staff didn’t even pretend to make a mistake when a guest arrived in a new Ford pickup. “I kept it pretty,” the owner said of his vehicle. “This was no beater with rust.” Still, a club employee ran frantically into the locker room to report that pickup trucks aren’t allowed to be visible in the top car park and that it needed to be moved. “My nice truck had been banished to oblivion where apparently it belonged,” the guest continued. “They seemed to have stretched the traditional club etiquette to include well-behaved vehicles, too.” In no element of modern life do the guidelines at different clubs fluctuate more widely than with rules pertaining to the cellphone. At some clubs you can conduct a full video Zoom meeting in between shots; others permit only discreet phone calls off to the side. Some allow texting but have separate booths for calls, and others don’t want to even see the outline of the phone in your bag and likely expect important messages to be delivered via mail.
For courses that resist attention, photos and videos are met with disdain. A guest at a famous Bay Area club in Northern California made the mistake of snapping photos of the clubhouse and first tee, which he was able to enjoy for a grand total of 15 minutes. “We were immediately greeted by an assistant pro who informed us of the ‘no picture policy’ and asked us to delete the pictures from our phones while he stood there,” he said. At a private club in Westchester County, New York, phones are prohibited from leaving golfers’ bags, but during one round, a guest’s device was buzzing enough he feared an emergency. When he unzipped the bag to peek without the device ever leaving the pocket, he assumed he had escaped notice. Not so, according to the caddiemaster, who approached the guest’s host at the end of the round and said two women in the adjacent fairway had caught the whole sequence and reported the violation.
A similar example of policing played out at a Midwestern club that has hosted multiple major championships. When a golfer was spotted multiple times with his phone to his ear, members began calling the first-tee starter to lob complaints. That the visitor was former President Bill Clinton didn’t seem to matter. Sometimes it’s not the rule that is so unreasonable but the way it’s enforced. Consider the time a guest arrived at a top-100 course in Pennsylvania wearing cargo shorts, and his host decided the best way to spare his friend embarrassment was to tee off hoping no one would notice. He was wrong. On the third hole a staff member came with a letter from the club manager issuing a formal warning and a suggestion to buy new shorts in the golf shop as soon as possible. However, the letter’s delivery couldn’t be topped. The staff member was in a tuxedo, carrying the letter on a silver platter. “The sight will be burned in my memory,” a third member of the group recalled. THIS IS NOT A STRICTLY American dynamic. Elements of US club culture have been inherited from the game’s birthplace. Muirfield in Scotland is known for hosting 16 Open Championships, but the membership inspired Golf Digest’s Peter Andrews to write a 1992 feature titled, “Quite Likely the Rudest Club in the World.”
A CLUB EMPLOYEE SAID THAT PICKUP TRUCKS AREN’T ALLOWED TO BE VISIBLE AND NEEDED TO BE MOVED.
78 GOLF DIGEST SOUTH AFRICA
JANUARY/FEBRUARY 2025
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