At my 16-year-old grandson’s high school, students have to choose a different sport for gym class every semester. My grandson chose weightlifting last semester, and this semester, he’s playing chess. Chess? Does chess rate as a sport? Sports Illustrated says it sure does. SI once gave a cover to the young grandmaster Bobby Fischer – and Bobby never even had to break a sweat. In a sense, any competitive game can be a “sport.” But for a game to qualify as what we might call a real sport, the competition has to give every competitor at least one essential: a sporting chance to win. Sheer hard work – be it mental or physical – has to, at some point, really matter.

And hard work does matter all across the real sports spectrum. Kids from the Dominican Republic with hand-me-down baseball gloves can wind up playing in a World Series. Soccer players from shantytowns in São Paulo can star in World Cups. Youngsters in Harlem can go from rusted rims to NBA All-Star games. Golf, for a brief moment, seemed headed that way. Born in a dirt-floor shack, Lee Trevino quit school after seventh grade to caddy at a private Dallas country club. Between caddying treks up and down fairways, Trevino honed his golfing skills on a makeshift three-hole “course” that his caddyshack buddies built. In 1968, Trevino would go on to win the U.S. Open. By then, golf had already outgrown some of its aristocratic pretensions. On Long Island’s Nassau County, once a playground for New York’s wealthiest, the ranks of golfers started swelling during the Great Depression as private courses went bankrupt and turned into quality public venues that working stiffs could afford to play and enjoy.

My dad used to caddy at one of those private courses that went under. Dad and his fellow caddies chipped in, bought the course, and then went on to run it – open to the general public – for years. During those years, the golf-playing public was rapidly expanding. Between 1950 and 1970, one Texas A&M expert notes, the number of golfers in the United States more than tripled. But this 20th century golden age for golf didn’t last – our growing inequality didn’t let it. In our contemporary golf scene, financial resources determine outcomes much more than in any other pastime that aspires to actual “sport” status.

Are your drives not going far enough? To fix that, a golfer in days gone by had to practice on the driving range. Now, wealth buys easier options. You can spend $1,200 on a “gilded” driver that “offers exalted performance for seasoned players with moderate swing speed.” Do you have to pay $1,200 for a bat to hit better in baseball? In baseball, you don’t need a different bat to bunt. In golf, you need 14 different clubs, and none of them are particularly cheap. The cost of clubs and other golfing essentials undoubtedly contributes to this century’s shrinking number of golf courses. Since 2005, the National Golf Foundation reports that the number of America’s “18-hole equivalent” courses has sunk 12%.

Between 2002 and 2016, a SmartAsset analysis adds, the number of Americans playing golf dropped 24%, a number that “has continued to decline.” The golfing industry, meanwhile, sees nothing but bright days ahead. Industry leaders love to point to the boom in “off-course” forms of golf, like the indoor entertainment centers that feature “climate-controlled hitting bays, paired with music and a full bar and kitchen.” Everybody can swing away, have some laughs, and even get a little tipsy. Great fun for all. But it’s not a sport. The golf that does claim sport status increasingly belongs only to those who can afford it. Does this golf have any future? It’s hard to see where. As the Albany Law School’s Ray Brescia notes, local communities are coming under increasing pressure “to take stock of the environmental harms golf courses cause and the tax subsidies they receive.”

So let’s remember that individual “sports,” over time, have always tended to come and go. Think jousting and bullfighting. Good old golf may well be going soon.