by Bill Giest
“Not to be crass,” I ask, “but what may I ask are the fees for joining this club?”
“Fifty-five hundred,” he replies. Not bad! Not bad at all. I’m thinking “sign me up.”
“That is the annual fee,” he continues. “The initial membership fee is … one twenty-five.”
One twenty-five. Let’s see. He is saying “one twenty-five” in much the same way the auctioneers do at Sotheby’s, or the clerks at Tiffany, so that you just know he’s not talking one hundred twenty-five anything except thousands!
I am tempted to tell him what I once told a hotel desk clerk who quoted me a room rate of $200 when I was on a family vacation looking for a room with a roll-a-way for around thirty-five bucks: “I’m sorry, we were looking for something a little nicer,” I said, and walked out.
But he notes that we’re getting a little ahead of the game, that I have to be sponsored by at least three members of the club and that membership is by invitation only—and so far he hasn’t really extended me one per se.
I blink first. “I fold,” I say. I’m out. I’m holding a pair of deuces over here and he’s talking royal flush or better to open.
This seems to relieve him greatly. We both relax. He tells me I’m what he calls a “walk-in,” few if any of whom have ever become members of this club. “I try to be courteous to everyone,” he says, “but for some of these people the fees might be more than they paid for their houses. When I break it to them, they start to sense that they just might be in the wrong place.” We’ve all been there.
But Chip notes that members here get back 80 percent of their one twenty-five when they leave the club. Members of clubs elsewhere in the area say their clubs initially charge substantially less—say, $20,000 or $40,000—but many of the clubs keep it all. There are other clubs charging as much as $200,000 or more to join, and one nouveau riche magnet in the area has charged as much as $320,000!
In New York’s suburbs initiation fees tend to run in the neighborhood of $10,000 to $50,000, with a $10,000 to $15,000 (refundable) bond on top of that, plus annual dues of $5,000 to $10,000, possibly an annual assessment of a thousand or two, and sometimes monthly service charges, as well as annual dining room minimums up to $1,800, and even locker fees.
He says people wanting to join often drop names and claim to know club members. “We check that, of course,” he says, “and sometimes their knowing people is not good. Sometimes the members they know wish they didn’t. One said: ‘Yes I know him and if he joins, I’m out.’ “
If they say they’re members of other clubs, Chip calls the other clubs. He’ll go to their offices or homes to have in-depth face-to-face interviews. He swears he doesn’t check your voting record and doesn’t ask about political persuasions, although making bombs in the basement would be a red flag in the country club milieu. He does ask what schools you went to, about volunteer work to satisfy the character issue, and certainly about your business background.
You don’t even see an application form until you’ve passed muster. Members at other clubs say their applications required bank account numbers, their spouse’s financial records, driving records, family photographs, and as many as seven letters of recommendation from other members. Sponsors often have to fill out questionnaires, asking, for example, what percent of their total business is done with the applicant and how many hours they have spent with the applicant and his family in a social setting.
At one club, an applicant was completely qualified for membership except his very successful business was in the field not of stocks and bonds, but of bail bonds, and since other members might be uneasy about the prospect of his entertaining manslaughterers and other such clients here, and since “Jersey Bail Bonds” kind of stuck out like a sore thumb there on the ol’ application, it was just listed as “JBB Ltd.” He sailed through.
No essay is required, and certainly no Scholastic Aptitude Test. It’s always a little disconcerting to meet people at country clubs who are well established and well-to-do, yet could not possibly answer the $100 question (“What color is your shirt?”) on Who Wants to Be a Millionaire? That, like “Vice President Dan Quayle,” indicates something’s wrong with the system.
The process tends to favor older people who’ve enjoyed some success. I have seen actual dead people playing gin rummy at country clubs—I’m pretty sure. I went to a country club New Year’s Eve party that started breaking up around 11:15 as I recall. And at another club, the introductory tour pretty much revolved around a twenty-minute demonstration of their new portable defibrillator.
Chip puts together the dossier on an applicant, and presents it to the twelve members of the board who make their decision. All of this is, of course, way more than most adoption agencies go through when you ask for a child, but not as much as they do at some clubs.
At many clubs there’s a far more tortuous route. Applicants might be placed on a ten-year waiting list. They might be subjected to a “Mayflower check” of their bloodlines. It’s enough to make you write on the application that you once received oral sex from a member of the Junior League.
The name of the country club applicant might be posted on a bulletin board for sixty days, inviting negative comments. In some clubs if there’s one objector, one blackball, for any reason, the applicant is turned away. Too loud, too tacky, too “ethnic,” too racy, too whatever. Thumbs-down. At one club, attempts at membership failed when an applicant’s son beat up the son of a board member at school, and another applicant was turned down when he was recognized as the guy who’d defeated a particularly competitive board member at racquetball.
But it gets more humiliating than that. At many clubs, the couple wishing to join is invited over for a visual inspection by the membership committee. At one local club a prospective member was told by his sponsor to tell his wife to “dress like a nun and keep her mouth shut,” good advice at a club where couples wishing to join have been crushed when they were turned down because the wife’s skirt was too short or she mispronounced a word.
