One day a member having lunch at the club abruptly falls ill at the table. He grabs his chest, falls to his knees. A concerned scrum gathers around his table. Word reaches his wife, who arrives at the club gates within minutes.
“He is inside,” she is told as she tries to pass through. “Unfortunately,” the attendant continues, “no women are allowed on property. Please wait here.”
No way this is true.
No way this is true.
“It’s true.”
A similar story comes from another elite club. You would know it if you heard it. Another lunch, another golfer topples over. (Is there something in the food at these clubs?) In this case the man regains consciousness. “Please contact my wife,” he says from the floor, and hands his friend his phone.
The friend starts dialing, then stops. He is also a member and is now saddled with an inconvenient thought. “I can’t,” he says. “No cellphones in the grillroom.”
You will not find a set definition of country club stuffiness. As with pornography and a vanity handicap, you know it when you see it: rules for the sake of rules, a rigid adherence to tradition, an outsized emphasis on the superficial. This attitude is also, hopefully, in decline. This collection of stories, most from within the past 15 years, represents a side of golf the game has made efforts to shake, with at least some degree of success. Golf today is more modern, more inviting. Golf might still have its share of snobs, killjoys, and Judge Smails disciples, embracing priorities that range from archaic to laughably misguided, but at least the narrative has shifted. Once a statement, This is just a part of golf, it is now a question: This is still a part of golf?
Short answer: not as much.
Longer answer: maybe still a little.
There is at least one counterintuitive element to the American dream, which is if you work hard and advance in your chosen profession, you might be lucky enough to join the sort of club where you will always feel on edge. This is not how it’s planned, of course, but it is an outcome nonetheless. The typical municipal course might have scruffier conditions and longer rounds, but at least you won’t be ostracized for using the wrong fork. Sometimes the more exclusive the address, the more precarious the footing. Once, a golfer joined a blue-blood Connecticut club and was excited to jump into his membership. He played both weekend days and showed up during the week to practice. This went on for a short time until one evening a member of the golf staff greeted him on the practice green. The conversation began with some innocuous small talk but then led to a message. “You’re showing up here too much,” the new member was informed. It was time to scale it back. (...)
At some top-of-the-pyramid clubs, the membership process follows the logic of high school courtships, which says the best way to secure interest from the other party is to express as little interest as possible. Your microscopic chances of an Augusta National membership are contingent on you never confiding to anyone—not to your significant other, not to your clergyman, perhaps not even to yourself—that you would ever want to join. Even when in the door, though, you remain on guard. As the story goes, a member invited a guest for a dream weekend of golf and lodging in one of the club’s cabins. When a high-ranking green jacket approached during cocktail hour one evening, it was not to solicit feedback on the green speeds. “Please tell your guest we wear socks here for dinner,” the green jacket told the other green jacket, never once looking in the bare-ankled offender’s direction.
Broadly, guest experiences at clubs can be divided into two categories—one in which they strive to make you feel at home, the other in which they work hard to remind you that you’re not. At some of the country’s A-list clubs, guests can show up ahead of a member and are treated as if they are the ones writing the checks, with access to locker rooms, the practice range, perhaps even a bite to eat. At other places, you’re encouraged to wait in the parking lot, if not the Dunkin’ Donuts down the street.
At a Northern California club with holes along the Pacific, a guest showed up one day and wandered innocently into the golf shop to buy a gift for his wife. The shop attendant informed him unaccompanied guests were prohibited from buying anything.
“OK, then,” the guest replied, “I’ll just hit balls.” When he asked to be pointed to the practice area, the attendant directed him to the range at a different course, a mile down the road. (...)
At many clubs rules persist about where one can change shoes, as if the appearance of socks in broad daylight is a form of indecent exposure. At a name-brand club outside New York City, a guest showed up wearing sneakers, which he was told weren’t allowed in the clubhouse, so he then sought to change his shoes by his car.
“Amazingly, out of nowhere, an employee pops up from the trees and says, ‘Sir, you aren’t allowed to change your shoes in the parking lot,’ ” his friend recalled. “We tried to solve this issue and kept asking the employee what to do. His response, ‘Figure it out.’ ”
Briefly stumped, the guest resolved to walk back down the driveway of the club in his sneakers until he was outside the gates, changed into his golf shoes, then walked back. Problem solved, calories burned.
For an inanimate stretch of asphalt, a parking lot can provide a telling window into a club’s worldview in other ways. At a posh Palm Beach club, a guest arrived in a pickup truck and was asked if he was there to make a delivery.
“No, I have a tee time,” he replied. He returned from his round to learn the valet parked his truck in the service lot.
At a different club in the North Carolina mountains, the staff didn’t even pretend to make a mistake when a guest arrived in a new Ford pickup. “I kept it pretty,” the owner said of his vehicle. “This was no beater with rust.” Still, a club employee ran frantically into the locker room to report that pickup trucks aren’t allowed to be visible in the top parking lot and that it needed to be moved. “My nice truck had been banished to oblivion where apparently it belonged,” the guest continued. “They seemed to have stretched the traditional club etiquette to include well-behaved vehicles, too.” (...)
Sometimes it’s not the rule that is so unreasonable but the way it’s enforced. Consider the time a guest arrived at a top-100 course in Pennsylvania wearing cargo shorts, and his host decided the best way to spare his friend embarrassment was to tee off hoping no one would notice. He was wrong. On the third hole a staff member came with a letter from the club manager issuing a formal warning and a suggestion to buy new shorts in the golf shop as soon as possible. However, the letter’s delivery couldn’t be topped. The staff member was in a tuxedo, carrying the letter on a silver platter.
“The sight will be burned in my memory,” a third member of the group recalled. (...)
Play enough golf and these stories are not difficult to uncover. They travel freely because no one ever forgets them. The harder part is explaining them because a thorough unpacking should probably draw on insight from a broad assortment of anthropologists, sociologists, psychoanalysts and locker-room attendants.
A charitable view is that many golfers look to their club as a sanctuary from the disorder of their everyday lives, so they hold themselves and others to a standard that can’t be maintained anywhere else. That’s the nice way of framing it. Another perspective says some golf clubs make you feel privileged to be there, and others want you to feel unworthy. In that sense, the enforcement of silly rules about where you park or tie your shoes has the subtle benefit of putting visitors—members, too—on their heels from the start.
The simplest answer might be that as with any other organization of people, a golf club does not boast one personality but several. The problem isn’t always institutional but often individual. That’s why the manager of a Colorado private club has a letter framed on his wall from a member who wrote complaining about the club’s toilet paper unrolling the wrong way and why a golfer from a private club in Kansas enjoys recalling the story of another player yelling over from another hole to tell the man his son’s shirttail needed to be tucked in. The lesson: The world has its share of petty people, and some of them still happen to play golf.
by Sam Weinman, Golf Digest | Read more:
Image: Javi Aznarez
