To live anywhere in Florida is to live within a one-mile radius of a putt-putt golf course. No matter how much you hate golf and all of its associates, at some point you’ll have to play putt-putt or goony golf (named after a flock of goonies who landed on a course, attacked, and flew off with two 13-year-old boys who were flapping their arms and squawking like idiots). And, if you’re like me, you’ll relish it. 

I love it when out-of-towners think they can come to my very own Pirate’s Treasure Trove of Dilapidated Astro-Turf and Sun Damaged Plastic Boulders. Out-of-towners think they can beat me. They can’t. I’ve trained too long and too hard for these moments. Sure, they might brag about their putting skills on the “golf course,” but they haven’t played putt-putt with a native. 

Yes, the native knows that putt-putt is a game where your ball will at some point get stuck, dragged, eaten or drowned in some sort of windmill, dinosaur, shack, covered bridge or zombie tiki bar. He knows that in a game of putt-putt, it’s just as likely that you’ll get tetanus as a hole-in-one. He knows that someone will take an infinite number of practice strokes, lulling one into a stupor, until a younger someone will take a full baseball wind-up and snap one back into reality. He knows of festering holes that threaten with all sorts of festering diseases when he finally sinks a putt. He knows it’s a game that’s no fun with people who take it too seriously and, at the same time, a game that’s no fun with people who don’t take it seriously enough. He knows its courses are either designed by a mechanical engineer or a group of drunk monkeys. He knows that each course is a multiple-ER-visit-worthy trip hazard. He knows that, for some inexplicable reason, putt-putt comes with go-carts, arcades and snotty kids running around with Fun Dip dripping from their fingers. He knows that cheaters in fact do prosper on the putt-putt course, especially if they’re any good at math, and if (and this is a big if) they somehow manage to keep the score card through the entire game. He knows that if people who are bad at math will break down and cry by the third hole as they realize that not only does their pencil not have an eraser, but they have 15 more holes of excruciating addition, subtraction and possible quantum. He knows people may think they are in deepest darkest Congo, having survived a plane crash, in the Caribbean surrounded by pirates, in Holland surrounded by windmills, in Jurassic Park, or in some insane combination that gives him the same creeped-out feeling he gets at Disney on the ride “It’s a Small World.” A native knows that if it’s a course that has been open more than a week, it will likely smell, feel and look like the apocalypse has just sauntered through. He knows that putt-putt courses with all their attractions are little more than casinos for kids, and to say yes to a child is to feed the addiction. A native knows that every course, no matter the designer, has at least one hole that is physically impossible to score a hole-in-one in. Yet somehow the baseball wind-up kid will get that hole in one, which will only encourage his golf swing of death. He knows that this will likely happen in the front nine, making the back nine a spine-tingling, adrenalized terror for anyone with a fully-formed frontal lobe.

Now, I was going to write about how I enjoy a good game of putt-putt, but now that I know all a native knows, I realize that to do so would go against all I know. I think what I’m realizing even as I write this is that what makes putt-putt so attractive, in spite of all the above, is that it pulls out the imaginative child in us and puts it into a competitive, real life game that most anyone can play, few can master, and even fewer can resist. You know, like those who say no to a Coke on a hot day or those who tear up in “It’s a Small World” or those who are afraid of tetanus, possible electrocution, drowning, getting gatored, and/or golf clubs to their teeth.