In just the last year, Porters Neck's Tom Fazio designed course has gone from good to excellent thanks to the investments the club made. (Photo courtesy of Porters Neck)
It is a challenging and scary proposition to take a golf club private. First, you need a governing board with the backbone to make an investment in the course up front, before membership rolls are filled. There's a reason you don't see marketing lines like, "If you join, we'll use your money to improve the golf course." Then you need to communicate, without being too stuffy, that privacy brings a certain amount of privilege not found at daily fee courses, and that the privilege is worth the price of initiation. Simple math is working against you; a $30,000 initiation fee divided by a $70 daily fee at a good public course works out to a decade worth of golf elsewhere.
That is the challenge that Porters Neck Country Club, about 12 miles northeast of Wilmington, NC, is facing. Although the club is being coy about its intentions, all signs point to a transition to 
exclusive status. Greens fees for non-members have been raised to $110 and up, the club is in its second contract with a marketing firm that specializes in attracting new members, and the golf membership rolls are nearing 400, certainly a good number for an 18-hole course. The club's members, who took over from the developer in 2004, invested aggressively and smartly, spending $1 million in 2006 to restore and upgrade the terrific greens on the Tom Fazio layout, improving tee and fairway grasses as well as the drainage systems that support them, and enhancing the practice facilities (they added another $200,000 for new lighted tennis courts). We played the course before the renovations and after, and the money was well spent in our estimation.
Over time, we have found that Tom Fazio designs the most consistently good routings of any architect. On otherwise excellent courses, some holes by Nicklaus and Dye just make you scratch your head at how odd or brutal they are (or both). We've yet to find a clunker among the dozen or so Fazio courses we've played in the two years. He may not provide the drama of the others, but neither does he provide any unpleasant surprises. [Continued; click below]
