COURTESY MORNING SUN.NET By 2003, February will find American crying 'Putter there!' in unison.

ELItorial

Until March Madness, there's...mini-golf

The situation is dire. I was flipping channels last weekend, searching desperately for a sporting event, but I could find nothing. The Daytona 500 was on CBS. That didn't quite do it for me. They should give medals to the people who can actually watch cars drive in a circle 500 times. Another station was covering a Senior Professional Golf Association Tour event. Didn't they understand that Grumpy Old Men was funny because people were laughing at it, not with it? One more notch up the dial and I found the Rutgers-Villanova basketball game, an awful match-up between two teams whose only possible motivation to play is to avoid a last-place finish.

So I thought for a while. What does this sporting wasteland of February need? What could possibly salvage the month? Is there a new sport on the rise that could make it go by more quickly? I went online to search, and I soon found it: mini-golf.

Mini-golf, it turns out, is incredibly popular these days. The World Mini-Golf Sport Federation (WMSF), the game's international governing body, is pushing to make mini-golf an Olympic sport at the 2004 Games in Athens. The WMSF has subsidiaries all around the world and even has its own superstar, Andreas Schallner, who holds the minigolf world record of 18 strokes for 18 holes.

It dawned on me that maybe we should declare February National Mini-Golf Month. Judging from recent trends in sports and the entertainment industry, mini-golf could be the next big thing.

Americans don't want anything too original. Look at the failure of the X-Games. Nor do we want anything foreign—soccer was nice, but when the World Cup isn't held in New Jersey, we just don't care. We want another football, something comfortably middle-American, the sports equivalent of Regis Philbin. What's more American than a cute date, a milkshake or a sundae, and a round of mini-golf?

We like sports that showcase our democratic ideals. Cricket, tennis, and golf reek too much of the country club. Mini-golf takes democracy one step further—it doesn't require any skill whatsoever. With a few practice putts, anyone can be as good as anyone else. Most kids practicing basketball have a better chance of traveling back in time to King Arthur's court than ever dunking like Vince Carter. But this isn't true of mini-golf. Even more straightforward than EE 101, mini-golf is the perfect introductory sport.

Americans don't like whiny, pampered athletes who make an obscene amount of money. Mini-golf won't have any. After establishing a league in America, the WMSF can enforce a "Rodman rule"—any signs of individuality will be squashed immediately. No tattoos. No dyed hair. No piercings. In fact, let's just make all the pro mini-golfers wear the same clothes and, while we're at it, forbid them from talking on or off the course. As for salaries, that's even simpler. How about we host a TV show called "Who Wants to Marry a Pro Mini-Golfer?" We could get 50 beautiful women to compete, and the pro mini-golfer would choose one of them to receive his entire earnings, thus ensuring he'll remain poor and true to the hard-work ethic that got him to the top.

Americans are also obsessed with technology and fast-paced sports. Baseball was fine in the '50s, but wooden bats, rawhide balls, and five-hour-long games are so two generations ago. Instead of windmills, mini-golfers could putt through space stations or replicas of Silicon Valley. We could employ all sorts of tungsten alloys and digital technology to enhance the game and make it faster. Maybe we could even use the National Hockey League's cool blue halo to track the ball as it rolls to the hole, or the National Football League's yellow first down line to show the line the ball should travel. Needless to say, there'd be instant replay. But instead of having one referee review each putt, we'd get a whole panel of judges, one from each country, who'd score the putt first for its artistic merit on a scale of one to 6.745 and then for its technical performance on a scale of four to 8.023.

While we're talking about technology, why don't we just have the pros compete interactively over the web? The entire league could be an Internet start-up company. We wouldn't actually need to play a real game—all we need to do is sell advertising. Oh, and we could also have a huge halftime show featuring Garth Brooks singing "A Dream is like a River." To cap it all off, when everything is in place and Wall Street is chomping at the bit, we'd have a huge mini-golf IPO and get filthy rich.

Before mini-golf blossoms into its full glory, can we get some quality sports entertainment in February? Please?

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