Bizarre and Improbable Golf Game

Those are the rules, but...

Dale Gribble: What happens if my tee shot lands on a bird's back and he carries it out of bounds but then is attacked by a larger bird who grabs the ball and drops it in the hole? Is that still a hole-in-one? Because that's how I'm going to play it.

Hank Hill: Dang it, Dale! It already happened once. What are the odds of it happening again?

— King of the Hill, "A Man Without a Country Club"

Whenever there is a golf game in the TV show, one or both of the following effects may occur:

1. The rules say that the ball must be hit from where it lands, no matter what. Slapstick ensues as the ball goes into the most insane places, such as in the middle of the street or onto moving trucks. This may occasionally be subject to a Lampshade Hanging as the other players urge the character, in vain, to take the penalty stroke.

2. A hit golf ball bounces from several things (such as tree branches) before finally either going straight into the hole or landing right where it started. May be a stroke of luck, which ensures that the good guy wins the golfing tournament, or occasionally wreck their effort to Do Well, But Not Perfect. See also Bizarre and Improbable Ballistics.

Often the protagonist will be playing against their boss, who expects to win. The protagonist will have to lose in a way that looks natural, and overlook blatant cheating.

This trope usually makes a golfer play a ball in a place where nobody in the real world would (extremely close to a dangerous animal like a bear or alligator is popular). There are rules that cover this, and usually the writers are oblivious to them (or simply choose to ignore them in the name of hilarity ensuing).

In the cartoon version, all players must wear hideously ugly clothing (sometimes happens in real life as well) and must wiggle their behinds when setting up a shot.

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Examples:

Advertising

• Miller Lite's "The First Lite Beer Open" commercial has several. Most notably among them:
  • Bert Jones' ball lands right in front of a tree. L.C. Greenwood pulls the tree out of the ground so Bert can continue.
  • Bob Uecker hits a ball from the water hazard (the water is so deep Bob is completely underwater, with his hat floating on top).
  • Rodney Dangerfield hits a ball that bounces off a weather vane, down the downspout of a rain gutter, onto the green and into the hole.
• Another Miller Lite Commercial, "Miller Lite Presents 'Full Contact Golf'" shows a bizarre golf game where a golfer has to successfully play a hole while a football defense tries to stop him.
• Cigar advert starring Russ Abbot: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IE3uIrzt0Jg
• Cryptoland: In the Bitcoin Cash Super Golf area, Connie hits a golf ball really high into the air, then it bounces off the word "FAST" and a melex, making it fly for a while, and still manages to land in a hole.

Anime & Manga

• A chapter in Kochikame when Ryotsu rigs the game allowing his team (using a remote control ball) to win including helping his boss Ohara. The last stroke, Ryotsu has to play fair and square and surprisingly, like Dale Gribble's quote above, a crow took the ball and dropped it in the hole. Each subsequent win, there's a large party hosted.
• One chapter of Ghost Sweeper Mikami had Reiko dueling a spirit in a golf match on a course with impossible terrain, with both players using psychic powers to control the ball. Amusingly, the match is won by Okinu, who had never played golf before, and was playing the game normally, mainly because subtracting her absurdly high handicap from her absurdly high score put her one point below the enemy's score.
• In a brief scene in Dragon Ball Z: Fusion Reborn, Goten is hit by a golf ball while retrieving a Dragon Ball from a golf course. Angry about the hit, he proceeds to take revenge by dropping the ball into a nearby hole... cut to the old man who was playing being completely elated at getting his first hole-in-one.
• Birdie Wing: Not about 'Play it where it lies' in this show. That's small potatoes. Every element of golf in this series is unhinged. Its answer to the question of whether you should hit through a tree or around is to literally hit through the tree - like, the ball hits a branch, snaps it off and is barely slowed down. Another drive passes, in dramatic slow motion, between train carriages. Some drives merit Calling Your Attacks. Then there's the sinister underground golf Mafia with its secret modular course that can replicate any hole, anywhere. Then there's the golf hole on the top of a mesa with no visible access surrounded by a storm-wracked sea seen in a flashback.

Comedy

• Older Than Television: W.C. Fields created a hilarious golf game parody sketch, first in vaudeville and then in movies. Amusingly, thanks to the limitations of performing on stage, this didn't even have to involve hitting the ball. One of his first talkies, The Golf Specialist, adapted this routine, and he gets as far as "Keep your eye on the ball" before something inevitably goes wrong. Again and again. He never does get to hit it.

