6 ms·

Death of the Country Club

22 points by RickJWagner 7y ago

RickJWagner 7y ago
Bowling went through a similar decline. Societal forces, worth of underlying real estate, etc. We need something similar, else we risk further erosion of social fabric.
- SomeOldThrow 7y ago
  If country clubs ever contributed positively to social fabric they have hidden this phenomenon very well.
  - RickJWagner 7y ago
    They brought us "CaddyShack".
  - mc32 7y ago
    The worst thing about them is all the C-types talk to each other and compare and then come back and say, why aren’t we using solution X? So and so is using it at their co and they’re doing well!
    - iamstef 7y ago
      Literally the worst
  - WalterBright 7y ago
    > Leisure for today’s younger adults more often involves streaming TV shows in a high-rent city bedroom, not playing 18 holes on a suburban green. Not sure that's better.
    - SomeOldThrow 7y ago
      It sure as hell ain't worse. Anyway, the "high rent" bit makes me reject it wholesale. This was targeted at yuppies, not the people excluded from country clubs. Who gives a shit about yuppies (including us all): they can buy whatever they need.
Causality1 7y ago
You know how hard it is to convince someone you're not a racist after they find out you belong to a country club? Very. You can't spend a couple hundred years building a reputation for being the domain of rich racist assholes and then act surprised when being a rich racist asshole finally goes out of fashion.
- MaupitiBlue 7y ago
  Spend less time worrying about what people think about you.
  - SomeOldThrow 7y ago
    ...unless you're a racist.
  - Causality1 7y ago
    It's not what they think about me, it's what I think about them. Even in the last few years there's been news story after news story about some country club being a hotbed of racism. It's an industry I refuse to support and I'm happy to see it die.
    - jonnycoder 7y ago
      Queue the ‘whatever i dont like is racist’ meme. I get paired with black golfers all the time. I personally witness more bigotry and racism from cities than I do golfing or visiting rural areas.
      - Causality1 7y ago
        >I personally witness more bigotry and racism from cities No argument on that bit.
Spooky23 7y ago
The chairman of my wife’s old company invited us to a dinner at a fancy country club. He had to spend $20k a year in entertaining. Nobody has the time to do that anymore. That’s too rich for most political people and too time consuming for most business people.
- cascom 7y ago
  I’m a little skeptical of that number, while I don’t doubt the annual dues might have been $20k/year even clubs with mid six figure initiations are unlikely to have a $20k/year food and beverage minimum
  - Spooky23 7y ago
    It may have been dues with some sort of credit. They basically ate out and did all family functions there if I recall.
- sonnyblarney 7y ago
  Yeah, I don't think $20K in 'required spending'. More like $20K/year in dues, and $2K in 'required spending'. Even then, that's a lot. Maralago for example only has $14K in annual dues.
abtinf 7y ago
Another (now dead) comment here called country clubs the domain of rich racists. So I thought I might share my story. When my family immigrated to the US in the 1980s, my parents had limited English fluency and familiarity with the culture, so they couldn’t find any work. My father managed to work as a day laborer at country club one day. He had a conversation with one of the club members, expressed a desire to work in his broken English, was referred to another member, and then was connected with a permanent (menial) job at a local hotel. It made a big difference in our lives. I don’t have any other experience with such clubs, but I’m thankful that at least one of them recognized and helped a hard worker get ahead.
Ninjak2 7y ago
The author of this story failed at research. The Santa Clara Golf & Tennis Club is a public institution operating on land owned by the City of Santa Clara. It's the exact opposite of a ritzy, expensive club. It's closing because of developer greed, meanwhile other public golf courses in the area (San Jose Muni, Sunnyvale Muni, Shoreline, etc) are doing just fine. None of those courses would ever be mistaken for a Country Club though.
opnitro 7y ago
This is basically good.
all_blue_chucks 7y ago
Who has time to play golf? Even though we can afford it, we are constantly in back-to-back "sprints" during the day and tied to our computers so we can respond to pages for "devops" at night. In the rare downtime we get these days, the pace of modern highly paid professions leaves us too exhausted for lengthy sports like golf. Leisure is dead and will stay dead until life takes precedence in work-life-balance again.
- pg_is_a_butt 7y ago
  The public golf course across the street from my house is fully booked every single day
- baroffoos 7y ago
  This is a reflection of your own personal experience and is not reflective of all or probably even most peoples life. I would say the majority of people have plenty of time in their weekend for a game of golf. They may have filled their weekends up with other activies but if they wanted to play golf they could.
  - jdietrich 7y ago
    The golf industry disagrees. Lack of leisure time is one of the key factors driving the steep decline in the golf market. https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2015/03/05/why-america-fell-out-of-love-with-golf/ https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2015/03/05/why-a...
    - scottlocklin 7y ago
      People don't lack leisure time at all. They just spend it fiddling with their phones. I don't like golf, but I do like the idea of playing a relaxing yet challenging game outdoors which takes 4 hours to complete. Beats the shit out of fiddling with your phone.
      - baroffoos 7y ago
TaylorGood 7y ago
Depends on your locale. I’m in Orange County, south of LA where country clubs and yacht clubs are alive and well. Younger generations are joining both.
woodruffw 7y ago
There's something awfully tone-deaf about a conservative magazine using John Updike, Sinclair Lewis and Philip Roth to bemoan the decline of country clubs. These men's works (American Pastoral, Rabbit, Run) excoriate the culture of the 50s and 60s rat-race-to-the-country-club. The fact that the literature of the period employs the country club is not evidence of the country club's positive aspects -- it's frequently evidence of the exact opposite.
vivekahuja 7y ago
Nice post that you shared! I think with the trend of more urbanization, upper-middle class millennials have substituted some of the aspects of country clubs (social community mixed with athletics/sports) with expensive boutique group sports and fitness experiences like CrossFit, SoulCycle, and perhaps Equinox. Some of the true upper class friends I have still do things like pay dues for expensive social athletic clubs.
cascom 7y ago
Frankly I’m skeptical - is the article talking about high end private clubs owned by their memberships, or the corporately owned “country clubs” or clubs associated with a real estate development or planned community? They are two totally different things...
Buldak 7y ago
This reminds me of casinos, whose decline is also oft-reported nowadays. The financial difficulties of millennials notwithstanding, I expect that casinos just aren't as culturally appealing to today's youth as they were to their parents, and I wonder if something similar could be said of country clubs.
- sonnyblarney 7y ago
  Vegas is doing very well on the whole.
  - SomeOldThrow 7y ago
    Not due to gambling, though. Kids these days go for the clubbing.
sonnyblarney 7y ago
My folks belonged to a club, we were not wealthy, but my parents enjoy golf and it's a super important place for them to engage with their peers. It was an important community to them. We also belonged to a Ski club (again, not super expensive), and it was essentially our community. I think most of our family friends were part of that club or neighbouring one's. Most of them were a little well off (think Dentist), but most were definitely not rich, though sure there were some. Though clubs have been seen as the domain of the rich, they are really a great thing, I wish there were more of them. The only real negative attribute I see is that they can be seen as a strong sign of class: people will be judged on what club they belong to, and the fees will determine status. It doesn't have to be that way however.

