Vineyard golfers have been taking a drubbing lately. Two courses proposed for Edgartown and one for Oak Bluffs were voted down by the Martha’s Vineyard Commission in the past few years, with only Edgartown’s Vineyard Golf Club getting approved and built. In a front-page New York Times story a couple of winters ago, critics threw the S-word around as if there weren’t already suburban-style developments on the Vineyard.

It’s time Vineyard golfers had their say, and like it or not, there’s a burgeoning golf scene on the Island. The Vineyard and Edgartown golf clubs are private, while Farm Neck in Oak Bluffs and Mink Meadows on West Chop are private courses with public access. A bunch of families have also been operating a private six-hole course for years. They want its name and location kept secret, but I can tell you that it’s an enchanting little place built like a turn-of-the-twentieth-century links, with tees and greens well-tended, and the land in between mowed if not manicured. And some residents have constructed a hole or two on their properties. Warren Spector’s layout at Squibnocket Point is the best par-3 on the Island, according to Farm Neck teaching pro Alisdair Watt.
    
The Edgartown club is “very old-school, very Edgartown,” says a member. But it’s also “like the courses in the ’30s and ’40s, where you just show up and play,” according to teaching pro Jim Hackenberg. Because there are no tee times, any lonely captain of industry can drive up and usually get a game. When I think of the Edgartown club, I find myself paraphrasing Tom Lehrer: take a Republican to lunch this week, show him he’s one of the bunch this week.
    
It would be easy to construct stereotypes about the Vineyard Golf Club, which charges a $300,000 initiation fee and requires all players to use caddies. But consider this: the caddies are helpful, the course is beautiful, and the club doesn’t discriminate. You’ve never seen so many schmoozy Jewish guys.
    
The closest thing to a people’s course, Mink Meadows charges the public a reasonable $70 for eighteen holes in peak season; that’s twice around the nine-hole layout, with nine different tees and one different green on the back side. Members pay $530 for unlimited play between September 15 and the Friday of Memorial Day weekend, plus $30 for play after 4 p.m. in-season. The membership is a wonderful microcosm of the Vineyard: Oak Bluffs blacks, Vineyard Haven Jews, West Chop Brahmins, workers, tradesmen, and tradeswomen from all over the Island. And they’re constantly interacting, thanks to several midday times that are kept open for anyone with a course handicap interested in playing with the “noonies.”
    
“Three of us had made the turn when the pro asked if we minded having a fourth join us,” says Dick Rubin, who belongs to both Mink Meadows and Farm Neck. “ ‘He’s some kind of teacher, and he has a southern accent,’ the pro told us. I noticed that the guy was wearing a Penn shirt. ‘Do you teach there?’ I asked him.
    
“ ‘Well, sort of,’ he said. It was Sheldon Hackney, who at that time was the college president.
  
But any defense of Island golf must focus on Farm Neck. It’s where Bill Clinton plays. It’s where Bill Murray plays. It’s one of the top-rated courses in New England.
    
Farm Neck’s short but tight front side was built in 1976–77 by Geoff Cornish and Bill Robinson. Longer and more open, holes 10 through 18 were designed by Patrick Mulligan and unveiled in 1979. So what you have is an American-style front nine and something akin to a British links course on the back. Old farm equipment is scattered around the course, along with other lovely sights, such as wildflowers, climbing vines, and red-winged blackbirds. It’s hard to beat the view from the third tee. Looking beyond the bunker-splashed hole toward Sengekontacket Pond and Nantucket Sound, you see land, water, land, water, land, water, land.
    
So why do people criticize Farm Neck these days? Because the initiation fee, only $10,000 when my wife and I joined in 1993, shot up from $25,000 to $100,000 last year, and the public is charged $135 for eighteen holes (cart included) in peak season. It’s time for a visit with the club’s general manager Tim Sweet.
    
