An investment compensation expert, Graef Crystal, carried out a study purporting to show that the major companies, whose C.E.O's had low golf scores, had high performing stocks. Crystal obtained data for golf scores from the journal Golf Digest and used his own data on the stock market performance of the companies of 51 chief executives. He created a Stock Rating which gave each company a stock rating based on how investors who held their stock did with 100 being highest and 0 lowest.  

The data was obtained from the New York Times (31 May 1998, Section 3, p1) reporting the correlation between CEO's gold handicaps and the performance of their companies' stock.