Comic Books

• A Chinese Disney comic featured Donald Duck finding Gladstone Gander's hat (which has a Four-Leaf Clover inside it) and getting hole in ones no matter what (at one point, the ball is knocked into a kid's remote-controlled plane, which carries it over to the hole). Donald then challenges Gladstone to a golf match (as it turned out, Gladstone didn't need the hat), and Gladstone's luck pulls through like always (he hit the ball towards the refreshment stand, and it bounced off a guy's raised shoe, hitting a flagpole and landing in the hole).
  • Published here too in Walt Disney's Comics and Stories 668 (2006).
  • A much older story featured an unusual inversion where Don kept mysteriously winning with increasingly improbable ways, while Gladstone's failures became utterly spectacular, culminating him to swallowing his own ball. At the end it turned out that a man who had been observing them for all the time was a reporter who was going to reward the worst golf player of the day with a large sum of money.
  • In another story, Donald wants to practice golf and force his nephews to work as his caddies until he considers his game good enough. Wanting to get out of this, they tricked Donald into thinking he can make a hole-in-one whenever he wants. After they leave, he decides to charge one dollar from each person to let them see him making a hole-in-one. Gladstone Gander shows up and, not believing Donald can really make it, challenges him to a bet. If Donald makes a hole-in-one, Gladstone will give him a dollar; if Donald fails, he'll give Gladstone ten dollars. Donald accepts the bet and places a ten-dollar-bill inside the pot. Upon being told that Donald won't accept the bet until Gladstone adds his dollar to the pot, Gladstone leaves to find a dollar. Afterwards, Donald tries and fails to make a hole-in-one so he asks for his nephews' help. When Gladstone arrives with a dollar, Donald makes his attempt and the ball bounces off several places including an earthquake that takes place after Donald hits the ball. The ball eventually gets inside the hole… but comes out after bouncing off the ball that his nephews placed in there to trick Gladstone.
• An Archie Comics story has the guys turning the entire town of Riverdale into a huge Golf Course, setting various landmarks as their holes.
  • One hole only — Archie, Reggie, and Jughead played one hole from one end of town to the other, starting in a public park, and ending in Dilton Doiley's rain hat, hanging on a hook in his workshop. Par is in the mid 200s.
  • One Sabrina the Teenage Witch story has Sabrina caddying for the Head Witch Enchantra. And this game is really bizarre, taking place in the Other Realm, with both players using magic. Sabrina helps by zapping up a set of spell-resistant modern golf wear for Enchantra.
• In Reid Fleming, World's Toughest Milkman, Reid and Lena go on a golf date. Reid manages to make one ball fly across town, hitting several buildings and an airplane on the way, and finally smashing into Mr. Crabbe's office in the dairy. Later, he lands in a water trap, and Lena insists that he play it where it lies, using his water wedge. Fortunately for her, his golf bag also contains an umbrella.

Comic Strips

• In an Improbable Ballistics example, Roger Fox from FoxTrot (who's a notoriously terrible golfer) hits the ball, bounces it off several trees, golf carts, pins, roads, etc.… only to have it wind up back on the tee. In the words of his wife, "I can't tell whether the people behind us are laughing or crying."
• B.C. had its fun with golf. Characters have actually been known to make golf swings while hanging by their feet from a tree branch. For a bonus, there's Bizarre And Improbable cheating when Clumsy Carp balances a submerged golf ball on his nose and raises it out of the water for a friend to hit, in exchange for a share of the winnings. Another time, B.C. (or possibly Thor) somehow wound up, after his swing, with the ball balanced on the head of his club. Consulting the massive rule book, Peter found a rule that "covers it explicitly," and told the unlucky fellow they had to shoot him.
• Charles Addams once drew a cartoon showing a golfer grimly prying open an alligator's mouth as his young black caddie pokes around inside the beast with a club attempting to retrieve a swallowed ball; the golfer's partner admonishes him to "just play another one."

Fan Fiction

• In the Triptych Continuum short piece A Good Trot, Spoiled, this trope is just about the whole of the sport — purposefully. Minotaurs have designed golf to be deliberately infuriating, with every inch of the course enchanted to produce the most outlandish and rage-inducing results each time a player takes a swing — because the goal is to work out stress by sending the player into a state where they finally express all that anger within the padded pit which makes up the nineteenth hole. Basically, take Bethpage's Black Course, throw in a little TPC Sawgrass, add in the fine manipulations allowed by earth pony, pegasus, and unicorn magic, then dial everything up. This results in a course where your putt swerved right because microridges in the soil told it to, the rough is hidden by illusion, and the wind does in fact hate you — with every countering element steadily growing stronger as you move towards the end. Celestia silently sums it all up somewhere around the sixteenth hole.
  They had to call it 'golf'. 'Insanity' was already taken.