I met him in his office one Saturday afternoon. A lanky guy with blond hair and a barbershop-quartet mustache, he looked up from his computer, where he was finishing a report, and made the case for Farm Neck.
    
Like all Island courses, Farm Neck gives residents a break. So while the 250 full members pay $1,700 annually and $10 to play ($5 after 2 p.m.), Farm Neck’s 125 Island members ante up only $600 a year and pay $5 per round in-season. All members play free in the off-season.
    
“We raised the initiation because there was a crunch on the bottom line,” Sweet said. “We’re trying to be as egalitarian as we can. We had three choices. First, raise the public fee. But it’s already gone up. Second, raise dues. We didn’t want to get members in a position where they couldn’t afford to play. That left the initiation increase.”
    
I asked him about the charge of creeping suburbia. “A developer was going to build 800 lots on our land before it went bankrupt. We built the course as an open-space project, with only 50 houses. We use organic fertilizer, and the roots uptake nitrogen, which means there’s no leaching down below. A golf course is a living, breathing field of play.”
    
The Farm Neck Foundation matches each dollar contributed by members and in 2004 gave $31,515 to thirteen Island organizations in fields such as conservation and health care. But you must hang out at the club to understand just how democratic it is. I left Sweet’s office and headed into Farm Neck’s classy café – a lunch spot popular with the public. A burly member asked waiter Adam Grass where he got the bruise on his face.
  
“Bike accident,” he said.
  
“I had some accidents, too,” the member said. “Then I turned eleven and learned how to ride safely.”
    
“He just likes to kid around,” Grass said. “Farm Neck is a country club, but it’s not. The only people who give us trouble come from the outside and think they have to act a certain way.” In a standard set by head pro Mike Zoll, a former teacher and social worker, the staff is on a first-name basis with the members.
    
One of the club’s leading players, Elmer Silva, stopped by the bar to order a brewskie. “It’s seven-zip, Red Sox ahead in the seventh,” he said.
    
I headed into the TV room, where a plaque on the wall commemorates the club’s four-star rating from a Golf Digest feature, “Places to Play.” The regulars in Tony daRosa’s Saturday golf game were drinking beers and sodas, settling bets, watching the Sox, and showing absolutely no interest in the US Open tennis tournament. If you want Yankee-rooting, cocktail-swilling Wall Streeters bragging about their courtside seats and stock portfolios, look elsewhere.
    
The daRosa clan was dressed in typical Island golf attire: saddle shoes with plastic cleats, white socks, beige or gray shorts, subdued shirt, bill cap. I haven’t seen someone dressed like a pimp at Farm Neck since the last time I wore candy-striped pants there. Tony D is co-owner of a stationery store in Oak Bluffs. Another regular, Bob Priestly, coached college football at Brown and Norwich (Vermont). All around the room sat Island and charter members, the lifeblood of the club – virtually all of whom live on the Vineyard full-time. “Regular guys,” said Rich Bagdigian, an officer at Edgartown National Bank. “Not many elitists here.”
    
By and large, Vineyard golfers are nice people. It’s not just the stroll through nature that takes the edge off insolence, but the nature of the game. Simply put, something strange and unusual happens to you virtually every time you play golf. As a result, a tremendous body of literature, lore, and one-liners has built up around the game.
    
In my last round of the summer last year, I attempted to hit a ball over two trees and instead hit it between them. “That was what Sheldon Hackney calls a son-in-law shot – okay, but not quite what I had in mind,” said Rubin.
    
And yet, many people resent Vineyard golf – usually in inverse proportion to their knowledge of the game. “Play golf on an Island surrounded by water?” asks Don Rappaport. “It makes as much sense as Switzerland winning the America’s Cup in sailing.”
    
Rappaport is a great kidder. He belongs to Mink Meadows, languishes on the waiting list at Farm Neck, sails great distances, and knows full well that Switzerland won the last America’s Cup.
    
All over Switzerland, people celebrate sailing. Why can’t Vineyarders feel the same way about golf?