Miniature golf, also known as mini-golf, crazy golf or Putt-Putt, is a game modelled after the sport of golf. As in golf, courses are commonly 9- or 18-holes long and the object is to hit the golfball into the appropriate hole in the fewest number of strokes; however, in the miniature game, the holes are significantly shorter and consist of only a putting surface. The game is made challenging by an arrangement of obstacles, ramps and bunkers. It is a popular pastime in many areas of the world, especially among families.
Mini-golf rose to popularity in the late 1910s and early 1920s as a way for early golf fanatics to replicate major golf courses on a small scale. The game was commonly called "Garden Golf" and was played with a putter on grass. Thomas McCulloch Fairbairn, a golf fanatic, revolutionized the game in 1922 with his formulation of a suitable artificial green -- a mixture of cottonseed hulls, sand, oil and dye. With this discovery, miniature golf became accessible everywhere, and by the late 1920s there were over 150 rooftop courses in New York City alone.
A variety of different types of course exist, five of which are officially recognised: the most common of these are beton and eternit.
The book Tilting At Windmills (How I Learned To Stop Worrying And Love Sport) by Andy Miller tells the story of the formerly sports-hating author attempting to change by competing in miniature golf, including events in Denmark and Latvia.
It seems that minigolf course construction and minigolf course design are areas of the amusement industry that have changed a lot in recent years, and Harris is a company that has not only kept up with, but defined a lot of those changes."
Many people still expect a miniature golf course builder to be a specialist in sculpting oversized clown heads and windmills, the sort of things that used to be staples of miniature golf course construction.
Today's minigolf course builder must have the ability to satisfy a customer's land, utility, drainage and zoning restrictions while providing the best possible quality and craftsmanship.
The ability to provide a durable surface encouraged a slew of entrepreneurs to open miniature golf courses throughout the west into California as well as the Northeast.
In fact, by the fall of 1930, more than 25 million people were miniature golf fans.
The popularity of miniature golf seemed to lie in the fact that so much of it was dependent upon sheer luck instead of necessarily having to have skill - with beginners often having a viable chance of defeating seasoned duffers.
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