22 points by RickJWagner 7y ago

Bowling went through a similar decline. Societal forces, worth of underlying real estate, etc. We need something similar, else we risk further erosion of social fabric.

SomeOldThrow 7y ago
If country clubs ever contributed positively to social fabric they have hidden this phenomenon very well.
- RickJWagner 7y ago
  They brought us "CaddyShack".
- mc32 7y ago
  The worst thing about them is all the C-types talk to each other and compare and then come back and say, why aren’t we using solution X? So and so is using it at their co and they’re doing well!
  - iamstef 7y ago
    Literally the worst
- WalterBright 7y ago
  > Leisure for today’s younger adults more often involves streaming TV shows in a high-rent city bedroom, not playing 18 holes on a suburban green. Not sure that's better.
  - SomeOldThrow 7y ago
    It sure as hell ain't worse. Anyway, the "high rent" bit makes me reject it wholesale. This was targeted at yuppies, not the people excluded from country clubs. Who gives a shit about yuppies (including us all): they can buy whatever they need.

Causality1 7y ago

You know how hard it is to convince someone you're not a racist after they find out you belong to a country club? Very. You can't spend a couple hundred years building a reputation for being the domain of rich racist assholes and then act surprised when being a rich racist asshole finally goes out of fashion.

MaupitiBlue 7y ago
Spend less time worrying about what people think about you.
- SomeOldThrow 7y ago
  ...unless you're a racist.
- Causality1 7y ago
  It's not what they think about me, it's what I think about them. Even in the last few years there's been news story after news story about some country club being a hotbed of racism. It's an industry I refuse to support and I'm happy to see it die.
  - jonnycoder 7y ago
    Queue the ‘whatever i dont like is racist’ meme. I get paired with black golfers all the time. I personally witness more bigotry and racism from cities than I do golfing or visiting rural areas.
    - Causality1 7y ago
      >I personally witness more bigotry and racism from cities No argument on that bit.

