Golf On The Village Green - Natick, MA
EXECUTIVE SUMMARY
Score: 72.5/100
Would we play this course again? No.
Should you play this course? Yes.
The Takeaway: This loosely colonial-era United States themed course excels at highly-detailed, photoworthy props that are well-suited for Instagram posts and making videos to send to grandparents of their favorite (or not) grandchildren launching terminal velocity putts and then whacking each other in the shins with putters. The golf itself is middle-of-the-road with more than a few cookie-cutter holes that are essentially the same hole with just different building props. But still, it’s entertaining enough and fortunately the course size is ample which allows for some longer holes that makes things feel not too cramped. With classic patriotic songs playing over loudspeakers in the background, lots of Revolutionary War imagery, and a prominently placed howitzer next to the 18th hole, the Army would be wise to capitalize on this place and setup a recruiting office just outside the course exit to start roping in youngsters early.
The view from the 18th hole
TECHNICAL REVIEW
Golf on the Village Green is tucked off the busy Route 9 in Natick, MA. Aside from the mini golf sign on the road, this place goes unnoticed, sandwiched betwixt a couple low-lying industrial-looking buildings. As you approach you see an assortment of alluring props lying just beyond a chain link fence and feel your pulse quicken: What mini golf wonders lie in wait to be discovered? This isn’t rhetorical, keep reading and we’ll answer this question.
The entrance to Golf on the Village Green
We played this course on a weekday just after a heavy rain had rolled through. While this made for some soggy areas on holes, it also meant that we basically had the course to ourselves which was terrific and we suspect a rare occurrence. After getting a few minutes of warm-up putting in on the practice green (always a tremendous feature, both for killing time while waiting on busy days and, on totally empty days when there is literally no one else on the course, for dialing in your putting game because you’re a mini golf maniac—please, really, we need help) we hit the first tee.
The view from the practice putting green: the course awaits.
The course starts off with a couple mundane holes requiring banking your putts off bricks and concrete, though with a relatively long hole length that was refreshing after having just played the cozy Trombetta’s Farm. After these starter holes the more elaborate props begin, starting off with a 3rd hole that features a replica of the gold-domed Massachusetts State House. If you’ve always wanted to putt a golf ball through the state house, you’re in luck!
The style of this State House hole is approximately indicative of what’s to come on this course. The recipe goes like this: putt through or under a building or other man-made stucture, land on a secondary green, then put into a secondary hole and get transported down to the primary green and hope that the you get rolled out roughly in the direction of the hole.
Heading to the fourth hole (called ‘Strike it Rich” in the scorecard) we see an example of a quasi-historical lesson information board that appears in places on this course. It’s just enough to make you feel like the activity in which you are now engaged falls on the cerebral activity spectrum somewhere between mini golfing and visiting a museum or reading a book. It would not surprise us if some Massachusetts school districts designate visits to this mini golf course as an educational field trip because after all there is a goddamn Red Coat in uniform on this course. Let it be known that it’s the opinion of this reviewer duo that no such thin justification should be needed: every school in Massachusetts should have an annual and formally-approved fuck-off-and-go-play-mini-golf field trip in early June. Just to be clear, we will be nowhere near a mini golf course on whatever day that is.
Anyhow the course continues, tending towards a prop-endowed, multi-tiered, pipe-utilizing style, with the buildings you putt under or through changing (Faneuil Hall, to the Statue of Liberty, to the Old North Church).
This is a course that generally gets the fundamentals right: the greens are in good condition and free of tears, and while some feature artificial turf and some feature more of a rug type textile, they are totally fine in condition. There are no starting mats which is nice, cups don’t have large raised lips to push putts away, the hole signage is good, the scorecards are well-enough designed and they even name the holes (always a nice touch demonstrating pride in the course, in our view).
One gripe is that the holes have a “sunken” design, where the green sits below the walking grade and are ringed by concrete. This makes teeing off difficult because you are always wary of hitting the curbing on your backswing.
