Our obsession with crazy golf started after we played a friendly round with Richard’s brother, back in 2006. We travelled from our home in Stockport to visit my family in the seaside town of Felixstowe, and someone suggested a game. Richard managed to get a hole-in-one, which won him a free game.
We started talking about how many crazy golf courses there are in the UK – we looked it up, and found there were more than 600. We’d just bought our first car and decided it would be fun to try to visit them all as a way to see the country.
Now, almost 20 years on, we’ve visited 1,064 crazy golf courses all over the world – just over a thousand of those are in the UK. In 2015, we drove along the south coast, from Swanage to Taunton, and visited 62 courses in two weeks. We both have bad backs now, which we blame on the amount of driving we do. Once, we got stuck on a cliff face in a storm while attempting to trek 200 metres up the Great Orme headland, in Llandudno, to play the course at the top. Amazingly, the course was still open, and we played a fairly windy round.
Richard holds the Guinness World Record for the most crazy golf courses visited – 902 when it was awarded in 2022, as he’d travelled to a handful more than me. Between us, we’ve visited courses in 12 other countries, including New Zealand, Australia, Singapore and Chile. The European courses are all standardised. They follow one of three patterns and are considerably less “crazy” than the courses in the UK. On the other hand, the American courses are completely over the top, with dinosaurs and pirate ships adorning almost every one.
Crazy golf has always been in our blood. We both played on family holidays as children; Richard even has an old photo of his mum playing in Blackpool when she was pregnant with him. Every course is different, and you really have to think about how you’re playing each hole. It forces you to escape reality for half an hour.
We both have our favourite courses and holes. Mine is a council-run course in Lyme Regis that’s exactly as it was in the 1970s. It’s a simple outdoor course with lots of lumps and bumps, no fancy gimmicks, and it has a stunning view overlooking the sea. Richard prefers the modern courses – there’s an amazing Indiana Jones-themed hole that has skulls on spikes above a pit of snakes that he adores in Hemsby, Norfolk.
It didn’t take us long to realise that we could play competitively, and we’ve played individually and together as part of the Great Britain mini golf team in the UK and worldwide. I’ve won the women’s World Adventure Golf title twice, and hold the British women’s record – completing an 18-hole course with 12 holes-in-one and six holes in two shots. Lots of players put a huge amount of effort into importing specialist balls and putters, but we try not to take it too seriously.
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But we can get competitive with each other. There have been a few frosty car rides home after a game. Richard is a sore loser, but an even worse winner. He’ll gloat the whole way home, and insist I buy him a congratulatory ice-cream.
We’re lucky that we share a hobby, and it brings us together. People talk about “golf widows” to describe losing one’s partner to the sport, but crazy golf helps us spend more time together. We’ve never been interested in playing “big golf” – not everyone wants to spend four hours on a green.
When we first started touring crazy golf courses, a lot of our friends found it a bit strange. But over the last few years, there’s been a real boom in the popularity of adventure golf, and now people keen to tell us about their own experiences playing. A lot of our friends now send us pictures of courses they’ve visited on holiday.
The World Minigolf Sport Federation is trying to get minigolf in the Olympics. If it succeeds, we’d love to have a go. Winning an Olympic gold for crazy golf would be a dream come true for us both.
As told to Heather Main
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