Equipment Sales As A Barometer For Golf, Rovell Edition

Earlier this week Darren Rovell Tweeted a short item on a 21% drop in 2014 golf equipment sales at sporting goods stores, citing the Sports & Fitness Association.

Golf Digest's Mike Stachura took issue with the number for not telling the full story. Though my extremist view is that any golf equipment sales numbers are unfair as long as companies insist on rapid-fire product cycles, let's at least accept the premise for Stachura's rebuttal:

In fact, a check of golf industry research firm Golf Datatech’s sales figures for 2014 paint a slightly different interpretation. Sales in 2014 of just the core hard goods in golf (woods, irons, wedges and putters) were down, but only by 3 percent (2.97, actually). In fact, the $1.413 billion in sales of those four categories marked the seventh highest annual sales figure since Golf Datatech began tracking the golf business in 1995.