The Why of a Million Golfers

In 1923, golf was quickly becoming one of America's most popular sports, as it remains today. Will Americans in a century look back to the current moment as the similar rise of pickleball?

Here's how M.B. Levick described the newfound craze for New York Times Magazine in 1923:

This season there are 2,200 golf links in use. Of that total, between 400 and 500 belong to new clubs and have been opened for play only this year. Three years have seen a tremendous increase in the number of [courses]; the next three will bring an even greater growth.

How many golf courses exist in the U.S. today? According to the National Golf Foundation, it's just shy of 16,000.

Back in 1923, Levick added an estimated number of participants:

Today there are a million golfers in the land.

By 2022, again according to the National Golf Foundation, that number increased to about 41 million.

The foundation obviously has reason to skew their estimate upward. But even if the true number is just a fraction of that, the point still remains: golf has become way more popular since 1923.

So, why was golf becoming so popular around 1923 anyway? New York Times Magazine offered a few possibilities:

Did prohibition do it? Anglo-mania? Sheer love of a game? Set forth the problem to the sociologist, the psychologist, the business man, and the player, and each will tell you first that there's no finer game for a man — and each will give personal testimony to prove it. Then, each in his own way, they will go further into cause and effect.

While golf became more and more popular for the next 100 years, the U.S. wouldn't open its first TopGolf until 2005.

The Why of a Million Golfers

Published: Sunday, July 8, 1923