Country Clubs

City officials are working with two local country clubs on a plan for the use of treated sewage water, which would prevent it from being dumped into Newport Bay. Under the plan, the reclaimed water would be used by Big Canyon and Newport Beach country clubs, the Bluffs Homeowners Assn. and Corona del Mar High School for landscape watering. On Monday, the City Council voted unanimously to approve agreements with the Newport-Mesa Unified School District and the homeowners association.

The state Senate on Wednesday rejected a bill that would have allowed private country clubs that do limited business with the public to prohibit women as full members. The bill proposed exempting from state antidiscrimination laws such nonprofit organizations as golf and tennis clubs that regularly engage in limited business transactions with nonmembers. The bill, carried by Sen.

In a ruling that could alter the membership practices of various groups, the California Supreme Court said Thursday that a country club may not discriminate against women and minorities just because it is private. The court's 6-1 ruling delved into a legal and ethical quagmire that judges have been grappling with for years: When does gender bias violate the law, whether in sports, schools or country clubs that are either all-male or all-female?

Coto de Caza Golf & Racquet Club was sold two weeks ago, for an undisclosed amount, to Dallas-based Club Corp. of America. As part of the deal, the property was leased back to the original developer, Coto de Caza Ltd., which will manage the club for the next five to seven years. Company spokesman Tom Martin said Coto de Caza had always planned to sell the 36-hole course, but the offer from Club Corp. came a little earlier than expected. "It just seemed like a good opportunity," Martin said.

Louis Ludwig, executive chef at Ventura's Pierpont Inn the past 2 1/2 years, will leave the restaurant as of Tuesday to become head chef at the new Serrano Country Club in El Dorado Hills, east of Sacramento. Kevin Sherry, former executive chef at Las Posas Country Club in Camarillo, will take Ludwig's place at the Pierpont. In his new venture, Ludwig will be accompanied by his wife, Jeri Ludwig, who has been hired as assistant food and beverage director at the $200-million El Dorado club.

Bruce Linder stood up in small claims court Tuesday and said the exclusive Thousand Oaks country club where he has played tennis for 15 years had gone bad. "There's much more noise, there's crowding," he testified. "It's worse than playing on public courts." But North Ranch Country Club officials countered that their club is better than ever, and that Linder is simply upset because of a conflict between his wife and the new tennis pro.

A burglar broke into a country club building late Sunday or early Monday and stole 4,000 golf balls and some ball washer parts, authorities said. An employee at Big Canyon Country Club arrived at work and found the storage building door ajar about 6:45 a.m. Monday, Police Sgt. Jim Kaminsky said. Gone were golf balls worth about $2,330 and equipment from a padlocked cabinet.

When he was 14, Dick Muller took his first stab at building a race track when he borrowed a tractor and dug an oval out of a field on his family's 10-acre lot. "Unfortunately, I found out the next day that this was a farmer who was renting the property from my dad to grow alfalfa," he said. "We chopped up his alfalfa field and he almost blew a fuse." Muller, 51, is at it again.

Country club prisons just aren't the same since they started letting the riffraff in. Back in the good old days, when a nice, respectable white-collar criminal went to federal prison, he could do his time playing tennis with crooked pols, embezzling bankers, book-cooking accountants and other high-class folks. Not anymore. Now, Club Fed admits all kinds of lowlifes.

A local country club refused to allow a lesbian couple the same golfing privileges as married couples for fear the club would look "gay friendly" and open a "floodgate" of applications from homosexual couples, their attorney told an appeals court Monday. The attorney for the club denied that it was discriminating against gays, explaining that it had a policy of allowing spouses of members to play golf for free.