It's a Jungle Out There

A mini-golfer makes his way through the Hawaiian Rumble in North Myrtle Beach, S.C. (Bill Bamberger)

"Aw, come on," Matt said, turning his mouth up at the corner.

"Please?" The boy made a helpless, head-cocking gesture in the direction of his friends, as though he'd look a fool if he didn't follow through on giving Matt a good teasing, and couldn't Matt just play along?

Reluctantly, Matt scrawled his name on the paper. The boy's features widened into an unattractive leer. "Thanks," the boy said. "You're my hee-ro." Then he strolled back to his friends, waving Matt's autograph in the air.

Matt's friend Jim Palisano arrived, and they got in Matt's car, and drove west toward Branson, still 16 hours off. Jim, a pudgy 36-year-old with thinning hair and a close-trimmed beard, first met Matt at a tournament in 1992, and they've been friends since. Jim is also a professional mini-golfer, but he works as a field agent for a company called Animaland, which sells machines that assemble custom-made stuffed animals before customers' eyes. "They come with your choice of outfit -- shoes, hats, backpacks, sunglasses and a birth certificate," Jim said. "It's a pretty neat deal."

Jim's home was in Las Vegas, but a corporate espionage assignment had brought him to Hickory. A competitor's machine had been installed somewhere in the area, and Jim's boss wanted him to go spy on it and find out how it worked. Before his job at Animaland, Jim spent 13 years managing Putt-Putt courses and family entertainment centers across the country. His biggest win was in 1990, when he took home $13,000 at a Putt-Putt tournament in Florida. Now, however, Jim was on something of a chilly streak in his putting career, and hadn't won a tournament in six years.

Matt and Jim headed west, out of North Carolina and into Tennessee. The Missouri tournament would be Matt's first of the year, an opportunity to shake the winter kinks out of his game before competing in the U.S. Open one month later, in North Myrtle Beach, S.C. -- which, if he won, would give him his third straight U.S. Open victory, a record for the tour. The Branson tournament was only in its second year, and Matt didn't anticipate a large field or particularly savage competition. The U.S. Open would be another matter, he said. "You get a lot of Putt-Putt players, and some Europeans come over, too. They're really good." One of his more fearsome adversaries would be an 11-year-old girl from the Czech Republic, who is known to be a force. "She beat me one time in Connecticut," Matt said later. "She's got sponsorship. You have to look out for her. She can really knock 'em in."

Matt had brought along a collection of mix CDs for the trip, which included mostly feel-good, lite-rock numbers by groups such as the Little River Band, Gordon Lightfoot and America. He described these tunes as "Putt-Putt songs," and said he liked listening to them because these were the sorts of songs that reminded him of the childhood days he spent -- nearly every weekend -- at the Putt-Putt in Memphis, where he grew up. That halcyon era, he said, "was about the funnest time of my life."

In fact, Matt still seems rather young, though he'll be 35 in October. He has clear blue eyes, an unlined face and a tidy, post-collegiate style, favoring golf shirts and chino shorts. He has never married, and lives with his girlfriend and a roommate in Cary, N.C. He has a preternatural talent for barroom sports -- pool, foosball and darts -- and he alludes often to his belief in the existence of Bigfoot, a faith instilled in him by his grand-father, who claimed to have seen the mythic beast many years ago in a stretch of bottomland Tennessee forest. As Matt drove deeper into Tennessee, and the woods crowded the road, he announced, "There've been a few sightings around here."

"What?" Jim asked.

Matt said, "I heard some crazy stories of Bigfoot sightings around here. This guy and his girlfriend were on a picnic or something out here, and they saw a herd of deer running over the hill with this big, eight-foot thing chasing after them. They felt the ground vibrate. Then, two of them -- these eight-foot-tall, black-haired creatures -- jumped out from behind a tree.

It was an ambush. They grabbed two of the deer and broke their necks."

"They ate them?" Jim asked.