Is there anything more distinctly American than a member-guest tournament? But for minor variations, you know the drill. Multiple days, multiple flights, cash pools, tee gifts, beverage stations galore, skills challenges, red meat for the stag dinner and more varied fare when the spouses come to dance under the moonlight, maybe a shootout to decide the overall champions, cigars, hugs, jokes, uninterrupted quality time with a person important to you. The member-guest is a golf carnival. As one regular partner of mine says, “Win or lose, we’re going on all the rides.”
There’s no single club that can claim the member-guest. Most likely, the tradition developed organically and independently across the country after World War II. The emphasis on hosting and hospitality matched a boom in American business, and showcasing a club in its best condition fit an expanding private club model that relied on recruiting a lot of new members. Generally, British clubs have been staider and more exclusionary. One might argue that because British clubs have allowed and still allow anyone access to their courses under restrictions, the fact you could only get on most American private courses as a guest helped make the MG “the biggest event of the year” at so many.
Some of the longest-running member-guests in the United States date to the 1950s and 60s. It seems the Scots only recently caught on to the fun. Royal Dornoch started its member-guest in 2005, Muirfield in 2014, and a member from the Royal & Ancient tells us, “We have an invitational at The Castle Course. It’s relatively new. A one-day foursomes event, very low key, no gifts.”
My first member-guest experiences were from the vantage of caddie in the Robert Todd Lincoln, or RTL, named for the eldest son of America’s 16th president, who was himself a pivotal president of Ekwanok Country Club in Manchester, Vt. The energy around the event was always contagious, and just like the flight brackets, the bag rates were wide open with possibility. Years later, I returned to this event to compete as a guest, and please forgive if this sounds sappy, but it was a full-circle moment inmyAmerican story. Each of us has our own.
Since, from sea to shining sea, I’ve been both guest and host, partnering with my father-in-law, my brother, various friends, valued work connections and even once with a guy I barely knew who might’ve hoped he was getting a ringer. I laid an egg. However, my new pal and I still enjoyed each other’s company along with all the best things golf has to offer.
If the 250th anniversary of the United States is a time to reflect on our contributions to a sport we didn’t invent but propelled forward, at the very top of the list must be the professional game as we know it—and equipment. Ever since the money got good, the best golfers in the world have competed on the PGA Tour and worn the hats of mostly
American companies that led the way from hickory to carbon-fused titanium. You can tour their facilities in Carlsbad, Calif., and Phoenix and Chicago. Also, it was primarily our mowers and agronomic practices that transformed putting. This isn’t chest-beating but rather gratitude for what we’ve inherited. Still, for all their hard work and ingenuity, our golfing predecessors wouldn’t want us to get bogged down talking about the media and metal industries in the middle of summer. For all the things the Fourth of July signifies, for much of the nation, it means that member-guest season is nigh.
American birthdays have come in tumultuous times. During our 100th, the wounds of the Civil War were fresh. For the 200th, President Nixon had just been impeached. Even as the Revolutionary War raged, there’s evidence that clubs entered our ports. It’s not hard to imagine the mindset of Scottish immigrants who thought, “Fook it. Let’s go hit some balls in a field.” They’d already been dealing with King George and his forebears for the better part of a millennium. Even when it seems the world is burning, we’ve always had fun getting together for golf.
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