This article is classified "Real"
Golf is one of the least efficient games ever created. Huge tracts of land are required for a game that takes all day long. It consists of walking around while intermittently swinging a club at a small white ball, trying to knock the ball into a small hole. Several attempts have been made to improve the efficiency of golf, including golf carts to reduce the time between swings and better clubs and balls to reduce the number of swings necessary. However, at some point it was acknowledged that the critical concept in golf is that after the golfer had knocked the ball several hundred yards, he or she is actually near the hole. Thus the game of Miniature golf was invented. Essentially, the same scenario as regular golf is present, but instead of crossing several hundred yards from the tee to the green (from the staring point to the actual well-groomed area around the hole), the mini-golfer starts out near the hole, eliminating a great deal of time, effort, concentration, and walking. It also eliminated a great deal of the visual appeal of the sport, since the impressive, vast tracts of well groomed real estate were eliminated. To compensate for this, most miniature golf courses have artificial obstacles installed at each hole -- ramps, loops, bridges, tunnels, wooden ducks, miniature buildings -- anything that can looks cute and makes the game more difficult and interesting. As a result of all this effort, miniature golf has become immensely popular. So common is it in fact, that almost nobody makes any big money from it. (The "almost" was put in only to account for some bizarre circumstance such as extremely drunk people betting large amounts of money on miniature golf. To my knowledge there is no professional miniature golf league, and no one is working on it at the moment.)