Mini Golf Mantra: The Wackier, the Better

REHOBOTH BEACH, Del. -- In a world in which Grand Theft Auto IV can make $500 million in its first week of existence, how can the most innocent game of all survive?

We speak, of course, of miniature golf (goofy golf, adventure golf or Putt-Putt, if you prefer). Sure, the number of courses has declined over the years, but there's no real threat of the cheery yet maddening game going under. Mini golf is targeted at people 4 to 104, and those in the know fully expect the 4-year-olds to be playing in 100 years.

Marilyn Thomas of Towson, Md., played several rounds of mini golf recently in Rehoboth with her twin 12-year-old boys. It wasn't their first time.

"We come every time we're here," she said. "For us, it's as much a part of the beach as the sand is."

It's a happy ritual for many people in the Washington area, as they hit the beach towns of Maryland this holiday weekend. But as they pick up their putters and pseudo-curse the windmill hole, they might not know that the man who helped give goofy golf its goofiness is an Ocean City resident, still running his empire at 87.

Once upon a time, miniature golf was for rich ladies who were too delicate or too modest to swing a club past their shoulders. Then it became the quintessential everyman's game, with a bargain-basement cost. It offers perhaps the best chance for an 8-year-old to whump dad in competition and an innocent setting for millions of awkward teenage dates.

Mini golf loves anyone who loves it back. And, really, who doesn't love mini golf? Cultural references abound: Bart Simpson was conceived in the castle of a mini golf course, and the Karate Kid and the object of his affection had to push a car down a hill on their way to play a round. Let's face it: Nearly everyone has a mini golf memory.

"Some look at it as a sport, and in Europe they've tried to integrate it as sport, but in America it's a leisure activity," said Steven Hix, executive director of the Fort Worth-based Miniature Golf Association United States. "The wacky scenery and the story line is the trick, not so much the golf."

People who love mini golf seem to love wacky. Shell We Golf in Rehoboth offers straw hats to players navigating holes built around a large pond filled with (real) Hawaiian fish. Giant (fake) animals are the norm at many places; courses in Ocean City have towering dinosaurs, a giraffe and a slightly menacing flamingo. And old-timers can still find courses that don't get any crazier than the loop-the-loop or the windmill. But in the words of one teenage aficionado, that's soooo boooooring!

Mini golf began in Scotland in the mid-19th century, with no thought of wacky. It was simply a cheap knockoff of its more refined cousin, targeted toward women. While men played the real thing, ladies could play 50-yard courses that used bunkers and ponds as obstacles. The first U.S. mini golf course opened in Pinehurst, N.C., in 1916, but it still wasn't very wacky: It was modeled after gardens at the Louvre in Paris and was never opened to the public.

Then came Tom Thumb Golf.

Built on top of Lookout Mountain in Chattanooga, Tenn., it's fair to say that Tom Thumb brought the wacky. Frieda Carter, the wife of a plumber, used leftover tile, hollow logs and pieces of sewer pipe to create the first unique mini golf course.