Miniature Golf Day

What the day is

Miniature Golf Day is observed on September 21. It marks the small-scale putting game that turns up beside beaches, highways and family entertainment centers, played on carpeted greens with obstacles that would horrify a golf purist.

The appeal is that it removes almost everything difficult about golf. There is no long game, no equipment to buy, no dress code, and a round takes under an hour. A child and a grandparent can play the same hole on roughly equal terms, which is true of very few sports.

Origin and background

The origin of the observance is not documented, though late September suits it: in much of the country it lands in the last stretch of warm evenings before outdoor courses close for the season.

The game's own history is better recorded. An early putting-only course called Thistle Dhu was built at Pinehurst, North Carolina in 1916, its name a play on "this'll do." The commercial breakthrough came in 1926, when Garnet Carter opened Tom Thumb Golf on Lookout Mountain, Tennessee, with the scaled-down fairy-tale obstacles that set the template. Carter franchised the idea and it spread fast: by the end of the 1920s there were thousands of courses across the United States, many of them on hotel rooftops.

The Depression wiped out most of them almost as quickly. The version most people know today comes from the postwar revival, when courses were rebuilt around windmills, castles and loops, and chains standardized the format. Competitive minigolf also exists, played on plain, precisely engineered courses that look nothing like the seaside version.

How to take part

Find a course and play a round. Beyond that, a few things make it better.

• Go in the evening. Courses are cooler, quieter and better looking under lights.
• Aim for the banks, not the hole. On most obstacle holes the rail is the intended route and a direct shot is the wrong one.
• Keep score honestly but cap each hole at six strokes, which is how most courses tell you to play anyway.
• If the local course has closed, a putting mat at home works. The indoor version is how many people keep playing through winter.

Courses attached to arcades or ice cream stands tend to be the most fun, mostly because the round is not the whole outing.