THESE DAYS, WHEN

liquidator Bobby Johns sets up his booth in a parking lot or hotel ballroom, he often makes patrons step across a line of yellow crime-scene tape to emphasize what a "steal" they're getting. Johns sold more than $1 million in dramatically discounted goods last year throughout the Northeast. But his wares aren't Rolex knockoffs or black-market electronics; clients come to him for top-brand, unused golf merchandise. He regularly unloads clubs like the 2007 Titleist 907D2 driver, usually retailing at $400, for $170, and $75 Adidas and Nike golf shoes for as low as $30. Johns's only occupational hazard: needing to skip town every few days to avoid angry local retailers offering the same goods at full price. Otherwise, he says, "business has been very good."

The great golf fire sale is in full swing and not just in ballrooms and parking lots. Despite optimistic predictions that Tiger Woods would spark an explosion of interest in the venerable pastime, which Mark Twain once called "a good walk spoiled," the number of U.S. golfers has stayed flat for the past decade. The 10-year building spree that banked on those predictions and manicured the landscape to the tune of nearly 2,300 new courses has left such an oversupply that last year, for the first time in six decades, more golf courses closed than opened. The result? Bargains across the golfing universe.

Equipment and apparel manufacturers dumping overstock into the laps of liquidators is just the beginning. Golf clubs nationwide, their pros lonelier than Maytag repairmen, are slashing fees to entice new members. Gated golf communities are seeing an epidemic of for-sale signs. And more courses are quashing their exclusivity quotient by signing onwith mass-market vacation packagers. As Orlando golf-real-estate broker Scott Kauffman puts it, "In the golf-course industry cycle, we're at the bottom."

Most insiders blame over-zealous real estate developers, who routinely charge significant premiums for fairway views. But while builders have been chasing the golf-driven ka-ching, changing demographics have undermined them. Baby boomers leading more active lifestyles than their parents have felt less need to settle into low-impact sports like golf. And the rise in families with two working parents has made it tougher to disappear onto the links for five hours on the weekend. Even executives who use the game to woo clients are finding their companies cutting back on pricey club-membership perks.

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All this supply without matching demand has made for some very unhappy campers and not just those retailers trying to chase Bobby Johns out of town. After all, golf is one sport that lives or dies on its, well, clubbiness. From full-price members who now share a locker room with the hoi polloi to nongolfing homeowners saddled with a larger share of course maintenance, the great golf glut reverberates well beyond the game itself. But in the process it has also spawned a bevy of impressive bargains.

Memberships

Bill Adams knows a sweet deal when he sees one. When Tuscany Reserve Golf Club opened three years ago in Naples, Fla., it might as well have had the word "exclusive" mowed into its fairways. Developers envisioned 325 upper-crust golfers vyingto pay $200,000 in equity fees to play the sumptuous 460 acres.Billionaire Carl Icahn invested heavily to transform the scrubland into an idyllic Tuscan-style landscape, complete with hand-laid brick roads, imported Italian cypress groves, even a $30 million arched stone bridge. But despite the lavish outlay, it's a virtual ghost town. To date the club has attracted 50 members at the target price, and in late 2006 Tuscany's parent company, WCI, wrote down $85 million on the property. When Adams bought in to the tony community last fall, he paid $55,000 in equity fees, a nearly 75 percent discount.

WCI declined to comment, but Tuscany Reserve is just one of hundreds of overextended clubs nationwide forced to swallow their snobbish ways and lower the bar to admission. The Naples area alone, with 170 golf courses, has become bargain central for high-end golf memberships. Tuscany neighbor club Pelican Marsh recently slashed its equity fees from $155,000 to $60,000. Nearby resort The Meadows is literally giving away its course memberships with a home purchase. And while Naples's clubs still have mounting wait lists, these days insiders say there's a twist: The names are of golfers trying to get out, not in.

