Weekend Wisdom

by Vic Williams

Private Conversation

There's More Than One Way to Join the Club, At Least for a Day

It happened a couple holes before the turn, after I’d pumped one ball OB to far left field, one more way right and carded a 9 on an admittedly brutal Tom Fazio par 5, en route to a stellar front-nine 54. Subjected to this butchery were four witnesses: A fellow golf writer, his wife, the head pro at Pronghorn — a private palace of a development in Central Oregon — and my own conscience, whom I named, simply, Inner Voice. Somehow I managed to spare the others the fusillade of verbal self-abuse for which I’m famous, but on the flipside I got a good chewing out from ol’ I.V. as I defaced Fazio’s newest work of art in the name of hat-in-hand journalistic juice.

“Just what the hell are you doing here?” he said.

Then came an even more insidious assertion: “You don’t belong here.”

How could I argue? For one thing, I was sucking wind, barely passing as a golfer though I recovered with a 39 on the homeward nine. For another, Pronghorn’s second course, a rangy, breezy brute laced magnificently through volcanic high desert east of the Cascades, is closed to anyone but members and guests, and I was neither. Well, in this case I guess I was a guest, getting in through my status as a writer and sporadically paid publisher of this here magazine. Several weeks before I had called Pronghorn’s PR firm in Colorado, and, to my amazement, they set me up from stem to stern — rounds on both the Fazio and Nicklaus course (which opened in 2005 to fractional owners), two nights in a lovely villa and dinner with muckety-mucks and “real” members. Not that the tee sheet at either course was drenched in ink. Our foursome ruled the Fazio alone, and on the Nicklaus it was me, two other twosomes and nobody else. Between rounds I warmed up alone on the immaculate range, loaded up on tees and ballmarkers and headed out to notch another conquest on my personal tree of private club experiences, blowing off any feelings of guilt ’cause I knew Pronghorn would gets its editorial due. There’s absolutely nothing negative to say about either course. They’re scenic, routed like the best dream you’ve ever had and in fantastic shape. They’re also private, but even a struggling middle-class schmoe like me can’t hold that against them. Nor could I harbor similar feelings a month and a half later at Gray’s Crossing in Truckee, just 35 miles from my front door in Reno. It’s private, too, but since it’s brand new I was invited to play it. I accepted, and you can read all about my experience elsewhere in this issue.

Of course, since most of y’all are public golfers and my own prospects of joining a club are decidedly slim, I’d like to see more new public-access courses in the pipeline. A few have opened over the past couple of years across the West — Old Greenwood, just across I-80 from Gray’s Crossing; Monarch Dunes on California’s Central Coast, We-Ko-Pa’s Saguaro Course in Arizona, a few in Oregon, Chambers Bay in Washington and, most recently, The Crossings at Carlsbad in Southern Cal — but they’re far outnumbered by new private tracks from Northern Idaho to Southern Arizona. That’s the hot market, if you can call anything in golf hot right now. Truth to tell, quite a few public tracks have left the planet recently; the demand for them just isn’t there, and it’s tough to make a buck unless you’ve got membership and real estate paying the freight. It’s the way of the world until further notice.

“Private golf courses are private because developers need them to sell homes,” is a quote I’ve heard many times from PR people. They’re right. Today’s new private golf course is almost always surrounded by million-dollar mansions, unless it’s a hybrid private/high-end resort deal like the Broadmoor’s Mountain Course in Colorado Springs, which I also played this summer. And deep down, the Inner Voice agrees with me. He realizes that it’s part of my job to cover the private jewels, too. But that doesn’t keep him from pounding away in the space behind my face, as I spray another 7-iron or lip out a gimme.

“Hey, all you gotta do is buy a house behind the gates, shell out a truckload of Benjamins and they’ll let you in,” he begins after another double bogey at Pronghorn. “You’ll belong.”

“I know that. But I can’t do it.”

“Well, maybe someday you can. You’ll make it. A lot of middle class folks join up.”

“True.”

“But you’ll still suck at golf.”

“So do a lot of other members.”

“My point exactly. Doesn’t that stick in your craw? An amazing track like this, being defaced daily by the bulk of its dues-paying denizens?”

“Well, I wouldn’t go that far. Every club is loaded with sticks, a core of real golfers.”

“And you’re not one of them.”

“Yeah, I know. I’m a piker, a trespasser, not worthy of the sod I currently trod, though I’ve been playing for 35 years. So what’s it to you? I’m just doing my job.”

