The Fifth Hour: Benny Bogey

Ben Maller’s annual golf outing is not a trip to St. Andrews or Augusta National. It is a trip to Holy Moley, a miniature golf course in a cocktail bar where the obstacles are designed by people who, as Maller puts it, “lost a bet.” He lost by one stroke to his cousin’s husband, Bruno, and the episode is his extended, self-deprecating meditation on what that kind of loss reveals about competition, perspective, and the difference between real golf and the kind where a plastic T. rex judges your backswing.

The annual pilgrimage to Holy Moley

Maller frames his visit to Holy Moley as his “major championship,” a deliberate contrast to the real golf majors that dominate sports media four times a year. The course is a cocktail bar with 27 miniature golf holes, each with a theme: dinosaurs, pirates, a volcano, a giant mouse that tries to eat your ball. Maller describes it as what would happen if “Disney imagineers had less supervision and more alcohol.” The place has a bar called Caddy Shack, a speakeasy accessed through a photo booth, and a hotel called High Jinx. His wife found it; the double date included his cousin Shoshana and her husband Bruno, who beat him by one stroke.

The pressure is real, even with plywood windmills