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Marshall "Gap" Garypie.
Marshall Garypie, far right, with the 1993 Southampton High School golf team, which was undefeated and won the Long Island championship. The Southampton teams Garypie coached dominated high school golf for nearly a decade.
Marshall Garypie Jr., a lifelong Sag Harbor resident who coached the Southampton High School golf team through a decade of dominance and was integral in saving the Sag Harbor Golf Club first from destruction and then from expansion, died on August 3. He was 86.
Garypie, who was widely known as “Gap,” coached the Southampton High School golf team from the late 1970s until the mid-1990s, through an era of dominance in Suffolk County. His team won a long string of league, conference and county championships in the 1980s and 1990s, including a run from 1988 to 1993 when the team posted a 50-0 streak over five seasons, capped with the 1993 all-Long Island championship.
“He was always very proud of his golf teams,” recalled Jim Reister, who played on the 1992-93 team. “He found the perfect storm of golf in those years, everyone on the team had something to do with the local golf courses — either they caddied, or their dads were members or worked there. There was a real pedigree in golf. It all fell in Gap’s lap, but at the same time, he had a real job in keeping us all in line — we were boys.”
An excellent golfer himself, Garypie was not a coach who drilled players and offered instruction, other former players said, but was more of a father figure, buoying spirits, offering guidance and scoldings, and lessons in etiquette, sportsmanship and the rules of golf. Rounding that role, he drove the team to all of its matches himself, in a school bus.
“Under his tutelage, we didn’t merely learn to conquer the challenges of the course, we learned to conquer our own doubts and limitations,” said Bill Duggan, another of the 1992-93 team players. “The trophies we proudly held aloft bore witness not only to our skills but to his commitment to sculpting us into champions both on the course and in life.”
Marshall Garypie Jr. was born on August 28, 1936, to Marshall and Madeline Garypie of Sag Harbor. He was the oldest of three children, and attended Sag Harbor schools and SUNY Brockport, where he earned a teaching degree.
“Most of the men at Pierson went to the military, but he couldn’t go because of his eyesight, so he went to college,” his son, Marshall Garypie III, said. “His parents didn’t have money. My grandfather worked at Bulova, so he worked at Maidstone in the summers and at the Mott’s applesauce factory upstate when he was there to pay for school.”
After college, while working as a caddie at the Maidstone Club, he met Anita Robertson of East Hampton, who also worked at the club. They were married in 1960.
In 1964, he was hired to teach seventh grade science at Southampton Intermediate School. He was a longtime member of the Sag Harbor Fire Department and served as a Sag Harbor Village trustee for one term from 1992 to 1994, his son said.
He was also a longtime member of the Board of Governors of the Sag Harbor Golf Club. He served as the club’s president in the 1990s, a time of tumult at the club after New York State acquired the 341-acre property known as Barcelona Neck. At first, state officials said that the golf course would be plowed under. Garypie and other members of the club’s leadership mounted a campaign to save it.
“They were local working class guys who had basically built that golf course, so they all had real sweat equity in that course” recalled State Assemblyman Fred W. Thiele Jr., who was a Suffolk County legislator at the time. “It was part of life in Sag Harbor, and was unlike anything else out here, where we have all these big time golf courses, Shinnecock and Maidstone, but nothing for the regular guys. They mobilized the entire community.
“But that was only the first fight,” he added.
In 1997, after the course had been saved from destruction and handed over to the state Department of Parks and Recreation, the state introduced a proposal to expand it to 18 holes, and build a sprawling clubhouse and golf facility on the surrounding 300 acres. Again, the club’s leadership, led by Garypie, Paul Bailey and Jim Schiavoni, mounted a fierce campaign to have the club left as it had always been.
“They had protests and demonstrations,” recalled Thiele — who himself was at the center of one renowned nose-to-nose confrontation, in the clubhouse at the golf course, with a state official over Albany’s grand visions. “They made a lot of noise and worked really hard. Their story, the working class part of the Hamptons trying to hold on to something that was theirs, that was ultimately a fight Governor [George] Pataki decided he didn’t want to be on the other side of.”
Predeceased by his wife, Garypie is survived by his sister Sharon Becker of Boynton Beach, Florida; his brother, Peter Garypie of Elmira; his son Marshall Garypie III; and daughter Robin Early of East Hampton.
A wake was held on August 7 and funeral on August 8 at Yardley & Pino Funeral Home in Sag Harbor.
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