Day 6 - The Calm Before the Storm

As much as we like to pretend that covering the Super Bowl is actually hard work (and it CAN be - wait for Day 7), there is still a lot of fun involved and the Saturday of Super Bowl week is usually R 'n R Central.

By this stage, our work for the various UK media is done and there is no more we can do until Game Day rolls around. That means it is up to us to find creative ways to occupy our time in the interim.

With that in mind, we decide to create the First Annual Super Bowl Mini-Golf Am-Am (bearing in mind that you do actually need a pro or two for a Pro-Am). So the three of us (myself and the two Nicks - Szczepanik and Chapman, from The Times and News International respectively) jump in the car and go in search of Sport.

Bearing in mind our Orlando 'base' location, this is a natural. You cannot go five minutes in any direction without running into a decent golf course, and the mini-golf options are equally creative in this tourist wonderland.

And there is the perfect mixture of mini-golf and real, sporting challenge at our nearby location of Walt Disney World, where the Fantasia Gardens 18-hole turf course is as tough a prospect as anything in the genuine golfing world.

Did I say tough? Make that fiendish.

If you have ever tried to putt on polished glass, you will have an idea of what it is like. The course record is something like 51, and the 'Day's best' was listed as 59 as we arrived for a 4.25 'tee time.'

An hour and 40 minutes later, we rolled off the course, badly battered by its cunning layout and slick turf. The 'winning' score (Nick C) was a fairly miserable 72, three better than Nick Z, while my efforts totally a truly woeful 79.

That's right - 79, on a mini-golf course. People have completed marathons quicker (well, almost). Even John Daly can break 79 (every now and then).

The really sad aspect was that we treated it deadly seriously (well, for most of the time anyway, when one of the Nicks wasn't playing silly buggers and trying to drive the ball into the far distance).

We didn't actually have any air shots, and we did manage to finish most holes (with a six-stroke limit per hole - we invented a whole new score of '6 asterisk' for when it could easily have been 7, 8, 9 or more).

In the course of our round we were passed by two guys who had clearly played the course before and could finish a hole in less than five minutes, and a dad and his 6-year-old son.

To say this wasn't our finest sporting hour would be something of an understatement.

What it DID provide, though was laughs. Lots of them. An absolute barrel-load of big, deep belly-laughs as we lurched from one seemingly impossible predicament to another, defying the laws of golf, most sports, this particular course, Newton's Theory of Inertia and, most likely, the Law of Gravity.

It was hysterical, and we should probably apologize to the other patrons of Fantasia Gardens that afternoon as they must have wondered if we were either drunk or just plain crazy (I'm pretty sure we were neither) as we guffawed our way around all 18 holes, helplessly and whole-heartedly.

We can thoroughly recommend it as an aid to relaxation any day of the week.

And the best thing of all? We must all now make sure we are in South Florida this time next year for the Second Annual Super Bowl Mini-Golf Am-Am.

The locals have been warned......