William D. Cohan - Power Failure: The Rise and Fall of an American Icon

The Nantucket Golf Club is so exclusive that there is no sign for it off Milestone Road, the six-mile artery that connects the quaint and historic town of Nantucket, where the ferries pull in after the thirty-mile trip from the mainland of Massachusetts, to Siasconset (often shortened to Sconset), the old fishing and artists village on the far eastern edge of the island. If you make the mistake of turning onto the clubs long driveway without a member, or an appointment to visit with one, youll be stopped by security at the gatehouse a couple of hundred yards up the road and told to turn around.

The membership fee at the Nantucket Golf Club these days is $475,000 per person, more than double the $200,000 that investment banker Edmund Hajim corralled from about fifty initial members when he first conceived of the club in 1995 as an alternative to the nearby and infinitely snootier Sankaty Head Golf Club. At Sankaty Head, founded in 1923, the waiting list for membership is said to be decades, at best, although its never been clear whether thats simply a ruse to keep out the unwanted, or whether the demand to get in justifies the waiting list. Sankaty Head secretes old-money charm and shabby gentility. Membership dues are much cheaper at Sankaty Head, assuming you can get in, and so it also includes among its ranks a disproportionate number of the year-round residents who would be unlikely to afford the pricier confines of the Nantucket Golf Club. And after Columbus Day weekend, the official end of the season on Nantucket, anyone can play a round of golf at Sankaty for about $25. But thats not even remotely the same as being a member. Some say Sankaty Head is changing; in recent years, a few Jews have been added as members and the cheap after-season access to the golf course seems to have disappeared.

Hajim, now eighty-six years old, got tired of waiting for Sankaty to let him in, despite his qualifications. A fine golfer, his Horatio Alger story reads like that of, well, Horatio Alger himself. After he was born in Los Angeles into a failing, dysfunctional family, his parents divorced when he was three and then his father kidnapped him and told him his mother had died in childbirth, even though she was very much alive. His father lost all his money in the Depression.

He overcame these setbacks. He received a scholarship to the University of Rochester and then went to Harvard Business School. Armed with his MBA, Hajim, of Syrian Jewish descent, headed to Wall Street, where he made a fortune big enough to give the University of Rochester $30 million in 2008, its largest single gift. And he has given full scholarships to more than two hundred students at a variety of colleges and universities across the country. He was chairman of the board of the Brunswick School, the tony private school in Greenwich, Connecticut, among the places he lives when not on Nantucket.

Sankaty Head rejected Hajims bid to become a member, which was a shame as he had just built a nearly seven-thousand-square-foot house overlooking the Nantucket harbor. Since it seemed he wasnt going to be able to play golf on Nantucket, he briefly thought about leaving the island. But necessity being the mother of invention and all, rather than slink away, Hajim decided to get even and, along with golf-course genius Fred Green, began the nearly impossible task of building, from scratch, a new golf club on Nantucket, just as they had in Vail and would later do at Queenwood Golf Club, in the London suburb of Surrey. He and Green negotiated to buy the three hundred or so acres of land they needed for $8 million from a branch of the Tristram Coffin family, among the original white settlers of Nantucket in and around 1660.