Films — Live-Action

• In The Idle Class, Charlie Chaplin finds his golf ball in the mouth of a bum sleeping on the golf course. Charlie steps on the bum's stomach, causing the ball to fly out, whereupon Charlie hits it in the air.
• Happy Gilmore did both, in perhaps one of the most over-the-top examples. First, Shooter McGavin has to hit his ball off of Mr. Larson's foot, then a tower falls upon the eighteenth green in front of Happy's ball. Instead of taking two strokes to hit the ball around the tower and proceed to sudden death, Happy hits it up onto the fallen tower's pieces, which now act like a mini-golf tunnel-tube arrangement that just so happens to put the ball in the hole, giving victory to Happy in a single stroke. All in the space of five minutes.
• Likewise the Caddyshack movies.
• Both happen in the final game in Swedish movie The Unwilling Golfer. At one point, the ball lands on a truck that drives away, but the protagonist's sponsor calls the driver and pays him to instead park by the green. The bit about attire also applies. The antagonist holds an elitist attitude about "proper attire" on the course, which he follows by wearing tartan shorts, which just looks silly (and the attire is complete with grey suit jacket and a plain cap). Meanwhile, the protagonist's Scottish mentor informs the protagonist that no proper golfer would wear tartan unless he was a member of a clan with that particular tartan. BURN.
• Welcome to Mooseport ex-President Monroe Cole wins his golf games through cheating, though he doesn't know it — whenever one of his shots goes into the woods to the side of the course, the Secret Service agents hiding there throw it back onto the green, and he thinks he's just lucky. He challenges his mayoral candidate and town plummer Handy Harrison to a game of golf, but Cole's demanding ex-wife Charlotte forces the agents out of hiding, and he discovers that without their help, he's completely outmatched.
• Ian Fleming supposedly wanted to show that Auric Goldfinger was truly a Card-Carrying Villain by having him and James Bond play golf. Goldfinger flagrantly cheats throughout the game, which to a Scot like Fleming is beyond the Moral Event Horizon.
• in Convict 13, Buster Keaton is a golfer trying to hit the ball out of a lake while standing on a raft... and then diving in for fish to find out which fish swallowed his golf ball.
• Nothing strange actually happens to the shot (it's a pretty accurate drive), but Lt. Commander Dodge opening Down Periscope by teeing off from the deck of his submarine as it comes into port, complete with the crew rattling off a firing solution as though it were a torpedo, must surely qualify as bizarre and improbable.
  • For added awesome, he damn near scores a Hole-in-one, which prompts his Commanding Officer to chime in on the shot.
  Cmdr Knox: "Well what the heck, why don't we pull in so you can put out!"
• The Establishing Character Moment of Cuthbert Ware-Armitage in Those Daring Young Men In Their Jaunty Jalopies has him cheat at golf twice — once by distracting his opponent during his drive, and once by planting an extra ball on the fairway rather than bothering to look for where his ball actually landed — followed by delight at his father's recent demise because it means that he just inherited the family estate.
• The Three Stooges short Three Little Beers, which is the natural consequence of letting the Stooges onto a golf course. The reason why their game is so bizarre is evident from the start; none of the Stooges know how to play golf, and Hilarity Ensues as their antics wreak havoc on the course and their fellow players.

