As with many places growing up, our little piece of heaven is long gone. There are no signs it ever existed and even if you tried to describe how it looked with what is there now, you still wouldn’t be able to process it.
Our little pieces of heaven can be anywhere that a fantastic memory exists. Many friends will bring up their grandparents’ farm or a favorite fishing spot and anywhere that memory still holds you. Oh, the best part, every answer is correct.
This piece of heaven for us will make you laugh once you find out but remember, where ever that great memory exists, it does not matter what it is.
It was located on the corner of Donelson Pike and Murfreesboro road. The sound of roaring planes fills the air around the place now, but growing up, cheers and heartaches were preferred choices of music. It was a miniature golf course, a wee-tee as some call it.
Eighteen holes of a putt-putt course that looked as if Edward Scissorhands had built it in his backyard. Rusted out wood along the course, obstacles on the holes that looked as if they were plucked right out of the island of misfit toys on Rudolph’s Christmas story.
We couldn’t have cared less because we spent so much of our free time there and a ton of our money. To you, it might have been a dump but to us, it was our Masters. Our British Open. It was just a simple, very simple mini-golf course but it was everything to us.
Sure, we played for money and we took it seriously. If you remember that course, once you got to the 18th hole, it was a big sheet with a clown’s face on it. If you hit the ball into his eyes, you got four strokes off your total. In the mouth, you got two off and oftentimes it decided who won or loss. Listen, I have been fortunate to have done some great things in my broadcasting career that was pressure cooked, but nothing in my life has compared or will compare to trying to hit the golf ball into the clown’s eye and win.
Then one summer there, our friend Tony Cortez got a job working at the course it made the perfect place, even more so. I think we might have paid for a few rounds after he got hired but I am not sure. In fact, I don’t think we did and the owner, Russ, well, what he didn’t know wasn’t going to hurt him.
I am sure some of y’all reading this remember this place vividly. I won’t try to make it more than it was cosmetic wise, but it was certainly beautiful to us. We spent so much time in our summers there growing up and every single memory, is a great memory.
That is the thing about all of this. We get hard and rough days but I promise you, think back to that piece of heaven and what it meant to you and for you. I think about that goofy wee-tee course all the time and the great times we had come flooding back into my head and what I am going through at that moment, is washed away. If it comes back, I just repeat, lather and rinse.
No phones. No social media. If you needed us, we were at the course. Praying to the Good Lord that the clown was in our favor tonight.
