From Chapter 8 - Pace of Play

Whether you advertise your handicap or not, it’s a silent status signal.

The official hierarchy is visible and mostly irrelevant to your daily experience. The unofficial one (sorted by ball-striking) is the one that actually governs social life at the club. The Country Club Stick hierarchy, we’ll call it.

Good players want to play with other good players. Being a “good guy” and “fun to play with” will only get you so far. At the end of the day, these guys want to compete in “straight up” matches against players who understand the nuances of high-level golf.

I’m here to tell you that becoming a true stick will unlock access that money cannot buy, whether it be inside or outside of the club.

The good players are known, especially at the smaller clubs. It’s advantageous if you’re one of them. You may get your choice of caddy, or the Sunday group will text you on Thursday, letting you know there’s an opening.

Outside of competing (and winning?) your club championship, the real access comes from acquaintances you make over time. More often than not, if you’re a good player, they’ll want to play with you.

The golf world is small, and has a lasting memory. A short reputation for playing well and carrying yourself right travels further than you'd expect. It will open doors for you, both personally and professionally.

An extreme example of this is the Mid-Am cocktail circuit. The players invited to those events are the best mid-ams in the world, but the point remains. The most historic clubs in American golf still revere the serious amateur.

If you’re a great player in your own right, and aren’t a complete jerk, you’ll secure invitations to play at famous and historic clubs. The golf world is small, and if you play your cards right, the game will take you to special places.

The appeal of access to exclusive clubs comes from the scarcity of them. Invitations are rare, and memberships are even more so. Becoming a well known and liked stick increases your odds of playing them.

The social and competitive elements which fuel a proper scratch golfer are difficult to instill later in life.

Teaching a young kid how to handle himself after a bad shot, or a bad tournament round, is irreplaceable life experience. It’s not just the skill side of the game, either, it’s the mental fortitude required to ride the emotional roller coaster which is competitive golf.

Recreational golf won’t build this foundation. Competitive golf at any junior or collegiate level cements a level of foundational skill that can’t be attained through casual weekend rounds.

Yes, these skills can also be drawn from other team sports, (which is why kids shouldn’t specialize as early as they do now), but at some point men’s league basketball turns into rounds of golf on Saturday mornings. Might as well build the golf foundation in parallel to other athletic endeavors.

The game comes for all of us at some point. MJ doesn’t spend his time shooting free throws anymore; he spends time playing big-money games at his own private club.

The ex-All American soccer player will eventually find his way to the game. He'll just wish he'd started sooner.

Golf is the great game for all walks of life. Anyone can enjoy the walk, but there’s a difference between the guy who arrives at the game at age 55 and the kid who picked up the game at age 11. The older guy starts from the ground floor while the kid lives in the penthouse.

Most people have never heard of Ekwanok. That is not an accident.

Tucked into the Green Mountains above Manchester Village, Ekwanok is one of the oldest private clubs in New England and operates with nearly zero public footprint. No marketing. No rankings submissions. No reason to be known outside the people who already know.

Walter Travis designed the course in 1900, a year before he won the first of his three US Amateur titles. The routing makes full use of the Vermont terrain, playing through stands of hardwood and across ground that shifts enough to demand shot-making, not just power. Travis built courses the way he played golf: deliberate, strategic, with very little tolerance for sloppiness.

The clubhouse sits above the course in the manner of a well-kept inn, white clapboard with green shutters, unpretentious from the outside and exactly what you'd expect on the inside. Dark wood, framed scorecards, the quiet atmosphere of a room that hasn't needed to prove anything in a long time.

Ekwanok has hosted US Amateur qualifying. It has produced serious players. It has done all of this without a Wikipedia page worth reading or a single sponsored post on Instagram.

The logo is a clean serif wordmark. Nothing decorative and nothing extra. A club that has been exactly what it is for 125 years and has no intention of explaining itself to anyone who wasn't already going to find it.

I’m bringing this segment back for the first time in awhile. Happy hunting, and remember to Make Putters Beautiful Again.

