Cal Club of Chicago Is No More

This week, news broke that Calumet Country Club in the south suburbs of Chicago would close permanently and be destroyed. The course went public in 2019 and endured a turbulent stretch with various management companies and constant uncertainty about its future. Even with golf’s recent boom, it always felt like Calumet’s days were numbered. The day I hoped would never come has finally arrived.

Calumet is a place that means a lot to me. When I started Fried Egg Golf, I was a member at the then-private Calumet Country Club (or, as I liked to call it, Cal Club of Chicago). I was living in the South Loop, and it gave me an easy club to get to at a price a humble, 30-year-old entrepreneur could actually afford. I discovered their membership deal through a south side friend and managed to rope in a bunch of other friends to join. The price gets more absurd every time I think about it, $150 a month, which I knocked down to $100 through referrals. Nearly all my friends joined. It was an incredible deal and an even more memorable time in my golf life. Looking back, maybe that deal was also a sign of the financial distress the club was failing to outrun.

Calumet became my home during a formative stretch of my late 20s and early 30s. It was a good golf course, originally designed by Donald Ross, that had overtime fallen victim to a number of events: a highway expansion that reduced its total land and altered the golf course, thousands of ill-advised tree plantings, shrinking green sizes, and of course, the economic crash in 2008, which sent the club’s membership spiraling into a bad place. When I think back, I miss the place and that time dearly. I played countless rounds there with one of my best friends. It was the backdrop to some of my most meaningful golf friendships. It’s forever tied to the origins of one of today’s hot destination clubs, Broomsedge. It’s where I played my last Illinois State Amateur before realizing tournament golf no longer fit into my life. And it’s where I witnessed the most ridiculous fight between two friends on a golf course that I will ever see. Hundreds of serious, silly, and important memories in my life are tied to that course.

In those early Fried Egg days, I’d wake up, drive down to CCC, write all morning, grab lunch, and head out for an afternoon round. When I think about it now, Calumet is the site of so many of my best golf memories from a time when responsibility was light and my available golf hours were at an all-time high.

Most of us cycle through different golf homes as our lives evolve. If we’re lucky, we get to return to them once in a while, let the memories wash back over us, and feel like our younger selves for a few hours. With Calumet’s closing and impending destruction, I’m sad I didn’t get one last round. I regret not pulling in the last time I drove past it this summer. Over the past 48 hours, I’ve been revisiting my memories of the place, a course that helped spark my love affair with this ridiculous sport as well as strengthened and even created a few lifelong friendships.

So pour one out for Calumet. And the next time you’re near one of your old golf stomping grounds, stop in, take a walk, or play a few holes. You never know when you won’t get the chance again.