While golf in its original form was a largely solitary outdoor activity trudging around coastal sand dunes which required little maintenance, it has become a sport of pure reaction under capitalism. It's largely designed around being an activity to do something while networking with other wealthy white men, in which everyone who is not a wealthy white man is actively excluded and denied access. I've had some trouble finding global numbers so will use example figures from the US, but I imagine these divisions vary quite significantly from country to country but likely skew especially hard towards the more exclusionary models in global south. In the US, there are roughly 16,100 golf courses. About 2,500 are municipal, about 7,900 are daily-fee, and about 4000 are fully private.
Private courses may or may not be tied to a country club, but always require both annual or monthly dues, and often require a substantial up-front cash initiation fee. These annual fees are generally tens of thousands and initiation fees can reach into the hundreds of thousands. Particularly exclusive clubs will regularly turn down governors, senators, major celebrities. While they don't want to tell you this, even those that are less exclusive are all segregated with only few exceptions generally admitted under cynical pretenses rather than any genuine lack of bigotry. High likelihood of having caddies, snack carts that bring you food while you're playing, and other bullshit amenities that rich assholes love. Plenty of opportunities to harass working-class people and be showered in luxury.
Daily-fee courses are less expensive and exclusive, likely $50 to hundreds per person for a round. Also likely to have amenities, but these are more likely to be restricted to certain days, more limited, available at extra cost, etc. Only economically segregated, but the structure of golf parties is likely to insulate wealthy golfers from having to interact with working class people for more than a few moments. Daily-fee courses are generally situationally regarded as either public or private depending on convenience. When they're seeking government subsidies or trying to justify their existence against criticism, they're a public course that should be regarded as a public good like a public park that's funded by generous charitable contributions rather than taxpayers. When it comes time to get golfers on the course or justify police action against poor people or protestors, suddenly it becomes an exclusive private business which can exercise its right to decline service.
Municipal courses are fully open to the public and generally have "reasonable" fees, roughly $20-40 per person for a round, depending on the course. May or may not come with a cart. These are the least meticulously groomed, won't have premium bullshit, and are also the most likely to pursue less environmentally harmful practices like reducing pesticide or water usage. Of course, these are the least popular with wealthy golfers and are often most used by "temporarily embarrassed millionaires" who can't afford a private membership to practice for when they go to daily-fee courses. These courses are the least common, and are (as far as I can discern) vanishingly rare to nonexistent in most countries.
Basically this entire system is set up to create a tiered system based around exclusivity, where "middle class" golfers strive to play on daily-fee courses but play most of their games on municipal courses which deliberately creates an unconscious system of bias against public parks by contrasting them with the middle tier of semi-private courses. This is designed to create a constant source of strife and put the higher tier of the working class in conflict with the lower tier, creating a distraction from actual class conflict.
While golf in its original form was a largely solitary outdoor activity trudging around coastal sand dunes which required little maintenance, it has become a sport of pure reaction under capitalism. It's largely designed around being an activity to do something while networking with other wealthy white men, in which everyone who is not a wealthy white man is actively excluded and denied access. I've had some trouble finding global numbers so will use example figures from the US, but I imagine these divisions vary quite significantly from country to country but likely skew especially hard towards the more exclusionary models in global south. In the US, there are roughly 16,100 golf courses. About 2,500 are municipal, about 7,900 are daily-fee, and about 4000 are fully private.
Private courses may or may not be tied to a country club, but always require both annual or monthly dues, and often require a substantial up-front cash initiation fee. These annual fees are generally tens of thousands and initiation fees can reach into the hundreds of thousands. Particularly exclusive clubs will regularly turn down governors, senators, major celebrities. While they don't want to tell you this, even those that are less exclusive are all segregated with only few exceptions generally admitted under cynical pretenses rather than any genuine lack of bigotry. High likelihood of having caddies, snack carts that bring you food while you're playing, and other bullshit amenities that rich assholes love. Plenty of opportunities to harass working-class people and be showered in luxury.
Daily-fee courses are less expensive and exclusive, likely $50 to hundreds per person for a round. Also likely to have amenities, but these are more likely to be restricted to certain days, more limited, available at extra cost, etc. Only economically segregated, but the structure of golf parties is likely to insulate wealthy golfers from having to interact with working class people for more than a few moments. Daily-fee courses are generally situationally regarded as either public or private depending on convenience. When they're seeking government subsidies or trying to justify their existence against criticism, they're a public course that should be regarded as a public good like a public park that's funded by generous charitable contributions rather than taxpayers. When it comes time to get golfers on the course or justify police action against poor people or protestors, suddenly it becomes an exclusive private business which can exercise its right to decline service.
Municipal courses are fully open to the public and generally have "reasonable" fees, roughly $20-40 per person for a round, depending on the course. May or may not come with a cart. These are the least meticulously groomed, won't have premium bullshit, and are also the most likely to pursue less environmentally harmful practices like reducing pesticide or water usage. Of course, these are the least popular with wealthy golfers and are often most used by "temporarily embarrassed millionaires" who can't afford a private membership to practice for when they go to daily-fee courses. These courses are the least common, and are (as far as I can discern) vanishingly rare to nonexistent in most countries.
Basically this entire system is set up to create a tiered system based around exclusivity, where "middle class" golfers strive to play on daily-fee courses but play most of their games on municipal courses which deliberately creates an unconscious system of bias against public parks by contrasting them with the middle tier of semi-private courses. This is designed to create a constant source of strife and put the higher tier of the working class in conflict with the lower tier, creating a distraction from actual class conflict.