"Which is?”

“Experiencing these rarefied routings and passing my impressions onto thousands of grateful readers.”

“Though most of them can’t get in the door.”

“You have a point. Now shut up.” I thought that would do it. But I.V. kept rolling.

“Not so fast, meat. I won’t clam up until you agree that maybe, just maybe, the golf universe is stuck in reverse, heading back to the bad ol’ days of playing by privilege, with all those public-play losers left on the side of the fairway.”

“You’ll never get me to go there, bro. Because it’s not true. Golf is much more equal-opportunity than it was 100 or even 50 years ago. It chucked that elitist air a long time ago.”

“Really?” The Voice retorted, and as I stood over a putt on the smoothest green I’d ever seen, my head began to throb. “From where I sit, the game’s in a serious backslide, economic necessity or no.”

“So blame it on Bush. You blame him for everything else.”

“Yeah, well, I could go into a whole diatribe about the income gap, the tax cuts, the obvious tilting of the table toward the haves and the ‘have mores,’ as Dubya himself so famously put it,” IV retorted. “And it’s showing up in the numbers. You get invited to more new private courses than ever before, and don’t lie to me — when you show up, you love it. You start dreaming about signing the line and slamming the gate behind you.”

“Yeah, sometimes,” I said sheepishly as I tidied up a four-jack and managed a chuckle for my long-suffering fellow players.

“I mean, why wouldn’t you want to hide out here on such a blissful slab of grass, and stay with your own kind?”

“Hide out? My own kind?”

“What else can you call it?”

“How about, ‘Being part of a community.’”

I.V. paused. “Well, that’s the major sales point, isn’t it? But open the lens, broaden the view, and it’s one buy-in community separate from everyone else. You can’t get around that.”

“Of course,” I said. “That’s why they call it private.” By now we — I mean I — was on the next tee, ready to put that double-bogey behind me. My drive actually found the fairway, and I felt my shoulders inch up and back in a quick twitch of temporary pride. “Why do you think there was, like, one golf course in the Soviet Union until it fell, and the capitalists moved in? There was no such thing as private ownership, at least not officially.”

“That, and it was damned cold,” I.V. said.

We both laughed, or maybe it was just me. “Now, if you’ll pipe down for a minute, maybe I can make a par here and right the ship.”

“Good luck with that.”

I would need it. The pars did come, grudgingly, along with a couple more doubles and two birdies. And it all played out without too much comment from I.V., though I could feel him hiding just around the corners of my mind, ready to pounce with a put-down. That’s just the way it is for me on a golf course: Self-talk straight from the School of Masochism, without the sexual side effects. All internal and unnecessary pain, no discernible gain. But once in a while — usually on a private spread like Pronghorn where I normally don’t belong, and where far fewer than 100 souls sully the pristine fairways on most days — I’ll ease up on myself and just play the game in a cocoon of sorts. Or maybe it’s a zone of comfort and ease. That’s what happened on No. 11 when, as I lined up an 8-iron on a slightly downhill 3-par, a deer bounced across the green, paused on the fringe for a ryegrass nibble and slid up into the juniper. “Take that, I.V.” I said to the warming midmorning air. “That’s why people go private to play golf.”

Big mistake.

“Are you telling me you can’t find wildlife on a public track?” I.V. screamed in my ear. “What was it, eight months ago when you and Carl saw all those deer at Bidwell Park in Chico, which is as muni as munis get?”

Carl is Pastor Carl from my church in Reno, so at the time I figured he’d put in an order for a doe and a couple fawns with the Big Guy. “Yeah, OK, there are exceptions. But we’re out here by ourselves with no other players within several holes of us. You can’t get that at any public course in creation.”

“Whaddya mean we? You’re out here by yourself.”

“But I hear you still.”

“That’s in my job description as your conscience, knucklehead. To speak up and let you know when I think things are awry. And you playing all this private golf without the cred is not only awry, it’s obscene.”

“It’s also America.”

“Precisely my point. We could argue about this forever.”

“And probably will,” I said, tapping in for par and hoping to catch another glimpse of the deer here in Oregon paradise.

“So I can’t sway you? You’re still pining for the whole private gig someday — legitimately, I mean?”

“A man can dream, can’t he?”

“Well, yeah.”
So I did, for the rest of that round, before reality set in. And I still do, to excess, against I.V.’s wishes and my own Everyman sensibilities. I can’t help it. Nor can I deny that in a free society, as in golf itself, privacy has its place. FG