Fore! Play (15 page)

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.

M
aybe 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 enough.

Jerry says they have to maintain some sense of decorum: “People get married here.”

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.

“Here,” he said, “there were assaults and robberies right on the courses. If you left your car in the lot while you played,
it would probably be gone when you returned. Graffiti was all over everything. The well water at a course on Staten Island
was so polluted that when you used it to water the course all the grass turned black. And people were using the courses as
trash dumps.”

“Tell him about the bodies, Kimble,” said John DeMatteo, another American Golf supervisor. “We get a certain number of dead
bodies deposited on the courses. I try not to be the first one out on the course in the morning.”

“At the Dyker Beach course in Brooklyn,” John said, “it was lovely in the morning, mowing the tall grass and watching the
rats hop here and there like bunnies.” He said area residents complained about the golf course clean-ups because it destroyed
the habitats of the rats, which then sought refuge in nearby homes.

Things began to improve, and more golfers were returning, but many problems peculiar to the city game persisted. Youths still
ran out of the bushes and stole golf carts while the drivers were putting. The manager of the Clearview course spent a good
deal of time roaming the streets of Queens retrieving his carts and driving them back to the course on expressways.

“Abandoned automobiles on the course are a perpetual problem,” Kimble acknowledged. “Auto thieves love to drive them onto
the courses where they get stuck in the sand traps.”

At first he employed armed security guards at the courses. But as crime diminished and in the interest of providing a “country-club
atmosphere,” he replaced the uniformed guards with a force of unarmed “marshals” made up largely of retired men who liked
to play golf. They patrolled the course looking for people trying to sneak on without paying—an offense common to even the
most exclusive suburban clubs—and the marshals reported felonies in progress to the NYPD. They also did away with high-security
cashier cages, which were most un-country-club-like.

“New Yorkers love to beat the system,” he said. “We catch people sneaking on the course and they say ‘so try to stop me.’
” We call the cops and they say ‘What!? Are you kidding? We’ve got three murders over here we’re working on.’ “

With so few open spaces in the city, the golf courses are used as soccer fields, picnic areas, dirt-bike courses, lovers lanes,
and what have you. “They usually get out of the way,” said Jane Angelo, one of the many women golfers beginning to reappear
on public courses after things became a bit safer. “They stopped what appeared to be a gang fight once to let us play through.”

“We try to live and let live now,” Kimble said, adding that a number of people had taken up residence in tents on golf course
property and were allowed to stay so long as they were out of bounds.

He said that when American Golf took over it had to hire “ex-cops or large firemen” as starters—bouncers really—at the courses,
because of the terrible arguments over whose turn it was to play.

“Before they took over,” said Lou Avon, who had played a Bronx course for twenty years, “we had to come here at 1:00 A.M.
to get in line to play. That in itself makes people irritable. Now, they have a phone reservation system, and there aren’t
as many fistfights. It is becoming a country club for the average man.”

Things have improved dramatically. Where once there were rats on the Pelham and Split Rock courses, now there are foxes, rabbits,
and colorful birds, including pheasants, quail, and a mother duck hatching some eggs fifty yards from Pelham’s 7th hole.

And out in the nearly-filled-to-capacity parking lot that was once an abandoned weed field, one can observe expensive cars,
including a Mercedes convertible with “MD” license plates.

* * *

You can play golf anywhere these days, even in Manhattan. The elevator is on the right. After pulling off the West Side Highway,
the rumble and roar of its heavy traffic punctuated by jackhammers, one passes through the portal of a vast, old, enclosed
pier to encounter what appears to be an urban mirage: the clapboard facade of … a country club? Yes, with a putting green
right outside the front door, and valet parking if you like.

No sight is left unseen in New York. But here’s a new one for the books: two guys with full sets of golf clubs riding New
York’s 23rd Street bus, in January.