Credit: Business Insider

On a recent Saturday Matt Owens, the owner of Trenton Street Golf Course in West Monroe, sat indoors facing the entrance to his course and greeted golfers. In this town of 13,000 inhabitants with a love of fried catfish and a reverence for “Duck Dynasty”, a television show about hunters whose stars live nearby, golf used to be a regular indulgence for many, and that mild autumn weekend was ideal golf weather. Yet by the end of the afternoon Mr Owens had taken in only around $200 in green fees, a tenth of what his course earned on Saturdays a few years ago.

On weekends Mr Owens’s 12-year-old course once swelled with golfers, but that ended when the economy sliced into the rough in 2008. He offers prices “affordable for rednecks”, but bargains are not enough to bring back customers. “I sometimes believe that I could give golf away, and they still wouldn’t come,” he says. At the end of December he will close the course, and it will become […]