Rees Jones, the noted golf architect and "Open Doctor" who spent the past five years re-tooling Bethpage's Black Course for the 2002 US Open which commences on Long Island this morning, finds the recent controversy over the course's authorship particularly unfortunate.

For 66 years the Black was acknowledged to have been among the final creations of AW Tillinghast, but last month, claiming to have unearthed new, compelling evidence, Golf Digest ventured into print with an expose purporting to refute claims of Tillinghast's paternity.

According to Ron Whitten's story in the magazine, the Bethpage Black is the work of "Joseph H Burbeck, the long-time superintendent of Bethpage State Park, and not by the famous golf architect AW Tillinghast." Golf Digest, which annually compiles the nation's most respected rankings of US and world courses, announced it would henceforth list Burbeck as the architect and Tillinghast as a "consultant". "What really bothers me about this whole argument is that the only two men who could really address it are both long dead," said Jones. "And the one 'witness' who supplied this 'new' information was four years old when the course was built."

That would be Joe Burbeck, the late superintendent's now 71-year-old son, who claimed to have seen his father drawing up the plans for what would become one of America's top-rated daily fee public courses. Burbeck says his mother went to her grave fretting that her husband, who remained Bethpage's superintendent until 1964, had never received his proper due.

The magazine tried to bolster its claim by citing a passage from the official history of the Long Island State Parks, published in 1959: "The four golf courses constructed as work-relief projects were designed and constructed under the direction of Joseph H Burbeck, the superintendent of the park, with AW Tillinghast, the internationally known golf architect, as consultant."

"It's a Tillinghast course," Jones told us this week. (Jones was brought in to restore the original design shortly after the US Open was awarded to the Black back in 1997.) "Burbeck was the builder, what we'd call the 'shaper' today, and while he may have made some changes here and there, the design was Tillie's."

"I'm sure Joseph Burbeck was a very nice man, but if he really designed the Black Course, his name would be on the plan," David Catalano, the present director of Bethpage State Park, told Golf Digest. "The fact is, his name isn't on the plan."

Neither, the magazine pointed out, is Tillinghast's. The only existing plan still in existence is a developmental plan prepared by the landscaper, Clarence Combs. There are no existing blueprints connecting Tillinghast to the design.

"But that's not unusual," said Jones. "My father (golf architect Robert Trent Jones, who in addition to creating hundreds of top American courses also designed the Cashen course at Ballybunion and the championship layout at Adare Manor) sometimes used to design his holes on paper napkins."

The playboy son of a wealthy American family, Albert Warren Tillinghast was the lone US-born member of a fabled triumvirate of American designers who ushered in golf's "Golden Age" over the first third of the 20th Century. (His contemporaries Donald Ross and Alister MacKenzie were Scottish by birth.) Bad debts and a profligate lifestyle led to the foreclosure of his family home days before the official opening of the Bethpage Black and he died, a destitute alcoholic, in 1942. He left a legacy of courses whose greatness endures to this day, including the Lower and Upper Courses at Baltusrol, San Francisco Golf Club, Winged Foot, Quaker Ridge, Ridgewood, and the Philadelphia Cricket Club.

BETHPAGE State Park has its origins in land purchased from the Massapequa, Mattinecock and Secatogue Indians by a Quaker merchant named Thomas Powell in 1697. He named the area the "Bethpage Purchase" after Bethphage, a village in the Holy Land midway between Jerusalem and Jericho. (Like many American settlers, Powell apparently didn't spell very well.)

Golf Digest's action will apparently be unilateral. Officials at both Bethpage and the United States Golf Association say they will continue to credit Tillinghast as the designer. Rees Jones has diplomatically taken to describing the Black as "a Tillinghast concept with Burbeck execution". Philip Young, the author of Golf for the People: Bethpage and the Black", who was with Rees Jones when we spoke to him two days ago, addressed the controversy last month for the Tillinghast Society's newsletter, in response to the Whitten article which kicked up all the fuss.

"The fact (is)," pointed out Young, "that Mr Burbeck himself never claimed to have designed the course. As his son is quoted in Mr. Whitten's article, 'My father never talked much about it. He was a very strong personality. I never tried to coax it out of him', and 'I have no proof'. If Mr Burbeck felt he should make no claim while Tillinghast was alive then he had 42 years in which to do it from 1942 when Tillinghast died until his own death in 1984. If he was not wanting to bring up an issue that could conceivably threaten his job with the park, he still had nearly 20 years in which to stake his claim from when he retired in the 1960s up until his death. No, the fact is that he never made claim to having designed the Black, and we have no reason to second-guess his own lack of words."

Under Jones' remake, the par-70 Black will play to 7,210 yards, the longest in US Open history. Although it is being advertised as the first public course to have hosted the nation's most prestigious tournament, that isn't really true. Pebble Beach may be an expensive public course, but a public course it is nonetheless.

In the absence of DNA testing, Joe Burbeck's claim on behalf of his father may never be conclusively proven or refuted, but Philip Young related a telling episode from last month.

Roger Maltbie, the former PGA tour pro who works as a television broadcaster, prepped for this week's US Open by playing the course. Although he had never laid eyes on the Black before, Maltbie found himself overwhelmed, and midway through his round he called Young over. "I can tell you this much," he sighed, "nobody named 'Burbeck' designed this course!"