There's a way to do golf without all of the horrible things that often come attached to it. My local course is owned by an American Indian tribe, and the course is intermixed with a bunch of nature preserves that money from the course is used to maintain. In Scotland they prevent "country club culture" from arising by basically mandating that every golf course be affordable and open to the public. Stuff like that is cool, society has a vested interest in maintaining big green spaces and not every single one has to be a park, some of them can be sports fields and even golf courses, within reason and the desires of the community of course.

But as it currently exists in 90% of cases? To be honest I think rich people get off on how bad they can be for the local environment, water table, etc and on how they can be used to create and maintain regimes of discrimination and privilege.