If you are a golfer, you have likely spent a significant portion of your adult life standing in a mowed field, wondering why you voluntarily pay for an experience that provides the same level of emotional fulfillment as a colonoscopy performed by a guy named “Snake.”
There are two primary ways to experience this particular brand of misery: the High-End Private Country Club and the Municipal Golf Course (or “Muni”). Both involve hitting a ball with a stick, but the similarities end there, much in the same way that both the Space Shuttle and a 1984 Yugo are technically “vehicles.”
The Country Club Experience
The High-End Country Club is a place where everything is incredibly green, including the money you no longer have. The moment you pull your car into the driveway—which is usually lined with oak trees that have more pedigree than you do—a young man named Tyler, who looks like he has never experienced a single pore on his face, sprints toward your vehicle.
Tyler’s sole mission in life is to take your golf bag away from you. At a private club, it is considered a grave social sin to touch your own equipment, as if your bag might be infected with a rare strain of “Middle-Class Cooties.”
Once inside the clubhouse—a building with more marble than the Parthenon—you are greeted by a staff that treats you with the hushed, reverent awe usually reserved for minor European royalty or people who own professional sports franchises. I’ve seen grass on the course so perfect that I sort of felt guilty walking on it. It’s like playing golf on a giant, outdoor pool table. If you hit a ball out of bounds, you don’t go looking for it; you simply wait for a hidden staff member to emerge from a bush and present you with a fresh, organic, hand-polished ball on a silver tray.
The “amenities” at these places are staggering. I once visited a club where the locker room had a “scent menu.” You could choose to have your locker smell like “High-Altitude Cedar” or “The Tears of a Disgraced Hedge Fund Manager.” The showers featured seventeen different showerheads designed to blast water at you from angles you didn’t know existed, effectively pressure-washing your soul.
The Muni Reality
Then, there is the Muni. This is where I play almost all of my rounds – a nine holer in the middle of town that will never make anyone’s 100 best course list, but which I feel fondness towards since my tax dollars go to fund it.
The Muni is a different animal. You don’t “arrive” at a Muni; you survive the parking lot. There is no Tyler. There is, however, a guy named Bud in a stained lawn chair who will watch you struggle with your heavy bag and offer a helpful comment like, “Your trunk’s open.”
The clubhouse at a Muni is usually a cinderblock bunker that smells permanently of deep-fryer grease and despair. The “Pro Shop” consists of three sleeves of scuffed balls, a rack of shirts in sizes “Small” and “Tarp,” and a jar of pickled eggs that has been there since the Nixon administration.
When you check in at a Muni, the starter—a man who clearly hates the sun, the wind, and especially you—will tell you that you are teeing off in four minutes with a group of three strangers named Dave, Dave, and possibly a homeless man who found a tossed 8-iron and has nothing else to do.
The Muni course layout is usually designed by someone whose primary inspiration was “fit this into the land available.” The fairways are not so much “grass” as they are “a collection of weeds that have reached a temporary ceasefire.” Putting on a Muni green is like trying to roll a marble across a giant, sun-dried English muffin. You hit the ball, it bounces over a crack, hits a discarded cigarette butt, disappears into a mysterious hole, and eventually reappears in a different zip code.
The Contrast in Etiquette
At the Country Club, there are Rules. You must wear a collared shirt. You must tuck that shirt in. You must not speak loudly. You must play “The King’s Game” with “The King’s Dignity.” If you celebrate a birdie too loudly, a man in a blazer will emerge from the shadows and politely ask you to leave the planet.
At the Muni, the rules are more… flexible. I have seen men playing golf at Munis wearing:
- Work boots.
- Mesh tank tops.
- Actual pajama pants.
- Nothing but a sense of profound regret.
The Muni is a democratic institution. It is the only place in America where a high-court judge, a plumber, and a guy who claims to have invented the “silent Velcro” can stand together in a bunker for forty-five minutes trying to find a ball that clearly entered another dimension.
The Verdict
The irony of golf is that the more you pay, the easier the game gets. At the Country Club, the bunkers are filled with sand so white and fluffy it looks like powdered sugar. If you land in it, the ball sits up perfectly, practically begging to be hit.
At the Muni, the “sand” in the bunkers is actually a mixture of construction gravel, dried mud, and what I’m fairly certain is radioactive waste. If you land in a Muni bunker, your best bet is to call your family and tell them you won’t be home for dinner, then begin excavating your way out with a pickaxe.
So, which is better?
The Country Club offers a glimpse into a world of elegance, where the grass is manicured and the towels are warm. It makes you feel like a success, right up until you see your bar tab.
But the Muni? The Muni is real life. It’s gritty. It’s loud. It’s the place where you can top a ball, watch it skip across a pond like a panicked frog, hit a goose, and still have the homeless guy tell you, “Nice shot, man,” before he throws up.
Personally, I prefer the Muni. Mostly because at the Country Club, I’m constantly terrified I’m going to accidentally break a statue of a Greek god with a shanked 7-iron. At the Muni, the only thing I may hit, is the liquor store that borders the course.