![]() ![]() Bill Koplin didn't invent artificial turf, but he did help standardize carpet to make play more fair. At first, magic "carpet golf" was literally that, with putting surfaces made from strips of wildly different rug scraps. Hideous mannequins toil in the Watz-Yerziz Mine.Īccording to Jeanne, her father was behind a number of mini-golf innovations. "And also things that would work for a golf course hole." Finding the sweet spot between attention-grabbing art and a navigable golf hazard, she said, took years. "We built things that we thought would be neat," said Jeanne of the Koplin statue hazards. The Watz-Yerziz Mine (What's Yours is Mine) is a nod to Reno's silver rush heyday - a one-of-a-kind creation complete with dummies who look like they've been underground too long. The Reno course features scores of hand-made Koplin monsters, dinosaurs, pagan deities, a putt-thru pyramid with mummies, and a giant worm with a cowboy hat. "'Do you like this? What do you think about that?'"īy the time Magic Carpet Golf was built in Reno, Bill Koplin had been crafting sculptures for two decades, and had an assortment of tried-and-true ideas. "He was always talking to people," said Jeanne of her father. The Koplins later created an additional, more realistic dinosaur at Pee Wee Golf, but Jeanne said that visitors always preferred the lumpy original.Ĭowboy Worm, or the pet snake of Pecos Bill? "He said, 'I'm a welder I can do that,'" Jeanne recalled, and so he built the internal framework while Jeanne helped with the wiring and cement. Koplin was inspired to add his first rebar-and-cement sculpture, a dinosaur, when he saw one like this on a family road trip. "In the beginning it was pretty austere," said Jeanne of the first Koplin course, "but it was still fun." ![]() "He didn't golf," Jeanne said, but he had a knack for turning odd scraps of wood and pipe into amusing golf ball hazards. Koplin opened his first attraction, Pee Wee Golf, in 1948, only, according to Jeanne, because he was stuck with a strip of land and didn't know what else to do with it. "He was the one who started that," said Jeanne Arterburn, Magic Carpet owner and Bill's daughter. ![]()
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