Preakness Hills Set to Host MGA Senior Amateur

The top senior players in the Met Area will visit Preakness Hills Country Club in Wayne, N.J., for the 81st playing of the MGA Senior Amateur Championship on May 4 and 5. The Willie Tucker-designed golf course promises to provide a tough test for the field and will add another chapter to its already storied history.

Preakness Hills Country Club was conceived in 1926 as a family club by a group of eight prominent local businessmen. The club is located in the section of Wayne named for the Thoroughbred racehorse after whom the middle jewel of the Triple Crown is named. Preakness was raced by cotton magnate Milton Holbrook Sanford. Shortly after the Civil War, Sanford bought a farm near Paterson, converted it into a Thoroughbred training center, and named it after Preakness, the horse that established him in the racing. The immediate neighborhood inherited that name.

The new club purchased the 160-acre Frew estate, which had been built in the late 1880's by a wealthy New York businessman. The Georgian mansion was converted to a golf clubhouse, and included glassed-in sun parlors, a marble staircase, and a game room where members could enjoy billiards, shuffleboard, checkers and chess.

For its golf course, Preakness Hills turned to Willie Tucker, whose credits included the original North Hills Country Club in Douglaston, N.Y., and the 27-hole Ridgewood complex in New Jersey, which he built for A.W. Tillinghast. A turf grass expert, Tucker had installed and nurtured the turf at Yankee Stadium and the West Side Tennis Club in Forest Hills.

Plans for the Preakness Hills course were drawn up in December of 1926 and the full 18-hole course opened in April of 1929. Throughout the construction period, Tucker was working with Tillinghast at Ridgewood, and one can only surmise the influence Tillinghast might have had on the Preakness Hills design.

Preakness Hills hosted both of its first major championships in 1993, the Ike and the USGA Senior Women's Amateur. In the Ike, George Zahringer tied the course record with a first-round 65. In the second round, Preakness Hills’ own Bill Green closed the gap to two strokes before faltering. Tom Hamilton of Greenwich took up the chase, and Zahringer had to birdie the 17th hole to win the title. Preakness Hills has also hosted two MGA Senior Open Championships, the first won by Russ Helwig of Essex Fells in 1998. In 2003, Darrell Kestner of Deepdale won the Senior Open title at Preakness by four strokes over Bobby Heins of Old Oaks. The top senior amateur players in the Met Area will look to add their names to the list of great players who have won a championship at Preakness Hills.