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Greg Nathan

Greg Nathan

President and CEO of the National Golf Foundation (NGF), the golf industry's leading research and insights organization, since January 2024.

Apr 28, 2026

47:06
What do you look at, Greg, as the metrics that are perhaps more forward-looking, that are indicative of the longer-term health of the game or perhaps anything that might be worrisome going forward?
47:18
Well, what I've been leading with lately is the fact that four of the past five years have been all-time record rounds.
47:28
The last time rounds were that high was around 2004, 2005.
47:33
And what's special about that comparison is Brown's numbers we're achieving today are with 2,000 fewer facilities, 3,000 fewer courses.
47:45
So that tells most people anything that they would need to know about the balance of the golf economy and how it's never been better.
47:53
And that is not going to be diluted by the construction of thousands of golf courses, which is the situation that we were in in the past when rounds were so high around the turn of the millennium.
48:09
With the building boom... that great supply and demand balance was diluted.
49:45
What are the potential headwinds in golf?
13:07
Where do they express this interest?
13:08
So in order to come up with our national numbers, how many people play golf, we actually do 36,000 interviews a year in order to collect data.
13:20
So if you were a recipient of one of our surveys and you said, I did not play golf on a green grass golf course in 2025, we ask them, how interested are you in playing golf now? Right.
13:36
And 21 million people say very interested, the number one answer.
13:42
So that's what I'm referring to as one part of the on-deck circle, is that there are over 20 million people who are very interested in activating.
13:51
They won't all.
13:53
And then you have this group who play off course only.
14:37
Is there any way to talk about or measure who golfers are? Is that socioeconomic level, has that remained the same?

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