Americans wonder if golf has 'grass ceiling'

"I don't see where there's anything wrong with that," he says. "If people want to have their own thing, they have their own thing."

In recent years, however, a combination of factors has made that difficult for all but the most elite clubs.

One is economic. The golf course-building binge of the 1990s has left more golf courses than people to play them. The competition has already put a number of private clubs out of business. Others, looking for members, have actually turned to advertising. The Brandywine Country Club in Maumee, Ohio, for instance, sent out a mass mailing to potential members with a coupon for $2,000 off the $6,000 initiation fee.

"As private clubs must compete more and more with high-end daily fee [clubs], they had better have programs in place to welcome minorities and women," says Jim Kass of the National Golf Foundation. "Otherwise, they might not survive."

To most observers, though, the signal moment in the Great Membership Debate came in 1990, when the PGA Championship was scheduled for Shoal Creek Country Club in Birmingham, Ala. After the Professional Golfers Association of America discovered that Shoal Creek had no black or female members, it laid out a new rule: A club forbidding female and African-American members could not host tour events.

As a result, clubs either had to open their doors or forfeit the right to hold a tournament.

"Shoal Creek was a wake-up call," says Ruffin Beckwith, executive director of Golf 20/20, an organization in Ponte Vidra, Fla., that studies the future of golf. "It forced golf as an industry to deal with this issue."

Several clubs dropped out, such as the all-male Pine Valley in New Jersey, rated No. 1 in America by Golf Digest. So did the Preston Trail Golf Club in Dallas, where Mickey Mantle used to play nude except for a pair of golf spikes. Augusta National also does not qualify under PGA rules, but it is unaffected because it hosts the Masters entirely on its own.

Those that have moved to accept women and minorities have met with varying degrees of success. In almost all cases, however, progress has been slow.

When Don Mathis hears of discrimination that has crept into other clubs, he chuckles. His Oak Tree Golf Club in Edmond, Okla., doesn't limit the times when women can tee off because it doesn't even have tee times. There are no extra fees for women, and the club has full facilities.

But Oak Tree still has only three female members. He imagines the initiation fee might play a role, as well as a course layout that favors men. But Mathis has no intention of turning Oak Tree back into the men's golf club it was until he took over in 1994.

"I don't like to discriminate," he says. "I'm not saying other clubs don't discriminate; I'm just saying that we handle it differently than other clubs do."

• Glynn Wilson in New Orleans contributed to this report.

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