Dimpled balls

There are people who play mini-golf professionally. This blows my mind.

Mini-golf – in case you’ve been captive in a Sri Lankan dungeon since the age of steam power – is a putting game based on the premise that people won’t become murderously enraged by having their balls swatted back to them by spinning windmill propellers. Its origins are fuzzy, so I’ll just go ahead and assume it was created by a mad scientist, probably German, whose goal was to make children cry while their families slowly went insane.

All that will sound excessively harsh in light of the revelation that I, an easily frustrated man, try to make it out to a mini-golf course at least once a summer. No clue why I put myself through the ordeal. Mini-golf is one of those slippery experiences whose negative effects evaporate from memory faster than disappearing ink. In that way, it’s very similar to my relationship with hot-dogs. Every summer, I get super excited whenever someone offers me a hot-dog, and it’s only halfway through eating one that I remember I hate them.

To be fair, I don’t outright hate mini-golf. It can be vaguely fun as long as nobody’s keeping score, which is usually what ends up happening anyway, even if it didn’t start that way.

The whole thing begins innocently. You and your golfing buddy grab your balls (oh, grow up), and a scorecard with one of those nubby eraserless pencils that are always sticky. You walk to the first hole and you think, “What’s the harm in keeping score? This first hole looks easy enough; simple straight line, piece o’ cake. We’ll be done the whole course before my ice cream starts to melt.”

Forty-five minutes later you’re on the 9th hole, listlessly whacking balls around without even looking, telling your partner, “Whatever, I’ll just take the six.”

It’s as though the game was invented so the non-checkered-hatted masses could taste a bit of the frustration of actual golf. Every once in a while I’ll tune into CBS on the odd Sunday to watch “60 Minutes,” only to find it delayed by a professional golf tournament; and while my initial reaction is usually disappointment, I’m invariably sucked into the drama of watching grown men cursing at a ball the size of a mutant grape. If mini-golf is an exercise in frustration, golf-golf has got to be the most painful ordeal this side of a Greek pan-flute concert.

In real golf, Mother Nature is the windmill, conjuring gusting winds that steer well-hit balls into tangled woods or giant kidney-shaped ponds. Even the greens, so flat-looking on TV, are riddled with dips and curves in a complex geometry that would have driven Einstein to give up math and form a barbershop quartet. The next time you’re watching TV and come upon a golf tournament accidentally (because nobody seeks it on purpose), watch the faces of the guys in third or fourth place. They look like they’re pouring over gruesome crime scene evidence.

Mini-golf is a microcosm of that reality. Its one saving grace is that when you make a lousy shot, you don’t have a ten-minute walk to the ball. You simply step over the cowboy’s outstretched boot, hop across the Hobbit-sized waterfall, and chuck your pink ball into the adjoining video arcade. There it will stay until staff comes around and digs it out from behind the dusty Pac-Man machine from 1983.

But hey, some people are gluttons for punishment. These unfortunate souls can be found playing in the World Minigolfsport Federation, and unlike the old World Wrestling Federation, where “World” is a term meaning “Gold’s Gym in Arkansas,” the mini-golf league is truly world-wide. World championships are held on odd-numbered years, while continental championships are played in even-numbered years. Divisions within the federation make space for the full scope of humanity: Men, women, the old, the young, and in all cases, the alarmingly disturbed.

All kidding aside – most kidding aside – these players have my respect. It takes a person of a certain amount of fortitude to practice whacking a piece of plastic through a clown’s eyeball until you’ve got it just right. And maybe this is just a shot in the dark, but something tells me these valiant men and women aren’t exactly pulling down Tiger Woods money; you don’t see a pro mini-golf player hawking Buicks on network television. No, I’m pretty sure these players have kept their day jobs. Which is even more impressive, since it must be hard to train for tournaments when you’re responsible for closing up shop at Bed, Bath & Beyond.

They’ll serve as inspiration the next time I subject myself to 18 holes of pure silliness. Who knows? If I master the windmill, there could be a future in it for me.

A strange, strange future.