For most of the past 20 years, Jim Koppenhaver has been as welcomed at the annual PGA Merchandise Show as the Grim Reaper at a home for the elderly. Every January, the lanky, bespectacled Koppenhaver would arrive from Chicago in one of his multicolored sweaters, looking like a modern-day Joseph come to share hard truths with his golf brethren. 

On the second day of each show, Koppenhaver and sidekick Stuart Lindsay would set up their laptops in a large meeting room in Orlando’s Orange County Convention Center and deliver a stats-intensive postmortem on the state of golf. The news almost invariably was bad. The sugar high of 2000, when Tiger Woods was the most famous athlete on the planet and some 30 million Americans played a then-record 518 million rounds of golf, was a distant memory. Over the next two decades, golf lost nearly one-third of those golfers and 90 million rounds. More than 1,600 golf courses closed, and Koppenhaver’s biggest gripe was that the closures were happening too slowly, prolonging the pain.