(Chris Hartlove - For The Washington Post)

By Mary Battiata
Washington Post Staff Writer
Sunday, May 23, 1999

O  plastic skanky indoor-outdoor! O furry molded Astro green! Sand-blown circus-colored dragons astride the flag-snapping, cloud-scudded, salt-sea air! Moated mazes! Ticket-hut quiver of bristling putters, nest of popsicle-painted dimple-balls! Veil of french fry, whiff of funnel cake!

An ode to miniature golf. The only good kind of golf, some say. And they've got a point. As long as you're playing at the beach. I played real golf once. A few times. It was okay in the beginning. I had classic beginner's luck. I didn't know enough to be nervous, so my ball sailed straight down the fairway. I made my putts. The little rented bag was light on my shoulder, and if memory serves, I played near par. It wasn't until the third time out that the ball began to defy me.

I gave it up. Too staid, too slow, too country club. All that thwacking and walking and studying and frowning and thwacking again, trying with all one's might to force that ball along a narrow, invisible path of air. It didn't feel freeing, or even playful. In fact, it was a lot like being at the office.

But there was one great thing about golf that I grasped immediately: A day of golf was a day spent outdoors. An entire day. Whether you played 18 holes, or 9, or even 36, you finished peacefully tired, pleasantly worn. Your skin tight and gilded from hours of staring across the manicured savanna, the emerald veld, with its billions of blades of grass, each reflecting the sun, with more collective scorch power than the ocean or a swimming pool.

The game had elements of the military and the nautical, too. You marched over hill and dale with your clanking armament, kissed by spring breeze and summer rain, surrounded by huge swells of land that rose and fell all around you. When the veranda chair rose up to meet you at the end of the round, your legs wobbled just as they do stepping off a sailboat. All worries were swept from your brain. You had to work to remember what had been bothering you when you'd teed off hours earlier.

It was, I later realized, the closest inland thing to a day at the beach.

Which goes a long way toward explaining the intersection of Route 54 and the Coastal Highway, where the Atlantic Ocean, Ocean City, Md., and Fenwick Island, Del., all converge, and where we arrived on Easter weekend in search of the perfect Proustian game.

This intersection is the epicenter of miniature golf at the beach. The heart. A miniature mecca. A miniature miracle mile. There are putt-putt golf courses on three out of four corners here. And to the north and south rise more than a dozen and a half others, as far away as Cape Henlopen and the Indian River Inlet. They are in every daydream and nightmare of a style, from the rococo splendor of the pirate ship and giraffes at the Old Pro at 134th Street, to the wild-eyed fiberglass Norseman at Viking Golf at Route 54, to the Shaker simplicity of the Lilliputian course on Garfield Parkway in Bethany Beach, the course I played, and played, with my brothers and sisters when we were kids.

On summer evenings, the players line up by the dozens at these places. Even on Easter weekend, there was a respectable crowd making all the familiar noises. "Make it, Grandpa, make it for the family!" begged one wriggly boy, watching an older man line up a putt. "Hole in one! Hole in one!" chanted his brother. And from somewhere back behind a large, gray molded-concrete mountain, the satisfyingly ludicrous, "Fore!"

This 30-mile stretch of Delmarva coastline can't claim to have the most miniature golf courses. That honor goes to Myrtle Beach, S.C., which has 45 and counting. But there are at least 15 here. And there's no accident in that.

The beach, after all, is where golf was invented. Not on the beach itself, of course, but the land just beyond the beach, the rough, grassy, not-good-for-farming swath on the landward side of the sand dunes. This is the terrain the Scottish call "the linksland," according to the sportswriter Michael Bamberger's book of similar name.

This is the land where golf began. Which is why a great many people who would never pick up a putter back home find themselves heading with lightened step toward a game of miniature golf at the beach. Miniature golf at the beach gives you the best of both worlds. You get the bonsai conviviality of the miniature course, but its potentially claustrophobic small scale is expanded by the sweep and vista of the seaside. I can't imagine lining up to play in a shopping mall, or along a commuter roadway, or even a suburban park. But the beach? The heart lifts like a sail in the wind. Putt-putt at the beach is like golf played while sucking helium. It is social and sociable, silly and deeply theatrical, with its elaborate sets and giddy theme-park decorations taken to a drunken, excessive, taste-be-damned extreme.

It was just this helium feeling that overtook us as we cruised the beach highway early Easter weekend. The sun was up, across the highway the sea was slaty and calm, and a cool breeze snapped the bunting flags. The dog's ears flapped in the wind in the back seat, and up front, we considered the array. For one brief moment, it was the best of all possible mornings in the best of all possible worlds.

At Viking Golf, where we eventually settled, there were the familiar 20-foot wild-eyed fiberglass Norsemen, freshly painted for the new season, with bulging lacquered pectorals and little clubs. And there was something new, too, a 25-foot-tall two-headed dragon whose eyes light up during night games, and whose roar, a cross between a locomotive and a vacuum cleaner, comes from pinhole speakers in the roof of its mouth. It took an artist in Florida a year and a half to build him. The course's owner, Bjorn Andersen, who grew up playing real golf in Denmark, says the dragon, now entering his third season, is very popular.