Jokes

• A joke features a person playing a covert, forbidden game of golf (most commonly, a priest skipping out on Mass to hit the links or a rabbi on Saturday) and making eighteen holes-in-one. The punchline is God, in reply to an incredulous angel, shrugging and asking, "Who's he gonna tell?"
• A man playing with his girlfriend badly slices on the 13th and ends up behind a barn. He complains that he will have to lay one off on the runway before playing towards the pin. "Not so," says the girl, "I'll open the front and back doors of the barn, and you can play right through it!" He agrees, but his shot hits her between the eyes as she stands by the open door, killing her. Ten years later, the man is married, and they're playing on the same course, he slices it again on the 13th and ends up in the same spot behind the same barn. He complains that he will have to lay one off on the runway before playing towards the pin. "Not so," says his bride, "I'll open the front and back doors of the barn, and you can play right through it!" "NO!" says he. "I can't do that!! Last time I did that, I took an eight!"
• A golfer gets a round in with his buddy. On the first hole, he slices right into the woods and finds his ball trapped behind some trees. The next hole, he slices it and it goes straight into a bunker, buried until he could barely see it. The third hole, he slices it right into a pond. The golfer says, "I should just drown myself to save the embarrassment." His buddy says, "You think you can keep your head down long enough?"
• Jesus and Moses come down to earth to play a round of golf. At the seventh hole, there is a water hazard. Jesus takes out a 7-iron and addresses the ball. Moses says, "You can't hit that ball over that water with a 7-iron." Jesus replies, "If Arnold Palmer can do it, I can do it." Jesus hits the ball and it goes into the lake. He turns to Moses and asks, "Um... can you help me get me ball?" Grudgingly, Moses waves his arms apart, the waters separate, and Jesus goes in to get his ball. He sizes the shot up again, and Moses sputters "You cannot hit that ball over the water with a 7-iron!" Jesus says, "If Arnold Palmer can do it, I can do it." Jesus hits and the ball again goes into the water. Moses says, "You're on your own on this." So Jesus walks on top of the water and dips his club into the water searching for his ball. Two other duffers pass by and see this incredible sight of a man on top of the lake. One of them asks "Who does he think he is? Jesus Christ?" Moses sputters "No... he thinks he's Arnold Palmer!"
• A man is going golfing with a priest as his caddie.
  On the first hole, he lands it on the green for a par, but misses the putt by three inches and mutters, "God damn it, I missed." The priest reprimands him for taking Lord's name in vain; the golfer apologizes and putts the ball in, landing a bogey.
  On the second hole, he again lands it on the green for a par, but this time misses the putt by two inches and mutters, "God damn it, I missed." The priest warns him that if he again takes the Lord's name in vain, a bolt of lightning will fall from the cloudless skies and kill him; the golfer apologizes and putts the ball in, landing a bogey.
  On the third hole, he yet again lands it on the green for a par, and this time misses the putt by one inch and mutters, "God damn it, I missed." At this point, a bolt of lightning falls from the cloudless skies and... kills the priest. The golfer is horrified (and horribly confused), until from the heavens a voice emerges: "God damn it, I missed."
• Jesus and Saint Peter are playing golf in Heaven. Jesus swings, the ball goes way to the left, bounces off a tree and into a bird's nest, causing the panicking bird to fly around and drop the ball into the hole. Saint Peter then says "Lord, are we here to play golf or screw around?".
• Moses, Jesus, and an old man are playing golf, with the hole being a Par 3 over water.
  Moses goes first, and his first stroke lands in the pond. He steps up to the bank and touches the water's surface with his golf club, causing it to part with his ball sitting on the pond floor; he manages to sink it from there for a birdie, and lets the water close back up as he gets out of the fairway.
  Jesus goes second, and his first stroke lands in the pond. He steps up to the bank and walks atop the pond, his ball floating up to the surface; he manages to sink it from there for a birdie, and gets out of the fairway.
  The old man takes his shot, and his first stroke doesn't even approach the water. Abruptly, a gopher pops up from under the fairway, knocking his ball towards the water. A fish catches the ball in its mouth, only for a bird to lunge out of the trees and seize the fish in its talons. As the bird is flying over the green, lightning descends from the cloudless skies and strikes both the bird and the fish dead; as they land on the green, the ball pops out of the fish's mouth and rolls into the hole for a hole-in-one.
  Moses turns to Jesus and says, "I hate playing against your dad."

Literature

• According to Death's Domain: A Discworld Mapp, Death's golf course is designed to have bizarre and improbable effects, since it's filled with dimensional instabilities, folds in space-time, and gravitational anomalies, all in an effort to counteract The Grim Reaper's Awesomeness by Analysis which prevents him from understanding that getting a small ball to go exactly where you want is supposed to be difficult. It also has a windmill, the symbol of crazy golf everywhere. It grinds the balls very finely. The accompanying illustration shows Death in his normal robes, but Albert, caddying, sports the traditional tartan plus-fours and silly hat.
• A particularly memorable one in John M. Ford's Star Trek novel How Much for Just the Planet?, which features a sign reading "Hazards: Bunker Left, Minefield Right."
  • "Do you know there are land mines on this ground?" "Well, I should think we'd know. Not going to play eighteen holes without doing our recce, are we? Twelfth at Direidi, best par 4 in the galaxy."
  • Upon receiving permission to play through, they proceed to do so with artillery. "They" being the Brigadier and Sergent Benton. Yeah.
• The subject of all P. G. Wodehouse's golf stories.
• In The Brentford Triangle, Pooley and O'Malley are barred from every golf club in the county because of their Bizarre And Improbable antics: Flagrant cheating, occasionally getting into fistfights over said cheating, violating the dress-code and generally making a bloody nuisance of themselves. They resort to inventing Allotment Golf, hiding the holes amidst the sheds and vegetable patches of their own and their neighbours' patches. There is a rule book, to which additions are surreptitiously pencilled in as they go along. This serves solely as an explanation for what they're doing at the allotments in the middle of the night to witness the latest bout of Brentfordian weirdness that kicks off the plot.

