“There’s a bit more hesitation out there for buying new equipment.”

Golfweek's Bradley Klein talks to a variety of people with different ties to the game, and contemplates whether golf is really recession proof.

Scott Peters, owner of New Hampshire-based Golf & Ski Warehouse, is witnessing first-hand such changes in consumer behavior.

Though he experienced “a good summer and Christmas for 2007,” Peters says “the first three months of 2008 have been down” compared with the year before.

He also blames more stringent USGA equipment limitations for making consumers skeptical whether next-generation products are truly superior to their predecessors. Mix such wariness with economic woes and, Peters says, “There’s a bit more hesitation out there for buying new equipment.”

This would assume that a decent portion of the golfing public even knows what the USGA has done, which I suppose is possible. Or could it be that people simply realized that it's silly to keep a driver every year...or even more often than that?