Well, I like Midgard the Dragon. He has turquoise and aquamarine scales and flared, Gila monster cheek gills, snaggle teeth and orange claws as thick as trowel handles. His wattles and snakelike tongue look like something from a medical textbook. He is satisfyingly ghastly. If you were a child, you might still be thinking about him at Christmastime.

As we teed up at the first hole, it struck me that we were putting at what you might call the St. Andrews of miniature golf.

Okay, the analogy isn't perfect. Big golf was invented in the British Isles (an advance on the one-club game the ancient Romans brought along). The St. Andrews courses, on the eastern shore of Scotland, are the game's Holy Grail and Taj Mahal and Jerusalem all in one.

Miniature golf was not invented on the Delmarva peninsula. Depending on who's talking and how you define a miniature golf course, the game was invented early this century by a rich businessman on his estate in Piedmont, N.C., or a Long Island golf pro at an indoor courseoverlooking Grand Central Station, or the wife of a real estate developer in Lookout Mountain, Tenn.

The Tennessee course, built by Garnet Carter, was the most like the courses we play on at the beach today. His wife, Frieda, who had a passion for fairy-tale characters, festooned the course with tiny trolls and hollowed-out "logs" made from cement.

Within a few years the Carters franchised some 3,000 Tom Thumb miniature golf courses, part of what became a 10-year national craze. By the late 1920s, there were 25,000 to 40,000 courses up and running around the country, including 150 or more on rooftops in New York City. President Herbert Hoover had the Marines build one for his son. There were miniature golfing pop songs.

Like all fads, it faded. There was a miniature golf revival in the 1950s, and then another lull. But the '90s have seen a third boomlet, with growth of about 20 percent a year, according to the Miniature Golf Association of America. More than half of the courses on the Delmarva Miniature Mile have been built in the past 15 years. Around the country, there are about 8,000 courses. Trouble is, if you like your miniature golf a little over the top, a lot of the new ones are kind of boring. Tasteful little red and white mini-barn sheds, a sapling here and there. In Bethany Beach, for example, because of changes in the zoning laws, it is no longer possible to build a miniature course outdoors at all.

Bring on the lime-colored Buddhas! Thank the golf gods for what we have here at 54 and Coastal Highway. Fen-Tiki Island Golf, Golf Down Under, Viking Golf. Up the street at 134th Street there's Old Pro Golf, where you can play the Polynesian course or the Pirate Ship or the Safari.

"Try our other Old Pro Courses," solemnly advises the sign at the ticket window. "23rd St.: Lost Empire. 28th St.: Castle and Circus. 68th St.: Prehistoric and Underwater."

Even the Bethany Beach course, where the kitsch factor is far lower, has its own dizzy charm. The descendants of the original owner have added a mural of pink flamingo and striped beach umbrella to the wall that flanks it on one side. The aesthetic is now pastel Shaker, utilitarian but somehow graceful. There's no cascading waterfall, but I wouldn't want there to be. I have a lot invested in having it be like it was.

Growing up, we lined up every night we could, carrying our coins in weird plastic change purses that we'd bought across the street at Rhodes Five and Dime. Inhaling the salty air, our guts distended with crab cake and ice cream custard, we stepped onto the green carpet and began our evening adventure under the halo of the white klieg lights, our skin prickly from the salt water, hair still wet, flapping around like ducks in our plastic flip-flops.

And in a green ticket booth facing the street, or sitting in his chair, the ghostly presence of the original owner, Mr. Fisk, who, though we didn't know it then, was a retired saxophone player who'd once traveled and played the Eastern Seaboard, then married into the family that owned concessions up at Rehoboth. Tall and white-haired, he manned the booth with courtly reserve that was much like the course he designed.

Today, it's round the Viking course we go. We keep losing our little sharp pencils. The salt air makes the score card soft. You can smoke a cigarette if you want to. There is the smell of caramel corn wafting over the whole enterprise.

Tee up, swing, thwock. Onward we press, past Eric the Red, the Longboat (Hole No. 6), the Runic Stones, past the Burial Mound (No. 18), over small bridges, rock-strewn ponds and plaques bearing Viking lore: "Barred from his native country for manslaughter, Eric the Red sailed west to discover a rugged land of fjords, rivers and grassy slopes. He named it Greenland ... "

Bjorn Andersen says part of the reason for miniature golf's revived fortunes is the boom in big golf. Little golf turns out to be a good place to practice putting.

My score is a ridiculous 12 over par. No trophy today. No hole-in-one on the 18th hole. We consider another round, and then, for a wild minute, the notion of playing every course up and down the beach dangles and dazzles. How long would it take? How many Cokes? Sunblock?

In the end, my knees vote no. There's a lot of genuflecting in this game. Miniature golf is more strenuous than I remember. I think about a future where aging Americans tool around wheelchair-friendly li'l linkslands, shadowed by miniature caddies. And I think about the joke actor Jay Mohr told in his first stand-up routine, when he was 15.

"I'm captain of the miniature golf team," he said. "I missed my sophomore year because of an injury. I was hit by a windmill."

Mary Battiata is a staff writer for the Magazine.