Live-Action TV

• Episode "The Loneliness of the Long Distance Golfer" from Marty Feldman's sketch show Marty.
• The entire second half of "Tee Off, Mr. Bean" is an example of this trope. Mr. Bean plays on a mini-golf course, but after hitting the ball too hard it flies out of the course and he pursues it around town, into the sewers, on the bus, through a grocery store, etc. Finally he cuts a piece out of the ground where the ball sits and brings it back to the course late at night to finish the hole with a score of 3,427.
  • Some critics unkindly accused this sketch of being an inferior retread of the Marty Feldman version.
• An early episode of Scrubs had J.D. joining Dr Cox and Dr Kelso for their regular golf game. This led to a sequence of scenes in which Cox and Kelso debated medical ethics through J.D., apparently unconcerned that he was trying to play balls that had landed in increasingly ridiculous positions.
• Lost, of all things, has featured a number of golf games, due to Hurley's finding clubs in the luggage and building a course. One match saw the Losties betting on whether Jack would sink a putt, without showing the resolution. Another had Kate urging Jack to take a penalty when he hit it into the stream (again, no resolution, as they were interrupted by Mr. Eko carrying a bloody and unconscious Sawyer.) One of the mobisodes centered on Jin missing a putt and throwing a tantrum about how nothing is going his way and how alone he is.
• I Dream of Jeannie, "Watch the Birdie", featured a golf game where the ball did lots of bizarre and improbable things, but that was because of Jeannie's magic. Among other unlikely shots, Captain Nelson hit the ball from the branches of a tree and shot it in the hole after it had landed in a water fountain.
• Col. Blake and Co. had a tendency to play golf on the mine fields around the 4077th.
• In the Stargate SG-1 episode "Window of Opportunity," Jack and Teal'c wind up trapped in a "Groundhog Day" Loop, and in order to alleviate the monotony they engage in a variety of antics, including playing golf through the 'gate. Hammond interrupts to ask what he's doing, to which everyone's favorite Deadpan Snarker retorts: "In the middle of my backswing?"
  • Also, Jack drives a ball into the gate and asks Teal'c how far away the dialed planet is from their current location. Teal'c responds that it is "Several billion miles,"^note Untrue: the closest star to Earth (apart from our Sun) is somewhere around 25 trillion miles away. to which Jack remarks "That's gotta be a record."
• An inverted second type happened on Entourage when Ari played a round of golf against a studio head, wagering Vince's role in one of the studio's movies. The exec was coached by Phil Mickelson and it looked like Ari had no chance of winning. It all came down to the final putt which Ari missed. The miracle came when the exec began yelling at Ari, had a heart attack, and dropped dead. A stroke of luck, indeed.
• This trope is the entire point of the Leslie Neilsen videos Bad Golf Made Easy and Bad Golf My Way
• The MythBusters did a couple myths regarding golf—specifically, that it was better to hit through a tree than to try and shoot around because the tree is 90% air^note Anyone who's tried to hit a golf ball through a chain-link fence, itself 90% air, can spot the problem with that one and that a C4 explosion could cause a ball to fall in the hole. Both were Busted. During the testing of the first myth at Pebble Beach, Kari and Grant wore the stereotypical fashion-disaster golf outfits, while Tory (the only one of the three with actual golfing experience) had an outfit more likely to be worn by an actual golfer (a polo shirt, light pants, and golf shoes). Later, Tory engaged in a contest against Grant's golfing robot (actually an air cannon) to see who could shoot more balls through a tree. Tory won.
  Tory: [upon seeing Grant and Kari's outfits] I feel a little underdressed.
• Kamen Rider Fourze had one of these with the Taurus Zodiarts. Long story short, Taurus is a disciplinarian gone mad who challenges students to contests (even allowing them to pick the contest) and, if he wins, forces them to obey the strictest of rules. After most of the heroes (including Fourze) fall victim to his powers, Kamen Rider Meteor steps up and challenges Taurus to his specialty: golf. Yes, a game of golf between a minotaur monster and a Henshin Hero. And neither of them uses actual golf clubs, instead preferring their simple staves.
• ChuckleVision had three of these: "Goofy Golfers" from Series 4, "Cousins at War" from Series 13, and "Driving Ambition" from Series 19.
• "Hole in One (Or Two)" is a game played on The Price Is Right. How close to the hole you get to putt the ball depends on how well you pick grocery items from the cheapest to most costly. Some contestants will have the ball putted so hard it bounces off the greens barricade and into the hole. (Former show model Janice Pennington actually had that happen when she made a practice putt.)

Music

• The video for Dinosaur Jr.'s "Feel the Pain," which has them playing Urban Golf all over Manhattan.

