Let's flash back to the Good Old Days and play barnyard golf (horseshoes), croquet, bocce ball and miniature golf.
Bocce ball was popular with Italian gentlemen before Oak Meadow Park preempted their court at the corner of University Avenue and Blossom Hill Road.
These games of long ago were played in come-as-you-are clothing, long before modern enterprise--jogging, power walking and bicycling--required new clothing and a close monitoring of one's pulse rate.
Because today's rare photograph is of Nippon Mura, which boasted a croquet court. We'll start with that gentle game. The court was laid out on the lawn located about where the cameraman stood to take this photograph. Guests of the restaurant wore no special clothing--unlike the British, who played in team uniforms at Wimbledon before tennis took over that location.
The game was played on an oblong course with metal hoops, a wooden peg or goal at each end, and wooden or leather balls and mallets. The object was to hit your ball through all the hoops and to tap it against your goal at the opposite end. The game was gentle in the matter of exercise, but vicious in intent, such as when your ball and that of another touched, you could plant your foot on your ball and give it a mighty whack with your mallet to propel your opponent's ball far afield.
The sport that had the longest tenure here was horseshoes played at three or four side-by-side pits in Bunker Hill Park (later Memorial Park) on the west side of Los Gatos Creek and directly south of the Main Street Bridge. Park and bridge were sacrificed in 1955 when the state of California constructed the present through-town freeway.
Farmers installed horseshoe pits on their property, hence the name barnyard golf.
For a short time, Los Gatos boasted "The World's Most Beautiful Miniature Golf Course" at 46 E. Main St., the current site of the Garden Inn of Los Gatos, just west of Civic Center.
The boast was well founded. The l8-hole, hillside layout among trees was truly different from the concrete and gimmicky 18-hole courses that were being installed statewide during the 1930s. Los Gatos had one of those sterile, gimmicky 18-holers on the east side of N. Santa Cruz Avenue, just south of Royce Avenue and south of Wells Fargo Bank and in the neighboring parking lot.
Mini-golf faded as World War II approached, and the Main Street golf site reverted to open space, where scrap metal and used tires were dumped prior to patriotic recycling.
This article appeared in the Los Gatos Weekly-Times, February 7, 1996.
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