![\"\"](\"http:\/\/danwashburn.com\/scorecard.jpg\")
<\/p>\nAugust 8, 2000 \u00e2\u20ac\u201d Good golfers generally aren’t good miniature golfers, somebody told me recently.<\/p>\n
That person was wrong. And so was I, for assuming that the opposite also holds true: That awful golfers \u00e2\u20ac\u201d like me \u00e2\u20ac\u201d would somehow be ameliorated by the plastic greens, colored balls and banked shots.<\/p>\n
On Saturday I invited Gainesville High state champion golfers Kingsley Barrett and Stuart Moore and Times Sports Editor Rob Joesbury out for a round at Paradise Mini Golf.<\/p>\n
The exaggerated undulations of the Paradise greens didn’t level the playing field as I hoped they would.<\/p>\n
Barrett beat me by 20 strokes. Moore did it by 13. Heck, even Joesbury had seven on me.<\/p>\n
Once a duffer, always a duffer. Everywhere a duffer.<\/p>\n
I have a feeling Barrett could play well on any surface, under any conditions. Give her a club and a ball and she’ll find a way to knock it in the hole. On Saturday, she shot a par 39 and didn’t miss one short putt. Plastic greens or not, that’s pretty impressive.<\/p>\n
Golf seems to come easy for Barrett, who didn’t start playing until age 12, relatively late for the Tiger Woods era of golfing toddlers. She’s now 17, a rising senior at Gainesville, and already has three Class AA state girls titles on her resume. That’s right, three for three.<\/p>\n
She shows no signs of letting up heading into her final year of high school, either. In June, she won the Georgia PGA Junior Championship by 11 strokes with a career-best 3-under 69.<\/p>\n
“She could probably help out our team,” said Moore, also 17 and a rising senior. I don’t think he was kidding.<\/p>\n
Not that Moore needs much help. In May, he fired a 70 in the state tournament for the second year in a row. Last year, that was good for third place. This year, it earned him his first state title at Vidalia Country Club.<\/p>\n
No rocks in the middle of the greens there, I would guess. At Paradise, two big ones greeted us on the fourth green, creating a narrow passage directly to the hole, and two safer routes around the sides.<\/p>\n
“Go through the middle, Dan,” Moore yelled to me slyly as I lined up my “approach” shot. He had tried that strategy a few minutes earlier, and was unsuccessful. My performance to that point gave him no reason to think I would fare any better.<\/p>\n
My putting is not \u00e2\u20ac\u201d how do you say? \u00e2\u20ac\u201d good. I stab at the ball angrily, with so little grace or finesse that when the ball does head for the hole it invariably skips wildly off the lip, leaving me with an even longer putt back. Sometimes the ball trickles helplessly back down a long slope, and I get to do it all over again.<\/p>\n
There are no “gimmes” when I play.<\/p>\n
“You’ve been burning the lips, Dan,” Moore said. He and Barrett seemed to find great pleasure in laughing at my many misfortunes that afternoon.<\/p>\n
“So what are the toughest courses you guys have played?” I asked, trying to draw attention away from my bogey on No. 4 \u00e2\u20ac\u201d my third bogey on the day.<\/p>\n
“This one,” Barrett said jokingly before acing the fifth (I, by the way, triple bogeyed that one).<\/p>\n
Barrett has actually played Augusta National, home of The Masters. Shot an 85 from the members tees at the age of 16. Birdied No. 11, part of the notorious “Amen Corner.”<\/p>\n
“It was pretty cool,” Barrett understated.<\/p>\n
Moore pegged Pinehurst No. 2, site of the 1999 U.S. Open, as his toughest. He played the North Carolina course earlier this summer … and shot a 1-over par.<\/p>\n
“I played pretty good,” Moore said with a wide smile.<\/p>\n
The duos’ rise to the top of Georgia high school golf was not an accident. Barrett and Moore work hard at their sport. Both play or practice every day, but neither is close to burning out, they said.<\/p>\n
It’s still fun, like it should be.<\/p>\n
The recruitment letters from colleges have begun arriving. That’s no surprise. Both said they’d like to play for schools in the Southeast. Grades surely won’t be an issue in the search. Moore scored all A’s last year. Barrett made all A’s and one B \u00e2\u20ac\u201d in Honors Chemistry.<\/p>\n
“Stuart didn’t take that class,” Barrett chided. “He takes the easy classes.”<\/p>\n
Beyond college for these two, who knows? Neither rules out anything.<\/p>\n
But first things first. They’ve got state titles to defend.<\/p>\n
“So what do you guys do when you’re not golfing?” I asked. “What do teenagers in Gainesville do for fun?”<\/p>\n
“We’re still trying to figure that out,” Barrett said.<\/p>\n
“Gainesville can be pretty boring,” Moore agreed.<\/p>\n
I would assume playing miniature golf with two 20-something journalists is not the solution to their boredom, although I believe we provided them some amusement.<\/p>\n
For their birdies, we had double bogeys in return. For their holes-in-one, I had holes-in-five.<\/p>\n
Joesbury and I offered to take the winners out for lunch afterward. They politely declined.<\/p>\n
They were headed out to Chattahoochee Golf Course … to play some regular-sized golf.<\/p>\n
Go figure.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
August 8, 2000 \u00e2\u20ac\u201d Good golfers generally aren’t good miniature golfers, somebody told me recently. That person was wrong. And so was I, for assuming that the opposite also holds true: That awful golfers \u00e2\u20ac\u201d like me \u00e2\u20ac\u201d would somehow be ameliorated by the plastic greens, colored balls and banked …<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[37,9,15,19,6],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/danwashburn.com\/sportinglife\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/217"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/danwashburn.com\/sportinglife\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/danwashburn.com\/sportinglife\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/danwashburn.com\/sportinglife\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/danwashburn.com\/sportinglife\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=217"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"http:\/\/danwashburn.com\/sportinglife\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/217\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":591,"href":"http:\/\/danwashburn.com\/sportinglife\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/217\/revisions\/591"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/danwashburn.com\/sportinglife\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=217"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/danwashburn.com\/sportinglife\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=217"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/danwashburn.com\/sportinglife\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=217"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}