Video Games

• Golf Story revolves around this. Among the crazy golf situations include skipping balls across water while avoiding crocodiles, trying to keep mole rats and birds from stealing your ball, freeing Human Popsicles by hitting them with special heated balls, and fighting skeletons and wizards by attacking them with golf balls.
• In Ribbit King, the golf balls are frogs (and the game contracts "frog-golf" to "Frolf"). Yes, they hop upon landing, and yes, there are all kinds of bizarre and improbable hazards—most of which shouldn't be avoided, since they're usually worth extra points.
• Can be deliberately invoked in Sid Meier's SimGolf, as you are the course designer.
• Zany Golf lives up to its name, with hazards that range from lethal forcefields to a bouncing hamburger.
• Golf With Your Friends makes it on this list if only because of its rather loose definition of the word "ball", which includes but not limited to polyhedrons, eggs, cones, cubes, and hockey pucks (which are much easier to hit than the rest!). Though the game is based on mini golf, many of the levels have structures and hazards that would be difficult or impossible to feature in a real course, such as moving platforms, jungle bridges, and portals.
• Golf It! is much in the same boat as the custom maps can include "Halloween pachinko", incredibly difficult hole-in-ones, and shooting your golf ball out of a pirate cannon into the mouth of the Kraken.
• Wallace & Gromit's Grand Adventures, Episode 4: The Bogey Man involves a golf game occurring through the middle of town because it was built on top of the Golf Course. Out of both mercy and arrogance, Wallace's opponent changes the rules after the sixteenth hole so that that whoever is first to finish the last two holes in either order is the winner. Play goes through the sewers, through buildings, and at one point involves a squirrel. Success even involves using a legendary grip which sends the ball straight up and mailing the ball across town, respectively.
• The Aqua Teen Hunger Force golf video game took this to new heights, by combining the merely improbable (such as multiple rebounds) with the flat-out insane (such as your meatball friend absorbing the ball into himself so you can steer where it ends up, Frylock electrifying the ball so it goes further, and the ball being Made of Explodium). Courses take place on the Moon, in Hell, and in some kind of bizarre drug-fueled hallucinoland, and some of the holes are actually kart racing. Also, you need to take a chainsaw with you while moving around the course, in case you are attacked by time-travelling robot turkeys, mummies, or machine-gun-toting flowers. Basically, its sole similarity with golf is that getting a ball into a hole is an important step.
• 100ft Robot Golf probably counts, simply by virtue of being golf played with hundred-foot-tall robots. Whose pilots have free reign to demolish everything between them and the hole.
• Pangya has, among other things, courses set amongst naval fleets and inside the netherworld. You can pull off special shots that, for example, turn your ball into a cruise missile that explodes and stays put upon impact or make it shoot straight ahead before launching up to mimic a cobra.
• What the Golf? sets out to be this, especially in the levels where your goal is not to get the golf ball to the flag, but the club, or even the arrow that shows you the direction and strength of your shot. Also, the flags will move away from your ball sometimes.
• The Mario Golf series tend to be pretty realistic depictions of golf, other than the characters and the visual effects... that is until Super Rush and the "Speed Golf" mode, where all 4 characters play at the same time, have to run after the ball after hitting it and all of them can use special moves to either run faster, knock their opponents out of the way while running or having their ball have a special effect when landing as to push the other balls out of the way.
• One update for Terraria introduces the Golfer NPC, who specializes in selling golf-related items, meaning that yes, it's possible to make your very own crazy golf course, with feats like putting the ball into a hole at the bottom of a Hellevator.

Webcomics

• Penny Arcade has a good idea about how to make an improbable golf course.

• The Whiteboard Doc and Roger go golfing in 2012, antics include skeet shooting with the balls, bizarre scores, and some rather large divots.

Web Original

• Badass of the Week once featured an article on the rules of Battle Golf: a game played by 4 incredibly drunk people. Each 2-man team attempts to get their ball into the hole while preventing the other team from doing so with BB pistols, butter knives and other weapons.
• The online golf game, Pangya, a game with regular golf physics but with massively chaotic courses, awards a x2 score modifier for that shot every time the ball hits an obstacle but goes in. And by "massively chaotic", we mean that playing on a course made out of multiple naval vessels is of intermediate difficulty.
• Wonderputt has a similarly bizarre setting, with the courses laid out by meteorites, snowclouds, cows being abducted by a flying saucer, a submarine stuck in ice and so forth.
• Homestar Runner has Sweet Puttin' Cakes, a mini-golf course based on the incredibly trippy show Strong Bad invented. It exists in its own universe that can only be accessed by talking about mini-golf, the first hole is home to a talking worm, and the 18th hole has a par of infinity.

Western Animation

• The Flintstones: Happened in the episode "The Golf Champion". At the 18th hole, Fred Flintstone begins by ricocheting the golf ball off several trees and rocks and into a water hazard, atop a dinosaur's head. The second shot overshoots the hole and rolls into the mouth of a sleeping dinosaur. Flintstone goes inside the dinosaur's mouth to finally shoot the ball in the hole, and win the tournament.
• This happens in the opening of the Woody Woodpecker shorts The Loose Nut and Bathing Buddies. Also the plot of Woodpecker In The Rough.

