Mini Golfing with the nephew

My nephew Aidan is a cute kid. He's about to turn 7. Bright too, even though he likes to announce he doesn't know how to read yet (this isn't entirely true), his brain is always churning. I was over at his house a few weeks ago for his younger sister's birthday (I take each niece and nephew out for their birthday) and out of the nowhere he blurts out, "Uncle Eric, will you take me mini-golfing?" We all got a kick out of the spontaneity of the question. I found out later he played it on the computer and I guess wanted to know what it was like in real life.

So today we went, not for his birthday, but because I hadn't played in a long, long time and I thought it would be good for me. I took him to a Putt-Putt course we all went to as kids near where we grew up. I let him sit in the front seat. He declared his appreciation by informing me that the front was much cleaner than the back. "Yeah," I said, "it is kind of cluttered back there."

It was a cool, sunny day, but as we drove there, the clouds moved in. And as we started playing, it began to drizzle. It took me a few minutes to get him to hold the club right and to swing it correctly. Even I had forgotten exactly how to teach it. He wanted to swing it like a baseball bat, bending his elbows, pulling it back, and twisting his wrists as he swung. I got him to do a gentler sway and keep the club pretty straight and after a few practices, he got it in the hole in two hits. It was the easy first hole, just a straight shot. I got a hole in one on it--still, for him, two was very impressive. The next task was to get him to wait for the ball to stop rolling before he hit it again. That took a little while.

"Wait for the ball to stop, Aidan. Focus," I would tell him. "Patience. Set your feet. Aim your club." Through the front nine, he would occasionally get a 2 or a 3 here and there. If I could keep him from being careless, he would do okay. Before each hole, we would look at the hole and talk about how to hit it in. Usually, we would have to bank it or hit it up a hill or through a loop. By the tenth hole he was getting it. He understood the bank shot and the hills and how to hit around the obstacles. And when I could tell he was taking it seriously, I would give him mulligans. To his credit, he never asked for one. And when I would tell him to do it over, he would protest and want to hit it from "the field" as he called it. After a while, I just let him.

It was gently raining by the time we finished the first nine holes. He had a hoodie pulled over his head. I did not.

We were the only ones on the course. The guy working the desk waved at us and yelled, "you guys don't have to play in the rain. I can give you a ticket and you can come back and play another time." Aidan did not like this idea. He was having fun, and as he put it, "it really [wasn't] raining that hard."

When we got to the sixteenth hole, he looked at me and said, "I just have to hit it straight, right Uncle Eric?"

He was right, it was a straight shot, but it was a narrow path to the hole. It had mulch on both sides surrounded by the wood borders every Putt-Putt course has; there was little margin for error. He raised the putter behind him like he was going to drive the ball down a fairway.

"Aidan!" I said, "you don't have to cream it. Focus. Aim. Don't be careless."

"It's just a straight shot, Uncle Eric" he said non-chalantly lowering the putter back down to the ball.

"If you hit it too hard, it will go over the hole instead of dropping in," I said.

"I just need to hit it straight," he said, quite good naturedly, not at all bothered by my incessant coaching. Mind you, he was holding the putter down by the ball, looking at the hole every now and then as he talked to me. He didn't wait for another reply from me; he pulled that putter back and drilled the ball. It went speeding over the felt and right over the hole. I cringed. The ball hit the wood backstop behind the hole and popped up in the air, dropped back down, bounced a couple times and rolled a couple more inches right into the hole. If that hole isn't there, that ball rolls all the way back to us.

I started laughing. I couldn't believe it. "You know what that is, don't you?" I asked.

"A hole in one!" he yelled out. He was quite proud of himself and not as surprised as me at his success.

"You have a very confident stroke," I complimented him somewhat tongue-in-cheek. I did not get a hole in one, by the way. After that, the first shot was always taken seriously. He would find the hole, inspect the obstacles, and determine where the ball should be hit. He two-ed out the last three holes--no mulligans. And was ready for another eighteen.

