In my hometown of Midland, Texas, alongside the Interstate 20 business loop on the outskirts of town, stands the miniature golf establishment called Green Acres. Allegedly built in 1955, the Green Acres of today has recently undergone a total facelift, complete with landscaping, a playground, go karts, a neon sign, and a website. These days, you have to sign a waiver and book a reservation to play (where I come from, that’s called a “tee time”).
In the early 2000s, however, it didn’t seem like much had changed from 1955—the property was bordered by a chain link fence, and the “pro shop” looked more like a carnival booth than a permanent structure. It stood in a pasture next door to the owners’ home, and the turf was frayed, the wood was splintered, the primary-colored paint was chipped, and the water features were empty half of the time.
I remember each hole like they’re old hometown friends of mine, and I can still see their names marked on signs in the shape of Texas at each tee. “Country Mile” was always an excuse to whack my little blue golf ball harder than any other hole would allow, and the dreaded “Ant Hill” is where I blew plenty of Family Tour leads. There was a hole with the cliché mini golf windmill and another with the cliché Midland oil derrick. My seventh birthday party was on old picnic tables behind the bathrooms.
Drone photos of the forest green turf contrasting with the new, white concrete show that the refurbished Green Acres preserved the layout and hole designs of the classic. I may have begun my golfing hobby—miniature and otherwise—on the turf of Green Acres, but it isn’t from a place of nostalgia when I assert that Green Acres has excellent mini golf course design, new or old appearances notwithstanding. More importantly, it’s evidence that good mini golf design is dying.
Mini golf is one of those games like bean bags or tabletop shuffleboard or air hockey: it’s easy to know what to do to win, and even though there is unquestionably a level of skill to it, complete beginners can still enjoy playing, and can occasionally even be reasonably competitive against an experienced player.
In other words, a good mini golf course is accessible and fun for new players regardless of their competition, but rewards players who are experienced in shot accuracy, power control, and ricochet strategy. Yes, it is this serious—bear with me here. The tiny details of how we pursue leisure in this exploitative life are always worth fighting for.
A player should be able to read a hole and develop a strategy for how to play it. Should you aim for the narrow gap that rolls to the hole, or not risk a miss and go the long way? At what angle and speed should you hit into the slope to roll around the obstacle? Which wall will bounce the ball closest towards the hole? How hard should you hit the ball to jump the ramp?
Mini golf is, therefore, a game of geometry. A good mini golf hole is made up of shapes, angles, slopes, and obstacles that all convey more or less exactly what will happen when the ball encounters them. It is the combination of these elements, paired with the player’s skill, which introduces fun and fair uncertainty into each putt.
This thesis brings me to the mini golf courses I’ve encountered in today’s age: abominable monuments to abstraction devoid of any soul. There has been some sort of rush to capitalize on our collective nostalgia for mini golf by building course after course seemingly catering to adult clientele.
These places have cropped up across Dallas. They charge ridiculous fees for the privilege to play only nine holes at a time, inside cramped buildings, with incohesive, surreal themes. Each hole is a new exercise in randomness: just hit the ball wherever you want and as hard as you want, and hope it goes sort of where you want it to go. Because there’s no way to read the outcome of putting into their parabolic slopes from a Calculus III textbook or the jagged obstacles hauled from a dump somewhere, mini golf is reduced to a game of luck and nothing more.
Kitschy, colorful, childlike mini golf decor from the mid-century is understandably not for every park, but the art school rejects that modern mini golf courses have become are irredeemable. Posed mannequins, sporadic rebar, twenty shades of purple… These courses convey the same degree of good taste as those tacky, screen-printed “paintings” of bulldog heads superimposed over 19th century military portraits.
These eyesores are all in service of one thing: an “Instagram-able” experience for the patrons. The more tasteless millennials that can be tricked into an Instagram story by black lights, bad color palettes, and decorations that are wacky for the sake of nothing, the more free marketing for the course. Another feature of society that has fallen to the gambit of social media.
A huge draw of these places is the drinks menu, and truthfully, I can’t fault them for the strategy. It’s true: people will put up with poor quality experiences all of the time for the sake of somewhere to get drunk. I’m one of them. But—and I don’t say this often at all—maybe some things aren’t improved with alcohol?
Make no mistake, I’m not advocating for temperance, but I firmly believe each of these present-day establishments are constructed with exactly two goals: bring people here for drinks, and capture their baby-like minds with photographable environments. Literally everything else is secondary, including the quality of the drinks and the scenery itself. And, of course, the golf.
What these establishments invariably get wrong is what makes mini golf special. It’s not the fun themes, the wacky paint jobs, being drunk, or, especially, the golf ball not going where you intended. It’s the company you keep. It’s comparing your strategies and scores with one another, because if one of you genuinely tries on this next hole, they might win. It’s being outside. It’s failing due to your own misjudgment, not punishment by unpredictability. It’s the golf novice slapping a shot off of the wall just right to hit a hole-in-one, because the course allowed them to learn on the first ten holes how to adjust their strategy and swing.
As kids, my brother and I played mini golf everywhere in the country we went. I’ve seen some truly great mini golf courses in my life, and some olden-day stinkers, too (because those do exist). But the only one I really, truly remember is Green Acres. I’m overjoyed to see that the renovators understood what made Green Acres special to generations of Midlanders and honored that in their remodel. It gives me hope that there’s at least someone who understands childlike enjoyment isn’t necessarily something to back away from, even for adults.
One day, once more, I’d love to hit a golf ball down a rectangle of green turf, bordered by parallel rows of aluminum, off of a ramp angled at thirty degrees, and through a spinning windmill. I’d even love to do it while sober.
