Fore! Play (14 page)

The 9th green is adjacent to the club, on purpose, allowing golfers to relieve themselves in clubhouse rest rooms before setting
off on the back 9, thereby reducing the assessments necessary for new shrubs. It also allows golfers like ourselves to … just
… quit.

As we approach the green, I ask Brian which club he’d recommend and if he’d mind going into the club and closing the drapes
so people inside can’t see me play. I also feel the curtains might provide another measure of safety for patrons in the bar
and dining room.

I don’t know what my final tally is and I don’t ask. Club rules specify you must post your scores for 18 holes, but not 9.
Since most of my scores were 6s or 7s I figure my score was probably around 60.

It’s a good day. As a guest I can’t buy drinks or dinner even if I want to—it’s all on the monthly tab.

To sum up, I finish fourth. I don’t beat any little women, but I don’t lose
any
balls (thanks to Brian), except that very first one that went in the water. I receive no citations for dress code violations.
I don’t hit anybody. I don’t throw any clubs, pee on any bushes, and I keep the ball off surrounding thoroughfares and hit
no houses.

Damnit, I’m getting
good
.

M
aybe I should join a club. A country club.

Sure, they’re stodgy and expensive, but how else can you
play
this stupid game? Unless you enjoy sleeping in your car to get tee times at public courses, you’re almost forced to join
one.

One morning I drive over to the Metedeconk National Golf Club, its stately private clubhouse fronting a fantastic Robert Trent
Jones 27-hole course.

Driving in, I see no guard towers, no concertina wire, no checkpoints, and no aggressive valet parkers trying to carjack me—so
it all seems rather casual, open, friendly. I stride briskly up the front steps, hoping to stay a step ahead of the radar,
half expecting a couple of burly Secret Service types with walkie-talkie cords in their ears to grab me. But none do. So,
I take a survey stroll through the dining room and bar area—very nice—then step confidently to the front desk and ask the
receptionist:

“Do you have an application form?”

She gives me a quizzical look: “Are you seeking employment?”

Not good. I thought I was blending rather well, but this shakes my confidence.

“Uh, no, not really,” I reply. “I mean, membership forms. Applications for membership.”

“One moment please,” she says, picking up the phone to speak to someone—hopefully not Security: What if she has one of those
red buttons under her desk like the bank tellers have?

“Mr. Bechert,” she says into the phone, “we have a gentleman here asking about membership.”

Chip Bechert, a most amiable, fortyish man, dressed “resort casual” and ready to hit the links at a moment’s notice, bounds
into the lobby to greet me warmly and invite me to sit down for an iced tea. Things are back on track, going rather swimmingly,
don’t you think?

Chip, the director of membership, casually asks what I’m looking for in a golf club, and I tell him “a course.”

“Do you play a lot?” he asks.

“Oh, not really,” I say, “I’m new to the game.”

“What’s your handicap?” he asks.

“None,” I reply. Why? Did I wrongly park in a marked spot in the lot? I didn’t want him to think he was going to have to build
a ramp or anything.

He’s referring to my golf handicap, which has never been calculated, but is severe and possibly inoperable: “I shoot about
a 110,” I say, lying. It’s probably more like a 125, really, and on this challenging course more like a 175. I look around
the course later, and see that it is at once uncommonly beautiful and fraught with perils such as I’d never seen before, perils
like
double
doglegs. Long ones. We’re not talking dachshunds here.

And you do have to put your golf handicap on your application! “It’s okay if it’s high,” he insists, “although if you tell
me you’re shooting a 125 [which I hadn’t], I would certainly tell you all about our fine practice facility and the hours our
golf pro gives lessons.”

“Do you belong to other clubs?” he asks. I can’t think of any. I told him we joined BJ’s Price Club, a discount store, and
the AARP sent me a temporary membership card, unsolicited, when I turned fifty. The bastards.

Whether or not there’s a waiting list is difficult to determine, but one more answer out of me like the 110, and I think the
answer is “yes” and “long.”

Never join a club until you find out about the food, a (fat) friend had advised me. I ask, and Chip says it’s “great”—although
“great” food at a country club is usually like “great” food at a pet motel. Furthermore, he says there’s no annual or monthly
minimum you have to spend, unlike almost every other club I’ve ever heard of. Generally my wife and I are treated to the hospitality
of our friends belonging to country clubs on the thirtieth or thirty-first of the month, when said friends take us to their
clubs to try to eat up to those minimums: “Another chateaubriand, Bill?” The worst part of these minimums is that they can’t
be used for alcoholic beverages.

“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 emergency 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.