• In an episode of Rocko's Modern Life, "Teed Off", Ed Bighead plays against his boss, Mr. DuPette, and in order to make sure DuPette wins, Ed's manager has the golf course management launch pianos at Ed's ball (and occasionally Ed) from many improbable piano launchers, including a Kill Sat. But Heffer, who is working at the golf course and oblivious to the fact Ed is supposed to lose, tries to help Ed. At the end, Ed wins, and while Ed's manager is furious, Mr. DuPette doesn't seem to mind (however, unfortunately for Ed, he doesn't give him the promotion he was hoping for).
• Cow and Chicken, "Comet!". Dad's golf ball lands on Chicken's beak, and thus both ball and Chicken are flung through the air.
• The Deputy Dawg Show: "Diamonds In The Rough" was Deputy Dawg assigned to find and arrest a diamond smuggler when a seemingly errant golfer hits his ball into DD's office ("I slice badly," he says). It is then deduced the golfer is the smuggler and the diamonds are hidden in the golf balls.
• An episode of Hey Arnold! featured this on the eighteenth hole of a round of golf designed to settle a fender-bender between Grandpa Phil and Big Bob Pataki. Phil is forced to play a ball from a diner's quiche, and Arnold needs to make up a rhyme so that he can hit it. Found here.
• In the Disney cartoon How to Play Golf, Goofy takes "play where it lies" too far and ends up shooting the ball off the nose of a sleeping bull. What follows is one of the zaniest chase scenes ever, with Goofy running for his life while keeping the ball in play. At one point he misses the ball and runs back to hit it, narrowly avoiding being trampled by the bull.
• In the Danger Mouse episode "Afternoon Off With the Fangboner", DM hits a ball so that it lands directly into the hole and then bounces off to the next one. He almost accomplishes an eighteen-holes-in-one, but the ball unfortunately misses the last hole. After he leaves, the ball miraculously goes into the hole. Apparently, this isn't even the first time it's happened:
  DM: I sometimes wonder if that round-in-one at Gleneagles was just a fluke.
• Some characters seem to indulge in this merely for the property damage. Gosalyn does this with a hockey puck in the first episode of Darkwing Duck, from the nose of a gangster. In a following episode, she is about to whack the ball off of her own father's bill before he calmly asks, "Have I ever told you the story about the little girl, the golf ball, and the firing squad?"
• One Bugs Bunny cartoon ("My Bunny Lies Over the Ocean") has him playing against a Scotsman. Needless to say, he fudges the rules a bit, like digging a trench to lead the ball into the hole, for instance.
• Related to the Looney Tunes repertoire, "Raw! Raw! Rooster" has Foghorn Leghorn visited by his showoff college roommate Rhode Island Red. In a bid to outshow Red, Foggy substitues regular golf balls with exploding balls for Red to hit as Foggy runs for the hills to place the flag. Red hits the ball, but it doesn't explode until it hits Foggy. Confused and flustered, Foggy takes a swing at a ball and it explodes on contact.
• The Tom and Jerry short "Tee for Two" turns into this as Tom proves to be a horrible linkster. He fudges his score card with a score of 2, but when Jerry shakes his head shaming him, Tom grudgingly changes the score to 32. The cartoon even opens with Tom busting a sinew trying to shoot his way out of a bunker.
• The Jimmy Two-Shoes episode "Way Below Par" involves Jimmy participating in Lucius' blatantly rigged and excessively lethal golf tournament. The two are abysmally awful at the game, but with Heloise and Samy respectively helping them cheat, Hilarity Ensues.
• The Penguins of Madagascar episode "Mr. Tux" had a plot centered around this. And made no apologies for the obviously physics-defying shots. Apparently Mr. Tux is really just so good at mini-golf that he can bend physics to his will.
• The last event of a Laff-A-Lympics episode ("Grand Canyon/Ireland") was a golf game where the object was to score a hole in one. Cindy Bear wrote "18th hole" on the ball (she took addressing the ball literally) and used an umbrella for a golf club. She hit the ball at the wrong direction and it hit several random things until falling into the hole. Cindy won the game.
• Miniature golf doesn't get much more improbable and bizarre than in Futurama: Into The Wild Green Yonder. First of all Leo Wong builds the universe's largest miniature golf course, and plays golf on it. Then Amy Wong, pro-golfer, plays it with the Planet Express ship, while being chased by Zapp Brannigan on the Nimbus. It should be noted that the course in question is "mini" in name only - in that it isn't a "professional" course. The ball is easily 50' in diameter, the "club" is a canon, the ball return is a black hole, and the entire course covers a full arm of the Milky Way galaxy.
• In King of the Hill, they turn the alley into a replica of a Country Club's signature hole. At one point, Bill apparently had hit the ball into a garbage can. He tries to play it where it lies, but predictably doesn't get anywhere.
• Phineas and Ferb: In "Put that Putter Away", the boys build an improbably over-the-top miniature golf course, with plenty of crazy trick shots along the way.
• SpongeBob SquarePants, being a Literal-Minded Cloudcuckoolander, once played a game of indoor golf with Patrick. Hilarity Ensues because, well, you have to play the ball where it lies, right?
• In Men in Black: The Series, K's hobby is taking a bucket of balls to his "personal driving range" — a rooftop in midtown Manhattan.
• Beetlejuice plays a round of golf in the Neitherworld in the episode "Caddy Shock" to save Claire Brewster's hide.
• The Heckle and Jeckle cartoon "Goony Golfers." The two birds are caddies for Chesty the bulldog but only to drive him crazy.
• Dan Vs.: "Dan vs. Golf", unsurprisingly, culminates in Dan trying to win a golf game against Chris. The game ends with Dan winning because, through some of the usual improbable circumstances that seem to strike Dan, the course was filled with birdseed, everyone was attacked by birds, and one carried Chris' ball away.
• A Fractured Fairy Tale tells how golf was originally called "goof."
• DuckTales (2017) features both these things, though the first type was offered to change, as Glomgold insisted that Scrooge just take the penalty in a conventional game. But Scrooge, ever proud said, "A true scotsman plays it where it lands", landing them in "Druid Golf", where type 2 starts happening with Dewey making improbable shots.
• Popeye, Brutus, Olive and Wimpy participate in a rather unusual game of golf in "Golf Brawl." Olive can't sink a putt, Wimpy can't hit the ball, and Popeye and Brutus as usual compete against each other under the mantra "Play the ball where it lies!" Brutus gets a literal birdie ^note (One under par from tee-off to hole in regulation golf) when he hits a hawk's egg by accident and the chick hatches and attacks him.
• Top Cat plays a round of golf in the alley (episode "Rafeefleas") as he tells his gang to keep an eye out for a jewel thief who robbed a museum. The others make sure that every shot T.C. makes is a hole in one.
• The golf episode for Motormouse and Autocat was "King Size Caddy." Autocat's attempts to disrupt Motormouse's round of golf end up in usual failure: after a catapult results in Autocat getting his head planted in a hole:
  Motormouse: Hey, Autocat...what kind o' club are you usin'?
  Autocat: A mashie...what else?

