"Somewhere in the last decade's culture of excess in America, cheap golf got lost."

Jaime Diaz in a must read column on the last page of March's Golf Digest:

As decadence took over, the $50 green fee somehow became a bargain. The biggest losers have been kids denied a spawning ground, and the game has become poorer for it.

But there are signs of a reawakening. Youth on Course, a program begun in 2006 in conjunction with the Northern California Golf Association, seeks to facilitate the early connection that is the game's best insurance policy. Donated money, much but not all from the aforementioned rich guys, is used to purchase mostly off-peak starting times--some 28,000 last year--from participating public courses. Those times are then made available to golfers under 18, generally for $2 a round. At facilities with ranges, it's $1 a bucket. More than 100 courses in California--whose managers are more acutely aware than ever that a starting time unused is revenue forever lost­--have supplied more than 11,000 kids with the deep discount. Meanwhile, former USGA president Sandy Tatum, that 88-year-old missionary of the public game, is hoping to make the program a national model.

That won't come cheap. Paul Morton, co-founder of Youth on Course, says it will take $1.2 million to maintain the program at current levels.

Any mathematicians care to guess what you think a national program would cost?