By Chris Millard
Illustrations by Seymour Chwast
October 2000
As golf hotbeds go, Kutztown, Pa., is a long way from, say, Carmel, Calif. In 2008, however, the Pennsylvania borough finds itself at the core of a phenomenon that's sweeping through American golf: the changing face of the private club.
The numbers are startling. According to the National Golf Foundation, in 1970 there were 10,188 golf facilities in the United States. Private clubs accounted for 45 percent of the total. By 1990 the share of private clubs had slipped to 37 percent, and today such clubs represent only 28 percent of all American golf facilities.
It's not only the percentage of private clubs that's dropping. The raw number of private golf clubs in the United States actually decreased by 395 between 1990 and 2007, to 4,415. This while the number of daily-fee and municipal courses rose by 3,519 facilities, to 11,555. Project these statistics against a background of softening participation in the sport--the number of golfers playing eight or more rounds per year fell 13 percent between 2000 and 2007--and you have a game in transition.
"We're facing a new concept of the private golf club," says Mike Hughes, CEO of the National Golf Course Owners Association. "With the exception of the old-line private clubs--and I would say that's a very small slice, maybe one-tenth of all private clubs--everybody else is in the new reality."
Golf in America, though overwhelmingly a public enterprise (only 9 percent of all U.S. golfers are private-club members), has long been perceived as exclusionary. The truth is, it's easier now than at any time in the past 20 years to join your local private club (assuming you don't live in Pine Valley, N.J., or Augusta, Ga.). Likewise, if you prefer your golf public, the selection and affordability has never been more tempting.
The underlying reasons for golf's equivalent of the summer clearance sale span the American cultural spectrum from the graying of the baby boomer to the prevalence of the two-income family; from lousy club governance to emerging parental trends and from some place called Chambers Bay to the preferences of Generations X and Y. But industry insiders agree on four inextricably linked forces: the economy, heightened competition, the baby boomer and club governance.
Take Kutztown. If there is a place that represents the pressures facing the private golf club in America, it's Kutztown's Berkleigh Country Club. "The Berkleigh" was founded in 1925. In that era, Jews, much like the Irish and Italians in the region between Allentown and Reading, weren't welcome at the more established clubs. Berkleigh became an idyllic refuge.
The club was at its best in the 1970s, just as Adam Leifer (who would win eight club championships) and his pals, including future Golf Channel personality Rich Lerner (a two-time Berkleigh club champ), headed off to college. Better jobs awaited their generation in places like New York, Boston and Chicago, and the unraveling of Berkleigh began.
Because of the club's location, about 20 miles outside Reading, the lunch crowd started to dwindle, and the membership began to migrate to Berkshire Country Club, which is only five minutes from town. Soon, the time pressures felt by the remaining dual-income baby boomers and their resulting socialization patterns began to affect club life. Soccer practice and T-ball called; gone were the days when guys would stick around after 18 holes and have a few beers. Even on weekends, members began to forgo lunch. "They'd finish 18, get in the car and go home," says Leifer.
As if the attack from within wasn't enough, outside competition arose from half a dozen nearby public courses like the semiprivate Golden Oaks Golf Club in Fleetwood and Reading Country Club, a noted old-line club (where Byron Nelson once served as the golf professional) that is now open to the public.
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