After a failed affair with a Spider mallet, I’m back on the blade train for good. There’s something about the look, weight, and feel of a proper blade that just feels right. It’s the interminable war between data and aesthetics.

I like The Golfer’s Journal. It’s a proper company that delivers high-quality content.

The photography is excellent, the writing is several cuts above what the major golf publications produce, and the editorial posture, commercially quiet, no tour gossip, no swing tips for beginners, is one worth respecting. This is not a takedown.

But the Broken Tee Society deserves a closer look, because it is a genuinely strange thing when you hold it up to the light.

The “pay for access” model rubs me the wrong way. Corporate outings have always existed, but not to the commercial extent to which BTS elevates it.

The pitch is this: subscribe to TGJ, pay the membership fee, and gain access to a schedule of events at some of the best courses in the country. Aronimink. Olympic Club. Prairie Dunes. Sand Valley. Courses that are either private, prestigious, or both.

The flagship event, the Broken Tee 2-Man, puts 180 members on the grounds of a venue that most golfers will never see in their lives. Players of all skill levels are welcome. There is a double-bogey maximum to keep things moving.

It is a clever business model, and the courses are real.

What it is not is the thing it resembles.

The golf world has always had a vocabulary for access. Reciprocal arrangements between members who vouched for each other. The currency was reputation, built slowly, over years, through competitive play and impeccable conduct. You got onto the great courses because someone who had earned his way in decided you were worth bringing. The system was inefficient, often unfair, and entirely immune to a credit card.

The Broken Tee Society is a market solution to that problem. It says: here is a mechanism. Pay the fee, register before the event sells out, and we will handle the logistics of getting you onto a course your contacts probably cannot. It is democratizing access that was never designed to be democratic, and doing so with genuine taste and quality control. The Golfer's Journal understands the culture it is operating inside, which is what makes the whole thing interesting to think about.

The question worth asking is what gets lost in the transaction.

When 180 strangers descend on Olympic Club for two days of best-ball with double-bogey max, they are playing a great course. They are not experiencing what makes that course great in the way a member does. The round at Olympic has weight because of what surrounds it, the history, the relationships, the understanding of what it took to earn a place there. You can rent the setting. You cannot rent the context.

There is also a skill question that nobody says out loud. The access that this essay is really about, the kind that compounds over a career, flows specifically from the quality of your game. People want to play with good players. The Sunday morning game at a serious club is not an egalitarian arrangement. The right guys are invited because they can play, and because their presence makes the round better for everyone in the group. A subscription service is indifferent to your handicap. The serious amateur circuit is not.

None of this is a criticism of the people who attend Broken Tee Society events. Many of them are serious golfers who love the game and appreciate the courses being put in front of them. TGJ has built something real and it shows.

But it is worth being clear about the distinction. The Broken Tee Society gives you access to great courses. It does not give you the access that matters, the invitations that arrive without a registration link, the games with people who do not appear on any event schedule. That access has one path in. You earn it on the course, over years, one round at a time. There is no annual subscription tier that gets you there faster.

The early membership bylaws of the National Golf Links of America, founded by Charles Blair Macdonald in 1908, included a provision that still holds up as policy today even where it is no longer written down: a member vouching for a guest assumed full personal responsibility for that guest's conduct on the property. Not the club. Not the staff. The member.

If the guest played slowly, that was the member's problem to solve. If the guest conducted himself poorly in the clubhouse, the member heard about it. The relationship between host and guest was a direct extension of the member's own standing at the club.

This arrangement is largely informal now, but the principle has not changed at serious clubs. When a member brings a guest, he is lending that guest a piece of his own reputation for the day. The guest who understands this plays accordingly. The one who doesn't tends not to be invited back — and neither, eventually, is the member who kept bringing him.

I am in contact with an illustrator. As hard as I tried to generate the images with AI, they do not meet the editorial standards which the book deserves. This also means publication will be pushed back to July.

The nuance to some of the illustration is significant (drawing a Country Club Stick, for example), and AI cannot (currently) replicate years spent interacting with certain characters at private clubs.

I’m excited for you all to read it this summer.

Talk soon,

BTG