On Long Island there is a public course that would be the pride of almost any town in America, and it has spent its whole life standing beside a more famous sibling. Bethpage Red plays alongside the Black, shares its designer and its wooded hills, and so it shares a shadow too. In the park it is second only to the Black, and some know it as Baby Black, a name that says something about the difficulty and something about the affection. Yet the Red is also called the older, gentler brother, the one who will give you a stern test without the belittling beatdown. The ground itself has a past. Before there was a state park in Farmingdale, there was a family-owned estate and a golf course called Lenox Hills Country Club, designed by Devereux Emmet. After the Depression, the Bethpage Park Authority bought the course and the land around it so that a robust park could rise as part of a public works project. A.W. Tillinghast was then hired to build three new courses, the Black, the Red, and the Blue, and Lenox Hills became the Green. Demand kept growing, and Alfred Tull, Emmet's design partner, designed a fifth course, the Yellow. Today the park is one of the most heavily trafficked golf facilities in the world. Within that crowd, the Red keeps its own character. It inherits much of the Black's nature: hilly, forested ground, an abundance of doglegs, and an adventurous routing that carries you over ridges and around bends. The bunkers here are expansive, cousins of the Black's sand, though perhaps never quite as big and bold as their famous kin. The corridors run wider, and the land seems to breathe a little more. The green sites are natural and fine, and strategy holds your interest from the first tee to the last, in a layout that stays playable for every kind of golfer while still asking real questions. The Red begins and ends better than its famous neighbor, and that is no small thing to say. The first hole plays from ridge to ridge, much as the Black's 18th does, but it finishes at a terrific natural green set into a bowl on the ridgeline. It is the sort of opening that tells you at once what kind of place you have come to. The 18th snakes around a large hill and plays to a protected green benched into the hillside. Ahead of the 2025 Ryder Cup, rumors went around that one of these holes might stand in for the Black's own opener or closer. That such an idea could be spoken aloud tells you how highly the Red's bookends are regarded. Between them, the 5th is a fine long hole, and the short par-4 6th turns a cold shoulder to the golfer who swings too aggressively from the tee. It has been said that if the Black had never been built, the Red, with its many strong doglegged holes, might have drawn the same kind of acclaim. It is hard to walk these holes and disagree. There is a strange and lovely interruption near the 14th. Beside it lie more than ten acres of polo fields, where matches are played every week. Those fields once sat on the flat land now occupied by the first hole of the Black, a reminder that this park has always been more than golf, and that its ground has been asked to serve many purposes over the years. Perhaps that is the truest thing about the Red. Tee times are easier to land than on the Black, and for many locals it is simply the favorite, more fun to play than its brawny brother. It would be a gem at any other municipal park in the country, and here it waits, a little in the shadow, for the golfers who know where to look.