“I weed out the applications,” Chip says. “There’s plenty of money out there, you have to find people who get along.”
“People who get along” is not code. Metedeconk has a diverse membership. But it certainly is code at many private clubs, which have the constitutional right to let in and keep out anyone they wish. There are still all-male clubs, all-white clubs, all-black clubs, all-WASP clubs, all-gentile clubs, all-Jewish clubs, all-Japanese clubs, and even an all-female club or two.
It’s perfectly legal. At many clubs, women cannot become full members, cannot set foot in certain club areas, and are not allowed on the golf course at certain (prime) times. At one, a woman going to the bar unescorted to order a drink has brought a letter of reprimand from club officers. Women in shorts that don’t fall to a prescribed distance from their knees are told to change. A woman who brought a sandwich from home for her child was reprimanded, as was a woman whose suit was thought too revealing. It seems that clubs allowing women want them to at least look like men.
One Long Island club has drawn a line on the floor in the bar area, sort of a quarantine zone, behind which sit two tables for women. At that club, there’s been a ruling that men may, in an emergency, pee in the bushes, but that women have no such right. The ruling apparently did not address the issue of where, in an emergency, a woman was allowed to pee, but I would think some Depends in the golf bag might be a good idea.
Excuse me, is this Iran?
There are still clubs that allow no women at all—not as members, and not even on the grounds! Women must drop off their husbands or their (male) children for golf lessons at the gate. Years ago, a Long Island club that banned women was holding a golf tournament, and women were somehow allowed to come and watch, but when it started to rain and some of them sought shelter in the clubhouse things got ugly between members who thought that was okay in an emergency and those who did not. Zero Tolerance. Women madder than wet hens were everywhere. An emer
gency board meeting was called and a simple solution was found: no more golf tournaments.
In clubs where women are allowed in, it’s often grudgingly. At an old prestigious club in suburban Westchester, a husband and wife who were not getting along at all and on the verge of divorce had to make an untimely appearance before the membership committee to be inspected. There were five committee members rotating around the roomful of candidates, each member spending ten minutes with the various couples.
One member asked the husband why he wanted to join and the husband is said by an observer to have laid it on thick about the status of the venerable club and what he could add as a member and what an honor it would be to join.
Then the inspector general turned to the wife and asked the same question, to which she replied:
“I think golf is for assholes.”
Okay. Having no further questions, the interrogator moved on upstairs with his colleagues to compare notes and decide which applicants would be receiving invitations to join.
Meanwhile, the couple left the building to scream at each other in the parking lot, all the way home, and throughout the evening.
Their phone rang, and it was the club member who’d sponsored them calling. The husband began a steady stream of apologies that went on for several minutes during which time the sponsor kept trying to break in.
“No, no, no!” said the sponsor. “Wait a minute, wait a minute! You don’t understand. You’re in!”
“Whaaat?” said the husband. “How?”
“They know she’ll never play!” answered the sponsor. The club really didn’t like women around—particularly on the golf course.
Once you somehow gain acceptance to a club, you have to mind your Ps and Qs. The aforementioned letters of reprimand can fly for the slightest infraction. A letter was sent to a local club to a member whose guest wore a shirt that was deemed too loud. Moreover, you can not only be reprimanded but thrown out. “If, for example, you had one too many drinks and took your shirt off at the big Fourth of July party,” says one club member, “you would not only be thrown out of the club but so would your sponsor!”
So why join a country club? Because you love to play golf, and you want to play when you want to play, and the private courses are usually a lot nicer, and so is the ambience. A lot of people like the sense of belonging, too, of going to a place where they’re welcome and known by all. Not to mention, many don’t allow cell phones.
But be careful. You can be kicked out for the slightest infraction. No matter who you are! Take O.J. Simpson, you know, the former Buffalo Bills football star? C’mon, you remember him. He was kicked out of a country club just down the road for some darned thing. I never did hear what it was.
11
Among My Own Kind
Maybe we should try to join some place a little more relaxed.
Maybe here, at Goat Hill: euphemistically called the Shelter Island (public) Country Club. I’ve stopped by a few times. It seems clearly the type of place I belong (although I would have joined a Michigan club advertising “18 Holes For $18 & Free Six-Pack” if it weren’t so inconvenient).
Here at Goat Hill, there are pickup trucks in the parking lot, something you don’t see at a lot of other country clubs. Guys in jeans and T-shirts sit at the small bar drinking Bud, not cosmopolitans. Although they appear to be grounds-keepers assistants or maintenance personnel, they are actually golfers and in all probability members. The local bon vivants (many of them in yellow “Shelter Island Fire Department” T-shirts) tell jokes and tales of emergency plumbing mishaps they’re supposed to be fixing for clients but aren’t. There are tables and plastic chairs. Food is served and it’s supposed to be pretty good since Phil took over, having been stolen away from the Four Seasons or somewhere. The pro shop is a converted closet.
