You Can Go Home Again

“Wanna go hit balls down 440?”

It had been more than 40 years since I posed that question to my childhood friends in Bayonne, New Jersey. Never thought I would ask it again, truth be told. But I did, last May, to three guys who knew exactly what it meant.

In Bayonne, a peninsula just across the harbor from New York City that’s roughly 3 miles long by 2 miles wide, there wasn’t much room to launch wedges, let alone drivers. When I grew up there, it was full of corner bars, neighborhood delis, and narrow streets densely packed with houses so close together that, at least in my case, I knew what the neighbors were having for dinner because their kitchen oven vent was about 5 feet from my bedroom window. 

Yet we managed to carve out room for basketball, baseball, tackle football, and wiffle ball. Tons of wiffle ball. We played mostly on Eighth Street between the boulevard and Avenue C, where the front stairs of a house served as an unimpeachable strike zone on our diamond of cement. Vinny’s front porch, across the street, was our right field. 

Golf was well off our radar. We occasionally spotted an old-timer hitting balls in a portion of Hudson County Park, an oddity for sure. Some of our fathers played, driving out to the suburbs with their buddies to tee it up at whatever muni they could find. Home movies show my dad teaching me to swing a plastic toy club when I was 3, and we played plenty of miniature golf down the Shore. But he died when I was 13, and we never got to hit balls on a real course.

A golf club materializing within our city limits? The odds of me realizing my dream of pitching for the Yankees felt infinitely better. I nearly fell over when the gorgeous but private Bayonne Golf Club opened on the east side of town in 2006. I’ve played it a few times now, and it still seems like a mirage. 

As sports junkies, it was no surprise when the golf bug eventually bit some of us. We began to make the 7-mile trek north into neighboring Jersey City, to a driving range and a rudimentary pitch-and-putt course with some batting cages standing between them. 

It didn’t take long to get there from my house on North Street. Head up Avenue A, then merge onto Kennedy Boulevard. Pass my future alma mater, Marist High School, then make a left turn onto Route 440 once you cross the line into Jersey City a block later. But nobody ever said “route.” Just “440.” Everyone knew.

I’m not sure when people first hit balls down 440. It’s tough to find an opening date for the facility, located directly across the street from Lincoln Park on the west side of Jersey City. To say the neighborhood was gritty back then is like saying Pine Valley is worth a look.

The gravel parking lot would flood after even a moderate rainfall. Heavily chipped and dented pieces of knee-high white plyboard divided range slots, and golfers stood in a crescent-shaped line while smacking battered balls out onto a flat field flecked with patches of grass. A handful of flags were stuck in the ground at varying and unconfirmed distances. At night, you could track a ball for maybe 150 yards under the lights before losing sight of it. Looming in the distance were factory smokestacks and the elevated Pulaski Skyway that linked Newark to Jersey City.

To the left of the range were a handful of batting cages, where the overhead netting was pockmarked with gaping holes. It was no surprise when a rubber-coated gray baseball flung by machines toward batters would find its way out onto the pitch-and-putt course. Some of us may or may not have pilfered a few to use for batting practice in the parking lot of Pagano’s Supermarket back on North Street. 

We filled and emptied countless buckets of balls throughout the early to mid-1980s. And then we all moved on, to 18-hole courses like La Tourette and Silver Lake on Staten Island, Weequahic in Newark, and Ash Brook in Scotch Plains. Or down the Shore at places like Hominy Hill, Howell, Shark River and Cruz Farms. College. Jobs. New social circles. Weddings and families. You know how it goes. 

I moved out of Bayonne in 1992. Six years later, we sold the family house on North Street, the one bought by my Irish paternal grandparents, who had emigrated from County Tipperary in the early 20th century. I would return sporadically, lured by grammar school and high school reunions, wakes and funerals, visits with childhood friends, and the best pizza on the planet—not in that order. No balls were hit down 440.

I played golf sporadically in the years after leaving, highlighted by an annual outing with friends in the Catskills at Windham Mountain. Then I rolled the dice professionally. Left a safe, stable job in the corporate office of an insurance company after a decade to pursue a magazine career. I gave myself two years to succeed or return to a life of writing dry-as-dust brochures about the pros and cons of term insurance. With six months to go on my self-imposed deadline, I spotted a classified ad in The New York Times for an associate editor job at a golf magazine in the city. A few golf-related freelance clippings somehow landed me the golden ticket: traveling the world to write about golf. I know. Believe me, I know. 

Fast-forward to 2015. Now married and living in Arizona, I’d heard rumblings about a new course in Jersey City. Couldn’t be. Must have meant Liberty National, the private club that opened in 2006 with the knee-buckling views of New York Harbor. I knew it well, having caddied there part-time for two summers after becoming a freelance writer (turned out full-time magazine jobs were not quite as secure as insurance company gigs). More research and sure enough: A new nine-hole course was actually being built on the site of our former driving range. Boom. New life for the old hitting grounds. 

The Skyway Golf Course at Lincoln Park West opened in June 2015, and I heard it was good. Really good. Pictures showed an impossible transformation of the decrepit property I remembered. Took a few years, but I decided to finally go see it myself. And I knew exactly who I would play with. 

Bobby was the best athlete in our crowd growing up. Never met a shot he didn’t like (and usually make) on the basketball court. A rocket arm on the baseball and football fields. He had a hoop hanging above the garage in his backyard, where many pickup games delayed mountains of homework. Now a father of four who’d married his high school girlfriend, he lived in the nearby suburbs of Union County and worked as a benefits consultant.

Harvey was a Bayonne lifer. Also married his high-school sweetheart, who grew up a few houses down the block from him. Started working in a grocery store across the street from his childhood home as a teenager and never left the industry. We last played golf together 30 years ago, down the Shore at Spring Meadow. I still remember him chipping in for birdie on 18 from just off the green. 

