The sudden influx of participation, coupled with the demographics of baby boomer retirees, opened the eyes of course owners and venture capitalists everywhere, and they subsequently opened their pocketbooks for new greens. In 2000, at the height of the boom, there were nearly 400 course openings. Last year, there were 119.

"It's typical in any business to have cycles of expansion and contraction," says Jim Kass, research director for the National Golf Foundation. "You look at what was happening in the 1990s - the demand was there, the stock market was strong, and people were confident in spending money."

Golf course owners were spending money, but not solely on the private countryclub resort that's been synonymous with the golf business for so long. "Pay-for-play" courses, as golf course designer Thomas Fazio calls them, became the haute couture of the industry.

But the supply quickly outgrew the demand. Now countless numbers of pay-for-play golf courses, public and semiprivate, are being bought and deconstructed by those interested in the underlying land. "

You look at the patterns, and there always seem to be highs and lows," says Fazio, who's been in the course-design industry for nearly five decades. "The difference in the '90s was that golf was coming out of a recession in '92. From '92 to September 11, we had tremendous growth.

"Then September 11 hit, and we still had growth, but the economy was down," he says. "People weren't traveling, and clubs were empty. What happened is we had this growth not because of golf only, and we created an oversupply. Now we're in the shakeout period."