I drove up to Cape Cod for the long weekend from NYC. Some friends near Boston invited my woman and I to a golf course to go to the driving range.

I had never held a golf club before. My friend suggested I start with his 9 iron - it was fine, then he handed me his driver. It was pretty hard to get the right hit. The few out of the bucket I hit squarely made this amazing sound and just zoomed down the range.

But then we were invited to the country club and I noticed basically everyone there was a wealthy older white guy, and I was being casually approached and informed that if I would like to join that club it was a 250k "initiation" fee, and then membership.

I didn't think much of this at first but then wondered - what circles are these folks running in? All the senior execs I know in my career play golf, and I always balked at the idea. But is this supposed to be a power play? How some folks network for their kids to get into Harvard etc?

Is golf elitist? Or is it this country club scene? Was a weird introduction. Oh, and I loved the driving range. Going to find a nice place in NYC soon...

Yeah its also overpriced to keep refugee types out.

That alone shows that its foe upper class.

My dad is member of his local golf club. There are many celebs, politicians and business owners.

Lol have you lived under a rock your entire life?

Country clubs are elitist as fuk by design. Dat initiation fee, like you said.

Public golf courses aren't elitist at all. I played a round yesterday at a public course with a multi-millionaire who lived in La Jolla (and was absolutely awesome at golf), his Botoxed-up tennis wife (who sucked) and a frat bro with a sleeve tat and a call center job who chain-smoked joints out on the course. He was polite about where he puffed his smoke, and everyone involved was cool with it. I was doing shots of Jack out of a pint bottle I smuggled in my bag. No one gave a fuk.

And the cheaper the green fee, the more blue-collar the crowd gets. There's a course down in the barrio in San Diego where you can play 9 holes for $15. I'll regularly be playing there with Mexican construction workers wearing polos from Ross and chit.

I went to grad school in the UK.

Whereas some brehs creamed themselves over traveling to the "birthplace of golf" to learn the Old Course,

I was smashing leggy thespian (landed) types, in wellies, a little coat, and nothing else. I revelled in it, and them.

This whole "where did you skewl" was not lost on me, but now that I am in the circle of senior executives in NYC I figured I'd give golf a try. Could see myself hitting the driving range during lunch sometimes, but the courses take hours.

So is it the golfing, or the country club scene?

Golf itself isn't elitist. There are plenty of people with very modest means playing golf during retirement as something to do.

Many Country Clubs can be joined for $500 per month. This isn't anywhere close to elitist. However there are other CCs where it is $20k upfront and $2500 per month to be a member, and I'd say those are elitist. The people who join them are looking to insert themselves into a specific network and use it for connections.

I would say that the people who join Country Clubs generally view themselves as somewhat elite. However, I don't necessarily view them as elite at all, and most are just degenerates and/or low functioning people who like to party. However, for example I have a quasi-friend who is kind of dumb and joined a Country Club with a $100k salary and thought he was some type of big shot and talked like he had made it.

It’s elitist if you care about golfing at the best courses

If you just want to get out and hit a few balls you avoid those courses and everyone will be laid back and chill at public golf spots.

Depends on area too, I always feel relaxed and have fun at blackrock because it’s in Idaho and chill.

Thunderbird in Palm Springs, asides from the night of the living dead aspect, i would rather just hang out at the house.

But don’t get your sights set on golfing at like pebble beach or Augusta unless you roll in some heavy circles.

Geez man. How many people have an extra $500 a month to spend to be a member of a golf club though? What do they even do in there to justify the cost?


Think I'll stick to fishing from the bank with my $100 combo I bought years ago.

Koala tea courses here in SoCal cost about $100 per round to play. If you're golfcelling every weekend, the membership is basically what you are spending on green fees anyway.

Frankly, it's fukking worth it. It's kind of like golf as a frat house, with a couple hundred of your brahs all playing on the same course. Instead of having to wait on NPC randoms on the next tee box, you're either not waiting at all (public courses pack players on like sardines, country clubs are more open), or you already know the guys ahead of you and you can just shoot the **** with them.

I've got the money to swing for a membership every month, but the initiation fees are phukking KILLER, and so are the waiting lists for memberships right now.

I pay about $500/month in dues.

What I do there is golf without getting paired up with randoms and degenerates. The course itself isn’t really worth the money. I just enjoy that it’s moderately exclusive and much less busy than a public course.

Pretty much this. Country club is 100% elitist, but regular courses are not at all. See plenty of dudes who look like typical bros.

Makes sense.

Short term goal then is to hit the driving range a few times and git gud. Then see what "mingling" might be worthwhile.

If you want to git gud, go to a pro and buy a lesson package.

I love driving range maxxing. It's very Zen in a way, in that you can just endlessly experiment for your swing for ball after ball, focusing on nothing except your technique in that moment. But, it's not a good way to actually improve. I've taken a couple lessons with a really good pro, and every time, my swing improved more than an hour than I did by just hitting buckets of balls almost daily for months.

Pros can spot issues in your swing within 2 or 3 shots that you probably didn't even know existed, and can recommend you drills on the spot to fix them. With the right pro, you will see improvement immediately.

They're really fukking expensive - $150/hr in my area. With the golf boom and so many new players golfmaxxing, they can basically charge whatever they want. And you won't always click with every pro. Some guys have teaching styles that may or may not work for you... some are very mechanical and show you the nuts and bolts of what's happening. other guys teach feels.

But if you want to actually get better, they are the only way to go IMO. Once you find a guy you work well with, your game will take off like fukking crazy. Beating balls on the range is fun, but it is easy to get stuck going in circles.

I'm about to leave and go driving range maxxing right now, honestly. One of my problems is that I'm afraid to make contact with the ground, so I suck my arms in on impact and top the fuk out of the ball. My pro showed me a drill where I put a tee 2" about the ground, clip it with an iron, lower it to 1" above the ground, clip it, then lower it flush to the ground, clip it. I followed that for a while, my iron game took the fuk off, I got away from it and fell into bad habits, my iron game imploded. Going to go do some drills and get it back on track.

Thanks for the tip. To date I hit a bucket's worth of balls. When I switched to the driver I kept getting worried about hitting the ground too so I'd hit towards the top of the ball, or sometimes miss, or once hit up a chunk of turf.

I'll look into local pros to see what packages and locations look like to get as much mileage out of this in the short term that I can. And avoid learning bad habits along the way too!