Golf Scores as an Economic Indicator

I was golfing with a few friends yesterday, and out of nowhere a great idea for an Economic paper struck my mind. (Or at least I think a great idea) It popped up from a comment from my friend, who remarked something to the tune of "I always end up playing well by the end of golf, but play so rarely that I start from scratch the next time I play." I think certainly golf is a sport where practice makes perfect, and thankfully for this exercise, individual players have a benchmark score. Not like soccer, where its a team sport, or tennis, where you're comparing yourself to another player. It also helps that golf is very much an elitist/business game.

So here was my line of thought- This thought kind of ran through my mind yesterday, so it's far from refined. Golf is a business sport, one with benchmark scores for players. It also (and here is investigation point #1) seems to be more of a business luxury, I would expect that business golf games get slashed when company performance is doing poorly, or when the economy is in recession, much like business trips and bonuses do. (I acknowledge that golf is a tremendously popular way to get business done, such as for sales reps, but I imagine that it'd still decline significantly as company starts cutting expenses)

So the idea is to get some sort of metric for the golf season of mid-level business people, from say April->October. It'd have to be a large enough survey of course, and you'd have to get a similar type of person as a focus. I think low-level business people would be less than ideal, since they probably don't golf much anyways, and top-level execs probably golf independently of company performance. So if you culled a large amount of data from mid-level businessmen over a large period of times, would it reflect the economic cycles? Would their golf scores in October in 2009 be worse than in 2005? It'd be incredibly hard to come up with any kind of quantitative analysis, but I wonder what the data would say.