With few new golfers lining up to replace them, traditionally sleepy clubs realize they need to do more than just stand there waggling. In addition to aggressively lowering fees, they're keeping defecting members on the hook financially until a replacement (or three) can be found. Once-clannish clubs are throwing open their fairways to the nonmonogrammed masses. And to attract new blood, they're adding spas, fitness centers and other amenities; the driving range at Wellington Country Club in West Palm Beach, Fla., for example, now doubles as a polo field. "Clubs need to diversify just to keep up," says Richard Singer, director of consulting services at the National Golf Foundation.

Real Estate

When it comes to golf-driven real estate, developers have long followed the mantra "If you build it, they will come." Especially if you slap a gate around it and post a guard outfront. Some 70 percent of course openings were tied to real estatein 2006 driven by developers who, says Orlando agent Kauffman, could easily tack a 20 percent premium on to golf-homes prices (double that if a hotshot course designer was involved). But now overbuilt golf communities from California to Las Vegas to Florida are doling out deep discounts.

Take PGA West, a luxury country-club community near Palm Springs, Calif., begun in 1984, which boasts six designer courses by some of the biggest names in the business: Arnold Palmer, Pete Dye, Greg Norman and Jack Nicklaus. Three years ago fewer than 70 of the community's roughly 2,500 homes were listed for sale; today that number has jumped fourfold. A 2,200-square-foot, three-bedroom "detached casita" on one of the Nicklaus courses sold in late 2005 for $810,000; these days similar houses list for $595,000. "There's so much pressure to lower prices to compete," says Palm Springs real estate agent Mark Bennett.

Golf-saturated communities have taken an even bigger hit than their subprime-addled neighbors. In Palm Springs, in the second half of 2007, the median home price dropped 19 percent, while prices of the area's golf homes plunged 30 to 40 percent. Back in Naples, Fla., the median home price fell just over 5 percent in the same period, compared with a 25 to 30 percent tumble for golf-course residences in the $1 million-and-under range, according to the golf-market research firm Longitudes Group. One reason buyers are getting skittish: rising community fees. As clubs and course-management companies see red, they in-creasingly pass on the long-term maintenance costs to residents, more than half of whom don't even play golf. Grass upkeep alone can cost a million dollars a year.

Golf Travel Packages

Even folks who would never dream of dropping big bucks on an exclusive club membership or a high-end golf home are getting in on the golf surplus just by packing their suitcase and clubs. Dale Clark gets a virtual steal on a "stay and play" package each September at La Quinta Resort & Club in La Quinta, Calif. The Waldorf-Astoria property features five high-end public courses, and Clark, a civil engineer from Carlsbad, Calif., gets lodging, carts and greens fees for $110 a day roughly a quarter of the cost of a room alone. And, he says, the price has barely budged over the past decade. "They want to get people out there," he says.

Golf travel packaging, itself an $18 billion-a-year business, may offer some of the best bargains of all, particularly in oversaturated middle-market meccas like Myrtle Beach, S.C., Palm Springs, Orlando and Las Vegas, where struggling courses have turned to packagers to add income even if bringing in this crowd means crimping a club's cachet. Marketing rounds to nonmembers used to be something private clubs did to supplement their revenue, says Singer, but now, "it's almost like they can't afford not to." Indeed, to the dismay of some locals, the deals have migrated quickly to the mass market of the Web. There the profusion of sites like www.golfholidays-online.com and www.pgatourexperiences.com has only made it easier to shop for package deals even at some of the top big-boy PGA haunts. Want to give the famed Pinehurst course in North Carolina a shot? Two nights, three rounds of golf, breakfast, dinner and a $300 gift card can run $1,600 during high season, saving duffers more than $400.

Still, not all venerable courses are feeling the great American golf glut. Pebble Beach, the storied California course with magnificently craggy coastal views the place Jack Nicklaus said he would choose if he could play just one more round sells out nine months in advance and charges up to a cool $800 per room and $500 per round. "They won't work with you at all," says one golf travel agent.

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