And Jimmy. A tough and cerebral, if undersized, linebacker/offensive lineman in high school. He worked in banking for years, mainly in the city. Left that world to teach at a private high school down the Shore and raise a family, and led that school’s football team to championships as the head coach. Jimmy, Bobby and I had last teed it up together 20 years ago, at a fundraiser for our high school. Marist High was torn down in early 2023, with the land rumored to become a new exit off the turnpike. Can’t get more Jersey than that. 

I flew back East for a long weekend last May. The final day of my visit included a 1 p.m. tee time with the boys on a Sunday at Skyway. 

I couldn’t repeat the old driving route from the 1980s, since I was coming to the course from the west rather than Bayonne. But I still eventually turned left off 440 and onto Duncan Avenue. On my right were businesses that might well have been there for the past four decades: a Furniture Direct store (where a 23-piece home set will run you $2,399), a gas station open 24 hours a day and a heavy duty truck repair shop. But on my left was something entirely different. The entrance driveway had been moved farther west than I remembered. The parking lot was now paved immaculately.

While unloading my clubs, I noticed chain-link cages nearby. For a split second, I wondered if they had reimagined the old batting cages. Alas, instead they contained hitting mats for pre-round warmup ($2) or an hour of practice ($5).

“Tommy!” My quiet reminiscing was happily shattered by familiar voices. Bobby, Harvey and Jimmy were bounding across the parking lot, ready to go. 

Inside the clubhouse, a series of modular trailers linked together, we passed on lunch, which could have featured a Skyway quesadilla ($18) washed down by a New Jersey Beer Co. Blood Orange LBIPA ($8). 

I did spy a curious glass case, home to a pair of turtles named Little Joe and Junior. They reminded me of Cuff and Link, turtles from the original Rocky movie, which my playing partners and I had watched at the Lyceum Theater on Broadway in Bayonne in 1976. Anyone who grew up in my hometown will tell you that the story was inspired by Chuck Wepner, the “Bayonne Bleeder,” and his nearly going the 15-round distance against Muhammad Ali in 1975. Chuck still lives in Bayonne, forever “The Champ” to locals. 

And I learned from a sign on the wall that Skyway was not the first nine-holer in this neighborhood. Not by more than a century, in fact. Turns out there once was a Jersey City Golf Club, located on 50 acres in what is now Lincoln Park, right across the street. Opened in 1898, it was a founding member (along with Baltusrol Golf Club) of the New Jersey State Golf Association in 1900. It closed just five years later, when the city absorbed that land to form a larger park. Not sure what the course record was there, but at Skyway it’s the 32 fired by Kevin Na while visiting the area during the 2016 PGA Championship at Baltusrol.

We headed to the first tee. The starter, a Jersey City native, gave us the expected hard time once he found out we were all from Bayonne. It was a taste of home; if you’re not getting or giving the needle out here, then something is very wrong. At least he took a decent picture of our foursome.

Being a golf writer has sent me around the world to play some of the finest courses, from Ireland and Scotland to Spain and Sweden—New Zealand and Australia, too. So when I tell you the view from the first tee at Skyway Golf Course stopped me in my tracks, it’s coming from a spectacularly overprivileged position. 

The whole place was raised up 30 to 40 feet, with massive amounts of dirt used to create elevation changes and serious mounding. Space is tight, and it’s a bit of a shooting gallery in places. Not to mention more than a handful of blind shots that I’m sure lead to some spirited conversations back at the clubhouse. But the fescue was thin and waved in the breeze, the green complexes were legit with fast surfaces and Na’s 32 quickly became even more impressive. 

No surprise that it’s a popular place. Skyway does around 45,000 rounds a year, with women playing nearly 20%. Local Hudson County residents play 60% of the total rounds. The general manager, Steve Mills, and superintendent, Alfred Parcells, are even working to get the course fully certified by the Audubon Cooperative Sanctuary Program. It’s got wetlands, a resident fox, red-tailed hawks and some ducks that would make Tony Soprano smile.

At one point, I took in a 360-degree view and flashed back to different parts of my life. To the north, the Pulaski Skyway. Driving over that uncomfortably narrow four-lane roadway, opened in 1932, was the terrifying final act in a high school driver’s ed course many of us barely survived. To the west stood the corporate headquarters of the insurance company I once worked for. To the east, New York City, with One World Trade Center standing tall. To the south, Bayonne. 

Harvey, who said he hadn’t picked up his clubs in decades, of course drilled a 25-foot birdie putt on the first hole. Jimmy kept his stats for every hole. Bobby was hampered by a bulky knee brace, but the old athlete in him occasionally flashed. I hit a few good shots and a few bad ones. I rarely keep score anymore, preferring to focus more on conversations with new acquaintances or, in this case, reminiscing with old friends. Skyway’s layout tested us more than a few times, but we managed to find our way.

After nine holes, the verdict was unanimous: We could not have been more surprised at the quality of the place than if the Jets won the Super Bowl (sorry, Jimmy). “Gobsmacked,” as my friends in Ireland and Scotland might say. “You gotta be friggin’ kidding me,” as my Bayonne friends did say. 

Handshakes and hugs in the parking lot. Promises made to return soon. It was, as Jimmy put it later, a tee time 40 years in the making. 

On the flight back to Arizona, I tried to visualize our former hang but couldn’t do it. My mind was too full of fresh scenes I had accumulated that day. An email request to the Jersey City Public Library yielded just a pair of aged newspaper clippings about the old place, but no useful images. The general manager at Skyway didn’t have any either. Maybe a few exist out there somewhere, but perhaps it’s best if they remain in the minds of those who hit balls down 440.