One of the benefits of producing the National Golf Course Owners Association’s Golf Business Pulse Report year after year is that eventually you stop looking only at the snapshots and start watching the movie. And golf’s movie over the past five years has had quite a plot. When we first began examining trends coming out of the pandemic, golf course operators were asking a fairly existential question: Is this real? In our 2022 report, 58 percent strongly agreed that the golf business was booming. But even then, operators wondered whether we were experiencing a COVID-19 bubble or had reached a new, higher plateau for the game. Four years later, I think we have our answer. Golf didn't give it all back. Of course, whenever I talk about the golf economy, I remind people that we always live on a bell curve. In good times and bad, some golf courses are struggling, a great many are doing reasonably well, and some are absolutely knocking it out of the park. The curve may shift, but it never disappears. So when we say golf is booming, that shou...