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The Country Club Comeback Is Less About Golf Than Gated Belonging

The richest, most isolated young Americans in decades declared the institution dead, then paid their way back in—gate, Warhol and all.

The drinks arrive by drone now. At Apogee, the three-course golf cathedral that rose out of the Hobe Sound scrub in Florida, a small aircraft can ferry a cold one to the 14th green so no one has to interrupt the round. The founding members reportedly paid over $1 million each for the privilege. They are, by and large, between 35 and 55, with kids in school and a club membership or two back in the city, and they make up the most amusing reversal in American leisure: the people who spent the 2010s declaring the country club extinct have decided they want one, only with better food and a padel court. To understand why that’s funny, you have to remember what a country club was built to be. The American version arrived in the 1880s—the Country Club in Brookline, Massachusetts, usually gets the credit—and it spread with the suburbs and the commuter rail as a place where a certain kind of family could golf, dine, marry off its children and, crucially, decide who else got to do those things alongside them. The amenities were the visible product, but the relentless screening was the actual one. 

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Then, for a while, it looked finished. Golf shed courses for most of two decades—net closures every year from the mid-2000s onward, nearly 280 in 2019 alone—and the obituaries effectively wrote themselves. Institutional belonging had gone out of fashion generally; this was the era the sociologist Robert Putnam diagnosed in Bowling Alone, when Americans quit the Elks and the bowling leagues and the Tuesday-night anything. Church membership slipped........

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