Spooky23 7y ago

The chairman of my wife’s old company invited us to a dinner at a fancy country club. He had to spend $20k a year in entertaining. Nobody has the time to do that anymore. That’s too rich for most political people and too time consuming for most business people.

cascom 7y ago
I’m a little skeptical of that number, while I don’t doubt the annual dues might have been $20k/year even clubs with mid six figure initiations are unlikely to have a $20k/year food and beverage minimum
- Spooky23 7y ago
  It may have been dues with some sort of credit. They basically ate out and did all family functions there if I recall.
sonnyblarney 7y ago
Yeah, I don't think $20K in 'required spending'. More like $20K/year in dues, and $2K in 'required spending'. Even then, that's a lot. Maralago for example only has $14K in annual dues.

abtinf 7y ago

Another (now dead) comment here called country clubs the domain of rich racists. So I thought I might share my story. When my family immigrated to the US in the 1980s, my parents had limited English fluency and familiarity with the culture, so they couldn’t find any work. My father managed to work as a day laborer at country club one day. He had a conversation with one of the club members, expressed a desire to work in his broken English, was referred to another member, and then was connected with a permanent (menial) job at a local hotel. It made a big difference in our lives. I don’t have any other experience with such clubs, but I’m thankful that at least one of them recognized and helped a hard worker get ahead.

Ninjak2 7y ago

The author of this story failed at research. The Santa Clara Golf & Tennis Club is a public institution operating on land owned by the City of Santa Clara. It's the exact opposite of a ritzy, expensive club. It's closing because of developer greed, meanwhile other public golf courses in the area (San Jose Muni, Sunnyvale Muni, Shoreline, etc) are doing just fine. None of those courses would ever be mistaken for a Country Club though.

opnitro 7y ago

This is basically good.

all_blue_chucks 7y ago

Who has time to play golf? Even though we can afford it, we are constantly in back-to-back "sprints" during the day and tied to our computers so we can respond to pages for "devops" at night. In the rare downtime we get these days, the pace of modern highly paid professions leaves us too exhausted for lengthy sports like golf. Leisure is dead and will stay dead until life takes precedence in work-life-balance again.

pg_is_a_butt 7y ago
The public golf course across the street from my house is fully booked every single day
baroffoos 7y ago
This is a reflection of your own personal experience and is not reflective of all or probably even most peoples life. I would say the majority of people have plenty of time in their weekend for a game of golf. They may have filled their weekends up with other activies but if they wanted to play golf they could.
- jdietrich 7y ago
  The golf industry disagrees. Lack of leisure time is one of the key factors driving the steep decline in the golf market. https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2015/03/05/why-america-fell-out-of-love-with-golf/ https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2015/03/05/why-a...
  - scottlocklin 7y ago
    People don't lack leisure time at all. They just spend it fiddling with their phones. I don't like golf, but I do like the idea of playing a relaxing yet challenging game outdoors which takes 4 hours to complete. Beats the shit out of fiddling with your phone.
    - baroffoos 7y ago

TaylorGood 7y ago

Depends on your locale. I’m in Orange County, south of LA where country clubs and yacht clubs are alive and well. Younger generations are joining both.

woodruffw 7y ago

There's something awfully tone-deaf about a conservative magazine using John Updike, Sinclair Lewis and Philip Roth to bemoan the decline of country clubs. These men's works (American Pastoral, Rabbit, Run) excoriate the culture of the 50s and 60s rat-race-to-the-country-club. The fact that the literature of the period employs the country club is not evidence of the country club's positive aspects -- it's frequently evidence of the exact opposite.

vivekahuja 7y ago

Nice post that you shared! I think with the trend of more urbanization, upper-middle class millennials have substituted some of the aspects of country clubs (social community mixed with athletics/sports) with expensive boutique group sports and fitness experiences like CrossFit, SoulCycle, and perhaps Equinox. Some of the true upper class friends I have still do things like pay dues for expensive social athletic clubs.

cascom 7y ago

Frankly I’m skeptical - is the article talking about high end private clubs owned by their memberships, or the corporately owned “country clubs” or clubs associated with a real estate development or planned community? They are two totally different things...

Buldak 7y ago

This reminds me of casinos, whose decline is also oft-reported nowadays. The financial difficulties of millennials notwithstanding, I expect that casinos just aren't as culturally appealing to today's youth as they were to their parents, and I wonder if something similar could be said of country clubs.

sonnyblarney 7y ago
Vegas is doing very well on the whole.
- SomeOldThrow 7y ago
  Not due to gambling, though. Kids these days go for the clubbing.

sonnyblarney 7y ago

My folks belonged to a club, we were not wealthy, but my parents enjoy golf and it's a super important place for them to engage with their peers. It was an important community to them. We also belonged to a Ski club (again, not super expensive), and it was essentially our community. I think most of our family friends were part of that club or neighbouring one's. Most of them were a little well off (think Dentist), but most were definitely not rich, though sure there were some. Though clubs have been seen as the domain of the rich, they are really a great thing, I wish there were more of them. The only real negative attribute I see is that they can be seen as a strong sign of class: people will be judged on what club they belong to, and the fees will determine status. It doesn't have to be that way however.