park in Farmingdale, out on the hilly, forested ground of Long Island. The Long Island Park Commission asked for something that "might compare to Pine Valley as a great test." That sounds like the kind of ambition a public agency should never voice out loud. Yet the ground cooperated. The soil is sandy, the topography is dramatic, and the routing sets off on an out-and-back journey of more than six miles through the trees. The Black does bear some resemblance to the great New Jersey course, a place to which Tillinghast himself had contributed design ideas. For as long as the Black has existed, it has been spoken of as A.W. Tillinghast's, the famous architect hired to design the new courses and oversee their construction. He called it the "Black Leopard," a fitting name for something sleek, muscled, and liable to hurt you. But the park had a superintendent named Joseph H. Burbeck, who was the driving force behind the project and managed its construction, with Tillinghast as his consultant. In 1959 the official history of the Long Island State Parks said the courses were designed and constructed under Burbeck's direction. Before the 2002 U.S. Open, his son Joe spoke up for his father's part, and historians went digging. How the work divided between the two men is still debated, but it seems fair to say the Black carries the hand of both, the celebrated architect and the park man at the heart of the job. What they made is brawny and penal. The fairways are narrow, the rough is thick and tangled, the greens sit up on plateaus, and the bunkers are huge, sculpted things. The forward tees alone carry a course rating of 73.1, and anyone feeling macho is advised to start there. It nearly didn't survive. As World War II ramped up, maintenance on the Black stopped, and for three years it sat abandoned. In the spring of 1945 it was revived. Had it not been, the Black would have been lost after only six years of play. Instead it waited for its moment, though those who knew it understood from the day it opened that it was the jewel of the park. In 2002 the Black became the first publicly owned and operated course to stage a U.S. Open. Beforehand, the talk was that the course was too easy and scores would fall to record lows. Then the players arrived, and only one of them bettered par. That was Tiger Woods, the champion. The players agreed the Black was one of the finest courses in the world, a supreme test and eminently fair. When the Open returned in 2009, only five broke par. The PGA Championship followed in 2019, and the Ryder Cup was set to come in 2025. Along the way, renovations by Rees Jones cost the course some of its historical character. Through all of it, the Black has remained a public course, the most famous of five at a 90-hole park that sees more than 300,000 rounds a year. They call it the People's Country Club, and the name is earned. Anyone can come, play at an affordable price, stand beside that anonymous warning, and decide whether the leopard is worth the walk.