Riding the 'Deuce Train'

Philadelphia Phillies relief pitcher Billy Wagner needs 15 minutes in the bullpen before he's throwing 98 mph. The average league bowler gets, what, 10 minutes of practice before the scores count?

But here I am, getting ready to play in my first miniature golf tournament, and the Putt-Putt guy's telling me I have an hour to get loose.

Silly me. I figured a few trunk rotations and I'd be good.

That, my friends, was my first mistake - of many.

Another error might be calling this "miniature golf." Putt-Putt aficionados draw a distinction between the game they play and the one played at the beach resort courses. Putt-Putt courses are less flashy - not a windmill to be found - and are geometrically designed to test the player's putting skill.

My three-hour foray into the world of competitive Putt-Putt taught me several things. Most of all, it taught me that three rounds of this is fun but hard. Hard on the mind, hard on the ego, and, shockingly, even a little hard on the (untrained) body.

But if you decide to amble on down to the Putt-Putt Fun Center in Roanoke and enter a Tuesday-night tournament - and I recommend you do - perhaps my experience can assist you.

Lesson 1: Know your foes

If you're going to get crushed in an athletic event, it's nice to know beforehand. It took me about five minutes to realize I was in trouble.

I arrived at 6, and apparently I was late. Dennis Biesma, 41, had been there since about 4:45 p.m.

So had his wife, Denise Biesma.

So had his brother-in-law, James LeBrun.

All three are regulars in the Tuesday tourneys. All three had been playing the course, scouting the holes, reading the rails. Rain had struck earlier in the day, and that meant the greens could be particularly tricky.

Denise laughed when I told her I thought an hour of practice was a bit extreme.

"You need at least that much," she said. "It's like any other sport. You need to warm up. And if you have a tendency to get frustrated, get all that frustration out of the way now."

Fortunately, I'm not easily rattled. If I were, her comments might have caused a nervous breakdown before we even teed off.

Some good news soon arrived, though. Dallas King, the tournament director, said there was one more player who was on his way.

Hooray! I'd beaten somebody to the course.

Alas, the late arrival was 22-year-old Matt Summey - a touring Putt-Putt professional.

Lesson 2:

Respect the gear

"Do you have your own club?" King asked.

Uh-oh. This was going to be worse than I thought.

"No," I said sheepishly. "Sorry."

"That's OK. We'll get you one."

For me, putter selection has always been pretty simple. I stand 6-foot-2, so I always chose the long one.

I grabbed a long club and a bright red ball, only to have Dennis Biesma walk over and shake his head.

"That won't work," he said.

"It won't?"

I handed him my rubber-headed putter, and he replaced it with a metal-faced one. Then, he reached in his pocket and pulled out an official Professional Putters Association Top Flite ball (suggested retail price: $5).

"Use this," he said.

I smiled. Of course! A craftsman is only as good as his tools.

Biesma is a putting pundit, no doubt. In addition to playing the Tuesday events, he's on the road every weekend from April to October, playing PPA amateur tournaments in Virginia, North Carolina and South Carolina. His career scoring average is 29.5 on a par-36 scale.

But he wasn't too good to give the new guy a hand.

"That's the thing about putters," he said. "We have no problem helping other people learn the course."

Good, I thought. I'm going to need it.

Lesson 3:

Abandon common sense

Everything you think you know about putting, forget it.

For example, if the hole is 15 feet away, with nary an obstacle in front of it, and it begs you - pleads with you! - to take a dead-on, flat, straight-as-can-be shot, don't do it.

There's got to be a better way to get there.

I discovered this while playing in a threesome with Dennis Biesma and Summey. In the first 18 holes, they did more banking than Rich Uncle Pennybags. They had an exact starting point for every shot, a rail target for almost every shot and the kind of precision that makes Greg Maddux look like Mark Wohlers.

"How many times," I asked Biesma after one of his double-banked aces, "would you say you played that hole before you figured out that approach?"

He quickly did the math in his head.

"Oh, about a thousand," he said.

That's the other thing about putters - they're perfectionists. Every hole is a par 2, so if you don't get a hole-in-one, you've failed.

I failed a lot, despite my best attempt to copy my playing partners. After the first round, I trailed the the leader (LeBrun) by 11 strokes.

And I felt lucky to be that close.

Lesson 4: Learn the lingo

Like a lame parent who says "bling bling!" to his eyes-rolling son, I struggled to grasp the parlance of Putt-Putt.

"They call that being on the 'Deuce Train,'" Biesma told me after I notched several pars in a row. "And you're gonna want to get off."

Funny. The Deuce Train seemed like pretty comfy transportation to me.

"The balls have ears," Denise Biesma had told me before the first round.

They do?

She explained that if you tell somebody they made a good shot before the ball drops in the cup, it won't drop.

Ohh, those kind of ears.

But by the final round, I finally felt comfortable enough to share in the esoteric banter. Summey aced a hole. Then Biesma did. Then I did.

"We tripped it!" I said excitedly.

And everyone nodded.

I was, for a wonderful, fleeting moment, one of them.

Lesson 5: Stay hydrated

I know, I know. It's Putt-Putt, not a triathlon. But somehow, after three rounds, I looked like I'd just spent an hour in the front row of a dolphin belly-flop extravaganza at Sea World.

Soaked.

It was strange, though. As we added up the scores - a 26-under-par 82 for Dennis Biesma, including 31 aces; 84 for Summey; 89 for LeBrun; 110 for Denise Biesma; 121 for me - I noticed that nobody else had sweated nearly as much as I had.

Then it hit me.

Of course!

If only I'd done the warm-ups.

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