Golf picks up 1.5 million to 3 million new players every year. The bad news is it loses about an equal number each year due to death, injury, or disinterest.
According to the National Golf Foundation (NGF), “Today's typical golfer is male, forty-three years old, has an average house-hold income of $61,000, and plays sixteen rounds per year.”
Twenty-five percent of all U.S. golfers are older than fifty. They play an average of thirty-six rounds per year.
About 15 percent of all golfers live in golf communities. Another 3 percent own residences or vacation homes on golf courses.
As of 2001, the average fee paid per game of golf was $36.
Only 38 percent of golfers are from house-holds headed by blue-collar or clerical workers.
According to the National Golf Foundation, 22 percent of golfers say they regularly score better than 90. This breaks down to 25 percent of all male golfers who say they do and 7 percent of the women.
Six percent of all male golfers say they regularly break 80; 1 percent of all female golfers make that claim.
The average eighteen-hole golf score for all golfers is like the average IQ—it's 100.
The average golf score for men is 97; for women, 114.
According to the NGF, there are more than 18 million golfers in the United States.
The New York Times puts the number at 25 million.
The Northern Texas Golf Association fixes the number at 26.5 million, or roughly 12 percent of the population. Some weekends it seems like all of them are on the course ahead of you.
A Round of Ice Golf, Anyone? There are more golfers per capita in Minneapolis, Minnesota, than in any other city in the United States.
AWashington Post poll reportedly found that 70 percent of Fortune 500 CEOs regularly did business on the golf course.
“General Motors is basically run out of the Bloomfield Hills Country Club,” according to Dave Richards, a golf pro from that affluent Michigan suburb.
In the 1990s, the New York Times published a study demonstrating a positive correlation between a CEO's golf handicap and his or her company's performance.
Seventeen percent of sales reps who play golf with clients admitted in a Gallup Poll that they routinely let their clients win.
According to a company called Business Golf Strategies, which teaches companies how to sell on the golf course, the first four holes are for building rapport. Holes five through fifteen are for talking business. After that, stop discussing business and make sure your customer is enjoying the game…then go in for the kill while drinking at the “nineteenth hole.”
The Evans Scholarships were started by Charles “Chick” Evans, who learned to play golf while a caddy. He went on to become, in 1916, the first golfer ever to win both the U.S. Amateur and U.S. Open championships in the same year. Because Evans chose to preserve his amateur status, he directed that any money he won from golf be put into a scholarship fund for those who serve by carrying and waiting.
The Evans Scholarships provide $7 million every year to “deserving caddies” attending college in the Midwest.
“Man blames fate for other accidents, but feels personally responsible for a hole-in-one.”
—Martha Beckman, humor writer
The oldest man to “shoot his age” was a 103-year-old from Canada who scored, well, 103.
Has anybody scored two holes-in-one in a row? It's not impossible—at least twenty people have done exactly that.
“I'm hitting the woods just great. But I'm having a terrible time getting out of them.”
—Harry Toscano
Southeast Asia is the fastest growing golf market in the world.
In 1963, a man named Floyd Satterlee Rood decided to drive across America. “Drive,” that is, in the sense of hitting a golf ball from coast to coast. He started at the water hazard we call the Pacific Ocean on September 14, 1963, and by October 3, 1964, had made it to the Atlantic. He took 114,737 strokes to cover the 3,397.7 miles and lost 3,511 balls along the way.
We'd Give Our Right Arms to Join This Club: The Society of One-Armed Golfers, located at 11 Campbell Place, Torrance, Glasgow G64 4HR “organise week-long championships, weekend and day events for golfers using only one hand. Communication between members is by newsletter, normally three per year.”
A name can make or break a tournament. Consider these now-defunct tourneys: The Hardscrabble Open, The Girl Talk Classic, The Gasparilla Open, The Rubber City Open, and our all-time favorite has-been golf competition (drum roll, please) … The Iron Lung Open.
Angelo Spagnolo is the worst avid golfer. No, really. When Golf Digest sponsored a tournament called The Worst Avid Golfer Tournament, he won, hands down. Some of Spagnolo's finest moments during the championship included a 66 on a par 3 and an amassed 124 penalty strokes for his foursome during the round. His score on the eighteen-hole course was 257.
A mere heart attack was not enough to keep Dr. Pedro Brugado from winning a Brussels amateur golf tournament in 1996. A cardiologist, ironically, Brugado was in the lead when he suffered a heart attack on the final round. An opponent who was also a physician revived Brugado and had him rushed to a hospital. He was released 90 minutes later to finish the hole and win the tournament.
Lucky break or act of God? You decide. In 1956, when Morton Shapiro hit his ball up to the lip of the fifth hole of the Indian Springs Country Club in New Jersey, a ground tremor gently shook the earth, sending his balancing ball into the cup for a hole-in-one.
Scott Statler hit a hole-in-one on July 30, 1962, at the seventh hole of Statler's Par 3 Golf Course in Greensburg, Pennsylvania. He was all of four years old.
Harold Hoyt Stilson Sr., holds the record for the oldest person to ever score a hole-in-one. He swung to greatness at the ripe old age of 101 on the 16th hole at Deerfield Country Club in Florida, on May 16, 2001. Stilson died less than a year later on February 2, 2002.
In 1986, at the age of ninety-five, Erna Ross was the oldest woman to hit a hole-in-one. It was the seventeenth hole of the Ever-glades Golf Club in Palm Beach, Florida.
Brittny Andreas accomplished quite a feat: At the age of six, Brittny was the youngest girl to ever hit a hole-in-one. It happened on the Jimmy Clay Golf Course in Austin, Texas, in 1991.