He was two-ing and three-ing most of the greens, at least more than I expected him to. Once in a while, he would get careless. The shots after the first one didn't matter much to him. Sometimes it looked like he was playing hockey instead of golf but for the most part, he was trying.

At one point he asked me, "Have you played here before, Uncle Eric?"

"Yeah, your dad and I used to play here when we were kids," I said.

"Wow, this is an old course," he said, quite serious and quite astounded that a mini golf course could be around that long. "I didn't know it had been here that long. It really doesn't look that old."

I started laughing. "I'm sure they try to keep it looking nice," I said. The funniest part about this is that as far as Putt-Putt courses go, this one is a real "hole in the wall", no pun intended.

We eventually came to a hole similar to the one he got the previous hole in one on. By this time he was moving ahead of me. There was no more discussing the holes ahead of time. He was just getting to it.

But again, for this hole, I reminded him, "you don't have to hit it real hard."

"I'm just going to hit it straight," he said, still good natured but with a slight accent of concentration that hadn't been there before. And he did hit it straight. And again, he pulled that putter back and drilled the ball, and it went over the hole, hit the back, popped up into the air, bounced back down and came speeding back towards the hole. My jaw dropped. The ball hit the hole then popped into the air again, dropped straight back down, rimmed almost halfway around the hole, then fell in. As he retrieved his ball, he reminded me, "Just hit it straight, Uncle Eric." I couldn't have kept the grin off my face if I'd wanted to.

"Okay," I said. I tried to hit it straight, but I did not get a hole in one.

By this time, the rain had stopped, and he did not want to wait for me to go. He would politely ask if he could go on to the next hole each time after he finished without exception, and I would always say yes remembering what that was like. As I finished a hole a few holes later, I noticed he was teeing off (is that what you call it--you might as well when he's playing) at the hole with two triangles jutting in at different points. He had creamed the ball again and it had hit the second triangle. It caromed off the triangle to the opposite wall, hit the back wall then rolled in the hole. Another hole in one.

"How did you do that?" I asked, mostly to make sure I had just seen what I thought I had just seen. He proceeded to quickly explain to me by running across the green and showing me where the ball needed to hit on the triangle and that it would go on to hit in the other two places if I did that. But he also mentioned that I had to hit the ball hard enough so that it would go in the hole.

"Yeah, Yeah," I thought.

I did not get a hole in one. I was a couple inches short and as the ball hit the back wall and came to a stop, he respectfully said, "Yeah, you didn't hit your ball as hard as I hit mine."

He was correct; I had not. It was an observation more necessary than perhaps he realized. And again, I couldn't stop smiling. "You're right," I told him. "I didn't."

At the end of the day, he had three holes in one and I had three holes in one (different holes). And he had a better score than me on several holes. And his holes in one were NOT mulligans.

My nephew and nieces are good at making astute observations and asking good questions. I cherish my time with each of them. Sure, they're not always cute. They always want something. They don't always listen. More than once, Aidan had to go running after his ball because he hit it wrong or too hard. He wouldn't always listen. He asked if we were going to get candy afterwards. He kept wanting a soda out of the machine. And his holes in one, except for maybe the last one, were pretty lucky. But those aren't the things I focus on, and I don't think it's what they really care about either. There are the conversations that I don't always realize I'm having until afterwards that stay with me. Aidan and I had one today. It didn't hit me until after I got home. I don't even remember exactly how it went, but I remember the gist of it, and I don't think it lasted even a minute.

One thing Aidan kept asking me was how many points I had. And there were holes that he took seriously and I would give him a real score, but there were ones he didn't and I would just give him a four or a five. At one point I said, "it's about having the lowest score, not the most points."

To which he replied, "It's about having fun, not who scores the most points, right Uncle Eric?"

How could I not smile. "That's right," I said.

My nephew Aidan is a good boy.

Cheers.