It is a terrain of surpassing beauty: gently rolling, bathed inemerald, covered by an ominous mist. It is morning. A gentle breezetries, and fails, to cut the humidity. With each step, I inch closerto the rumbling giant, my heart racing as I wind my way throughdense underbrush. All at once, there it is: the volcano itself, vastand roiling. It dominates the landscape, cloaking me in shadow. Istruggle to get a better look, but I've waited too long. Suddenlythe mighty mountain erupts, exploding with a deafening roar. Iscramble. All sense of time is lost.
At some point, who knows when, I look down. Remarkably, I amstill clutching my putter, having retreated to the relative safetyof the 12th hole. You tried to best me, oh Hawaiian Rumble miniaturegolf course in North Myrtle Beach, S.C. But I have dug deep, andsurvival is mine.
Until, that is, exactly 20 minutes from now, when the thing willgo off again.
Not wanting to tempt fate twice, I bolt to the clubhouse. There,behind a counter covered with golf clubs of every conceivable sizeand golf balls of every conceivable hue, sits Bo Taylor. He is, Iimmediately decide, a rare sort of South Carolinian. Rare notbecause he spends most of his waking hours at Hawaiian Rumble, themost important course in what is indisputably the mini-golf capitalof the world. And rare not because he travels from home to work eachmorning in a burgundy golf cart outfitted with mag wheels. No, BoTaylor is rare because of his decades-long, unrepentant, curator'slove of kitsch. Good kitsch, I mean.
And one thing's certain: He needn't fear for his legacy. MyrtleBeach's ability to attract and breed kitsch - good kitsch, I mean -is something even more fearsome than Taylor's volcano. And that's nosmall part of the area's charm. In fact, you could argue thatAmerica needs more of these Black Swan landscapes, where past is noguide to future, where nutty ideas invariably find fertile soil,where improbable notions can become a life's work.
'I joke about it, but it's very serious business,' says Taylor,50. How serious? Olympic Games serious. It turns out that Taylor anda guy by the name of Bob Detwiler are busily readying for the daythat the International Olympic Committee decides to includeminiature golf in its roster of summer sports. For now, Detwiler,who is president of the U.S. ProMiniGolf Association, is content torun the group's Masters tournament, which is played here each fallon two courses, the Hawaiian Rumble and nearby Hawaiian Village,both of which he owns. In past years, Masters winners have receivedabout $18,000 in prize money, not to mention a green jacket.
'Let me rephrase that. You get a green windbreaker,' says Taylor,adding that the 12-round tournament regularly attracts premiercompetitors from around the world, including Olivia Prokopova, aCzech teen phenom who travels with an entourage, and a Swedishchampion named Hans Olofsson. The atmosphere at the Masters of mini-golf is every bit as tense as the one at that other Masters, Taylorsays, and many a talented putt-putter has let a nine-stroke lead getaway under the glare of the cameras.
'They say to themselves, 'I'm gonna be on ESPN2,' and that playswith their heads,' Taylor reports.
Like many other things in Myrtle Beach, the extraordinary numberof miniature golf courses is unexplainable, or rather explainablebut not persuasively so. For instance, during a recent three-daystay when the weather was gorgeous and not a single cloud marred thesky, I heard variously that there were 36, 46 or 50 mini-golfcourses along the 60-mile strip known as the Grand Strand, whichstretches from the town of Little River in the north, through MyrtleBeach, Pawleys Island and Murrells Inlet, and south to Georgetown,S.C. Whatever the actual number of mini-golf opportunities, sufficeit to say that you can see more plaster dinosaurs, pirates,airplanes, dragons, tiki torches and safari jeeps, more lost worldsand faux idol worship, more fountains spraying Ty-D-Bol blue waterthan can possibly be healthy. Whence the profusion?
'It's because it's a family beach, and mini-golf is a wholesomefamily activity,' Detwiler tells me.
Let me repeat: 50 miniature golf courses.
'There's a few that probably struggle,' he says with the air of aman whose miniature golf courses do not struggle. 'It is overbuilt.'
Still, every evening, when the temperature at last drops into the80s, here they come: sunburned dads hoping to extend their beerbuzzes from dinner and kids exhausted from long days playing indishwater-gray waves on a sand-castle-ready shoreline.
The mood on the course at such hours is subdued, the silencebroken only occasionally by the sound of fountains. And every 20minutes by an erupting volcano.
I decide to accept the fact - as I drive by Captain Hook's andDragon's Lair and Mt. Atlanticus - that the mystery of MyrtleBeach's elaborate shrines to miniature golf will never be solved.Like the wrath unleashed by the Mayan god Chak on the golfers atCancun Lagoon, you just have to roll with it.
My final day in town takes me back to Hawaiian Rumble, where Ican't help but marvel at the meticulous care Taylor takes of thecourse. There is the temperamental volcano, of course, which foryears ran on kerosene until the city forced Taylor to reconfigure itand switch to propane. There are the palm trees wrapped in Christmaslights. ('Sometimes the kids get it in their heads to use the clubsto break them.') There are the lakes that each year have to bedrained, refilled and dyed an impossible blue. ('A littleconcentrated bottle like this costs $90.') There are the ducks. Orrather, there (begin ital) were (end ital) the ducks. ('I'm notreally thrilled about the ducks. They have a tendency to leave theirdroppings on the carpet.')
And then there are the perfectly textured greens, which Taylorhappily rips up and replaces each season. ('This carpet costs $14 ayard, but it plays better than the carpet they wanna selleverybody.') No one knows when or if the International OlympicCommittee is planning a visit to Hawaiian Rumble, but if it does,Taylor is unlikely to be caught off-guard. And even if it nevercomes, Taylor most likely won't lose his warm, enthusiastic manneror his steadfast dedication to the volcano.
'The only time I'll get mad is when you disrespect me,' Taylortells me, continuing his vigorous defense of this life in miniature.'There was this one guy who came in here and told me I had a chicken(expletive) little job. I took out my dentures, set them down righthere and calmly walked around the counter. I asked him, 'Do you wantto settle this?''
The man, declining to further challenge Taylor's raison d'etre,strode quietly out the door.
