By Paul Sullivan | From the September 2026 issue

Getting into a private club has never been harder, or more expensive. Initiation fees at private golf clubs are up 55 percent since 2020, according to Michael Gregory of GGA Partners. So once you’ve survived the waiting list (or skipped it with your checkbook), where does all that money go?

The answer depends on who owns your club and what kind of fee you paid. In this feature, Paul Sullivan explains:

Corporate vs. member-owned. At a for-profit club, your fee goes straight into the general coffers. At a member-owned club, it should be set aside for capital projects, and big projects there can be “like moving the Titanic.”

The refundable-fee trap. A refund sounds like a perk, but it can backfire. A strong-willed owner can pay you to leave, and refunds owed to departing members can drain money meant for course and clubhouse upgrades.

What a fair fee looks like. Club Benchmarking’s Ray Cronin uses a simple metric to show whether a club is pricing its membership fairly or just overcharging.

Whether you’re a longtime member or thinking about joining, this is the story to read before you write that next check.

By Don Wade | From the October 1979 issue

In 1979, golf on TV was in trouble. Fifteen of the first 20 tournament telecast drew smaller audiences than in 1978, and the Los Angeles Open, the previous year’s top-rated event, lost 42 percent of its viewers. Don Wade asked the people running golf on TV what was wrong, and nobody agreed. NBC blamed slowing growth, mild weather and baseball took some heat, and CBS’ Frank Chirkinian said golf needed “a new star people can get excited about.” Commissioner Deane Beman’s answer was too many tournaments on TV, and that’s the one the PGA Tour is acting on now. Starting in 2028, the top-level Championship Series will consist of 23 or 24 events and will run from February to August, and the cuts are already landing: Colonial Country Club, which has hosted a PGA Tour event every year since 1946, is not expected to be included in the new Championship Series. Forty-seven years later, the Tour’s answer looks a lot like Beman’s.