Real Life

• A famous 18th-hole meltdown by Phil Mickelson in 2006 featured the ball bouncing off of numerous obstacles, but rather than going in, it just kept going farther and farther away, making this more like the first type than the second.
  • Also in the first variety of "playing it where it lies"—when played at Carnoustie, the British Open has featured a number of these where the golfer tries (and fails) to play the lie rather than take the penalty, most famously Jean Van De Velde's meltdown on the 18th hole in 1999, which was repeated almost exactly with Padraig Harrington in 2007. The difference, of course, was that when it happened to Harrington, he was spared by Sergio Garcia also bogeying the 18th hole, forcing a playoff which Harrington won.
  • Bernard Langer once climbed a tree to play a shot, after his ball landed in it, rather than taking a penalty stroke.
  • There is also an unsubstantiated story of a golfer landing a ball in a water trap, then taking his next shot from a rowboat when the ball miraculously floated.
• Then there's the story of the golfer whose shot started a wildfire.
• Kevin Na suffered through a 16 on a par 4 in the 2011 PGA Tour after he played a ball out of the woods. The issue appears to be that, once he attempted to play it out, he could no longer take the penalty and move to the previous position, as that previous position was also within the woods.
• Vijay Singh hit a ball of the 16th tee at the 2009 Masters, it skipped about 5 times off the water hazard, hit the berm, bounced onto the green, took a curve to the left, and rolled right into the cup. Watch it here.
• During World War II, an Obvious Rule Patch was supposedly adopted throughout Britain which would allow for a delay without penalty for the players to take cover during air raids, and allowing them to disregard the "play it where it lies" rule if a golf ball should land in a bomb crater.
• Nothing beats Alan Shepard's Golf on the Moon during Apollo 14.
  • Stephen Colbert joked that with NASA preparing to return to the moon, they should remember that Shepard’s golf ball was still “in play” and had to be hit from where it landed.
• People who live next to golf courses seem to have problems with trespassing golfers whenever a stray ball lands on their property. Here's one story where the homeowner decides he's had enough. (The golfer in question is a Jerkass who doesn't even realize his ball is out of bounds despite having to hop the homeowner's fence!)
• Rory McIlroy had a shot bounce off a tree and land in a spectator's pocket. Play it where it lies?
• There is a golf course that has sharks. It is, naturally, located in Australia.
• In a 2019 Pro-Am at Pebble Beach, Tony Romo's tee shot on the fifteenth hole sailed way right and landed in one of the hospitality tents. Instead of taking a drop, however, Tony Romo chose to play it where it lied. His ensuing shot landed on the green right next to the hole.
• Sergio Garcia once hit a tee shot that ended up stuck in a tree, about 10-12 feet off the ground. After he climbed the tree to find his ball, he had his caddy hand him his club (the announcers suggested that he use a tree iron), to the delight of everybody in the area. He then proceeded to hit the ball, one-handed and backwards, and have it land within a few yards of the pin. Watch it here. He even sticks the dismount when he jumps down from the tree.

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