The clubhouse is quaint, an old, slightly out-at-the-elbows, gray-shingled, white-trimmed Nantuckety-looking structure, sitting on perhaps the highest point on Shelter Island in eastern Long Island, offering vistas over the treetops of a small harbor filled with boats to the north and a large bay to the south. It has a nice wraparound porch filled with tables for diners and drinkers, protected by heavy mesh wire that detracts somewhat from the appearance, rather like a bug screen on a Cadillac grille or plastic covers on the living room couch—but it saves lives!
On the Fourth of July they park cars on the fairways. There are deer and sometimes deer hunters on the course. How’s that for a hazard? Carts are allowed anywhere, and it probably wouldn’t matter much if you just drove your car from hole to hole.
We have contacts here. Jerry Brennan, the guy with the used golf ball stand across the street, is president and membership chairman of the Shelter Island Country Club. That ought to tell you something. Usually presidents of country clubs don’t sell used golf balls in their front yards, they sell things like stocks and bonds on Wall Street.
We stop by his “Previously Owned Golf Ball Emporium” on our way home from golfing at Goat Hill to tell him that tonight is going to be a sensational one for hawking used balls out on the course thanks to the two dozen we just lost playing 9 holes, and to ask him about joining.
“Would you sponsor us?” I ask, knowing if we had him for a sponsor we were as good as in!
“Sponsor you?” Jerry asks. “You mean give you money to put my name on your hat?” Apparently they don’t require sponsors.
“What would it take to become a member here, Jerry?” I ask. “How many letters of recommendation will I need?” Again he doesn’t know what I’m talking about.
“References,” I say. “Professional, social, financial. You should know right now that one more motor vehicle violation and my license is suspended. I’m not proud of that.” Jerry looks at me like I’m nuts, like maybe he doesn’t want this kind of wacko in the club. Uh-oh.
“How about costs?” I ask. “Initiation fees, bonds, annual assessments?”
He hands me an application, a single xeroxed sheet that asks your name and address and to circle the kind of membership you want. My annual membership will be $325 plus a $50 credit voucher.
“Can women be full members?” Jody asks firmly.
“Only women with three seventy-five can,” Jerry replies.
“How about monthly minimums?” she asks.
“Nope,” Jerry replies.
“That’s all if—if—we’re accepted,” I say, waiting for him to drop the big one about the ten-year waiting list or the blackball system.
“Your chances are good,” Jerry remarks, “since we’ve never turned anyone down.” He said if we filled in our names and address and wrote him a check, we were in. Jody and I looked at each other. Too easy. We told him we’d take the form home and think about it.
“Of course you have to abide by all the rules,” Jerry reminds us. This is a country club, but the rules here don’t come in bound volumes. They all fit neatly on a sign by the first tee:
“Shirt and Shoes Required” (Same as McDonald’s, but why both?).
“Every Golfer Must Have Golf Clubs” (Although you might get away with garden implements or hockey sticks).
No coolers (Buy our beer or drink yours hot).
Ten-stroke limit per hole (Fine—helps my score).
Slower Players Let Faster Players Play Through (“Faster players” are those who’ve been removing the governors from the golf carts and speeding down fairways at forty miles per hour).
Carts are to be operated in safe manner and are to remain on golf course at all times (Golfers often drive carts on city streets to nearby West Side Market to purchase ice and beer for illicit coolers).
As president and chief law enforcement officer for Goat Hill, Jerry says it is sometimes necessary to enforce the rules when people try to play bare-chested or barefoot. And although they’ve never turned anyone down for membership, they did kick one member out of the club for getting drunk all the time and screaming ethnic jokes that were not only offensive but, moreover, not funny eno
ugh.
Jerry says they have to maintain some sense of decorum: “People get married here.”
12
The City Game
I meant to take up golf twenty years ago. But we moved to New York and I couldn’t figure out where to play. You can’t join a nice private club like Diane and Rick’s when you’re knocking down thirty-seven-five as a newspaper reporter, and the city’s public golf courses were … different.
We discovered that in golf, as in life, everything was a little different in New York. Take golf course hazards, for example, which tend to be of the sand and water varieties elsewhere, but which were far more diverse on New York City’s public courses.
Out on the Pelham Golf Course in the Bronx, Don Jerome told me that one of his tee shots had recently bounced into an abandoned car on the fairway, costing him a stroke. He said that on another occasion, a friend of his was robbed while lining up an approach shot, costing him no strokes, but $65 and his credit cards. “Something like that will disrupt a golfer’s concentration,” Don noted.
“I know a guy who used to take his dog golfing with him for protection,” said another golfer, James McDonald. He recalled that someone else carried a can of Mace in his bag alongside his woods and irons.
“It would really be smarter to play in eightsomes or sixteensomes,” added Charlie Pessoni.
Back then these guerrilla golfers blamed the city’s fiscal crisis and crime wave for all this and said conditions had been improving under a new program in which the city licensed private companies to operate its courses.
“We are in a mild state of shock,” admitted Kimble Knowlden, who had recently come to the city to oversee the improvement and operation of the public courses for the American Golf Corporation of Los Angeles.
“You have to remember that we’re from California,” said Kimble, once the head golf pro at Pebble Beach, which of course is one of the world’s grandest courses.