In the novel by Miguel de Cervantes, Don Quixote takes his lance and “tilts at windmills” as the saying goes, imagining their blades to be a giant’s arms.

I can relate.  I, too, have tilted at windmills — and usually lost . . . on the putting green.

Not one of those manicured, meticulously shaved creations trod by real golfers in their lemon-yellow slacks and white spikes.  Naw.  Ones made of plain old green carpeting, glued to beds of solid concrete.

Sinking a long miniature-golf putt is more guesswork and luck than skill for most of us. (Ben B Miller, Flickr Creative Commons)

I’m a miniature golfer, you see.  My game is the kinda, sorta putting part of golf — with a huge twist.  In my kind of golf, windmill hazards and polyethylene gorillas stand astride your sightline, and narrow chutes and bridges drop your ball down to levels where it rolls in a hundred different directions.

My ball, and the club I strike it with, look nothing like the ones that Vijay Singh or Tiger Woods or K.J. Choi’s caddie pulls out of a bag.  Mini-golf balls are colored — usually red, yellow, green, and blue — invariably faded and chipped from overuse.  Our putters are all the same institutional design, save for their length, and they, too, have been gripped by hundreds or even thousands of others before we get our hands on them.

No caddie hands them to us, that’s for sure.  The putter’s our only club, and we lug it around all 18 holes ourselves.  Any mini-golfer who brings a real putter to the course is called a pretentious poof, or worse, behind his back.

I am moved to write all this because the sport — activity? — of miniature golf lost a legend a week or so ago.  Ralph J. Lomma died at age 87 in Scranton, Pennsylvania.

Ralph Lomma's the one on the left! His zany twists to the staid game of miniature golf revolutionized the business. (Peter Morgan/AP)

It was he who turned what had been the tedious game of miniature golf into an adventure.  An early sort of theme park, sprinkled with absurd monsters and mermaids and monoliths.

Mini-golf is thought to have begun in the mid-1800s in a fitting place: St. Andrews in Scotland, which real golfers refer to as the Royal & Ancient Golf Club.  Its members decided that their pestering wives and lady friends needed a dignified version of their game to keep them busy while the men whacked golf balls around the gorse.  It was thought unseemly for a woman to perform the violent swings that advance a ball down a fairway, but the gentle putting stroke would be acceptable, achievable, and amusing.

So the club created an 18-hole course of just putting greens.  They called it “the Himalayas” — odd, since greens are as flat as a flounder.  Over the years, other golfing clubs and fancy hotels followed suit, building putting courses on a miniature scale.  “Garden golf,” “pitch and putt,” or “par 3 golf,” they called the game that was played there.

Par, for the uninitiated, is the number of swings, or strokes, deemed right and proper to get the ball from the tee into the recessed cup on each of the course’s 18 holes.  Making par should be difficult, but not daunting, to achieve.

Another putt, another dratted windmill! (vomsorb, Flickr Creative Commons)

In the case of miniature golf, that number is often made uniform the whole way through: 4, 3, or even 2 putts per hole.  That’s the optimum, and only sometimes the number of strokes YOU will take to put the ball in the cup down the carpeted way.

The first known U.S. mini-course opened in 1916 in Pinehurst, North Carolina.  It had a clever name: Thistle Dhu.  Or phonetically, “This’ll Do.”  A veritable boom in such courses followed.

Each had undulations, twists to the right or left, and idiosyncrasies.  A couple of pink, plastic flamingos stuck in the ground next to the holes, perhaps.  Various kinds of fake-grass surfaces, too.

Other than that, the mini game was pretty much the same: mildly interesting and challenging over the first few holes, a tad tiresome toward the end.

In 1954, Don Clayton of Fayetteville, North Carolina, created a miniature-golf layout that he called the “Putt-Putt” course, which he charged customers 25 cents to play.  It had a few refinements.  Each hole was a quick-playing par 2.  Sinking one’s ball into each distant hole was doable if you tapped a firm and true putt and didn’t hit a stone or a cigarette butt that someone before you had dropped.  Superior play could earn a player a modest prize, typically a free game.

Putt-Putt's not Coke in its reach . . . yet. But you'll find these signs in unlikely places around the world. (me and the sysop, Flickr Creative Commons)

Putt-Putt was rapidly franchised across America and much of the rest of the world.  Like dining at McDonald’s, you got pretty much the same experience playing it in New York or New Delhi or New Zealand.  The course was entirely predictable.

Ralph Lomma, who had been making and selling skillets and die-cast Christmas ornaments in Scranton, changed all that.  In 1955, he and his brother, Alphonse, opened a mini-golf course there that was loaded with wacky obstacles.  They included a revolving windmill whose paddles quite likely and infuriatingly would swoop downward and strike your ball just as it arrived, knocking it far from the hole.

Other Lomma courses added spooky castles, zig-zag misdirections, cement alligators whose gaping jaws stood between you and a beautiful shot.  Sometimes a plastic whale would spit your ball back at you if you missed the narrow opening inside its mouth.  Or a guillotine whose (quite dull) blade dropped, once again, right in front of a perfectly aimed putt.

Now THERE's a tricky shot! (SeeMidTN.com (aka Brent), Flickr Creative Commons)

Lomma’s creations weren’t just thematic decorations.  They added elements of skill, a bit of trickery, and a chuckle or two to what had been miniature golf’s monotonous parade of putts.  To win at his game, you had to concentrate, not just whack the ball against the course’s wooden bumpers and hope for the best.

Ralph Lomma would create about 6,000 courses around the world, on cruise ships, at federal penitentiaries, and even, he claimed, on an aircraft carrier.  That one’s hard to picture.

Mini-golf courses are recession-proof “money machines,” he crowed.  For $20,000, a franchisee got a prefabricated course, an array of putters, a good supply of scorecards and pencils, and one embellishment: a happy clown face that collected, and kept, your ball after your last putt — whether you had successfully knocked it in the cup or not. Read the rest of this entry »