Also, for some reason mini golf courses seem to struggle with having consistent cups that all match. It’s almost comedic really. This course is no different; some cups are metal and deep, some are so shallow that the ball tends to almost pop out when you hole it. And then there is this one that seems to have been hand-hammered out of silver by Paul Revere himself (don’t worry, we’re hard at work on a coffee table book of just photos of mini golf cups, tentatively titled “Cups I Have Known”).
Back to the mini golf, hole 11 (“Tea Party”) is a fun one featuring crates of tea, and is an easy hole-in-one provided you putt just hard enough but no too hard to land it in the troth that sends your ball rolling under a box of tea and directly into the hole below.
Hole 12 (“Take Aim”) is an odd hole that feels like an evolution of the ski-ball type 18th hole/non-hole used on some courses. Here as on several other holes, this course invents its own mini golf rules, bending the existing laws of nature and decency and allowing you to subtract 2 strokes from your score should get a hole in one.
In general this seems like a terrific place to take your kids when they still want things even after you just dropped $900 dollars on back to school gear at the Natick Mall, having resigned yourself to the fact that at least your credit card statement cycle just started so it’s another solid 45 to 50 days until actual payment time. And while there are a few throw-away type holes that this course just punts on that don’t really fit thematically with anything that we can tell (here’s looking at you 14th hole), the bulk of them are photo worthy and entertaining.
Still, aside from photo opportunities, the golf is just okay and kind of unchallenging. The course tends to feel like a museum of natural history with stately props almost like roped-off exhibits, a bit stuffy and not interactive. It’s definitely possible they hired a model maker from a museum to construct all the high quality buildings on this which look to be exceedingly well-made. But in the experience of playing here you are just kind of walking by them, gazing at them like taxidermy, and they don’t draw you in and have too much of a bearing on the game aside from simply putting right through or under them. Imagine elevating (literally) the Bunker Hill Monument hole and having some ramp option where you could land your ball at the top and have it bounce down all 294 stairs before being spit out at the hole, or an outlandish loop-de-loop wrapping around the Statue of Liberty. Now there’s a hole for the tired huddled masses.
Which actually brings us to our favorite hole of the course, the 15th hole (“Granary Graveyard”) on which you must bank your ball off the gravestone of Samuel Adams himself to send your ball careening down a ramp towards a potential hole-in-one below. We could all wish to be so lucky as to have our own gravestone prominently featured on a mini golf course as a helper prop off which to steer mini golf loving patrons to a hole-in-one. This hole was and still is terrifically amusing to us, and on some deeper level that we will reign ourselves in from waxing too quasi-philosophical about, this is a hole that seems to perfectly embody the borderline heretical zaniness of mini golf and life at large that makes it worth living. We’re already daydreaming about our own posthumously completed mini golf course featuring an 18th hole with a cannon that blasts a teaspoon of our cremated remains high into the air whenever someone scores a hole in one on it. YOU’VE WON A FREE ROUND!
And on that note, it’s worth remarking that this course does deserve some credit for an 18th hole that is a proper hole, not a throwaway bonus type hole that many courses use. Also don’t forget to take a picture of your kids next to the swan inexplicably located next to a howitzer as you make your way out. Grandma will love it!
APPENDIX
This is a mini golf course, for sure. The props are big and well-built. The golf is just okay, but certainly okay enough to make for an entertaining hour, though we don’t need to go back.
It’s a course like this, with an historical-ish (Colonial/Americana/Boston/Massachusetts/Revolutionary War/with the Statue of Liberty and a howitzer thrown in) spin that sets our brains on fire wondering how to design our own course with a fresher, less glossed-over historical approach—a course that is less Yankee Doodle Dandy and more Rage Against the Machine.
Is mini golf the appropriately nuanced and respectfully somber forum for this type of provocative exploration? Probably not, but it’s not going to stop us from fantasizing about a hole on which you’re not putting your ball through the gold-domed Massachusetts State House but through a textile mill in Lawrence in the summer of 1894 in which the interior temperature is a balmy 112 degrees. Surprise, your ball doesn’t come out the other end! You crawl in after it and then discover the doors are padlocked from the outside and you’ll only be able to get out once your 15 hour shift is over (don’t think your 7 year old kid is getting out of this either–those small hands are good for working the looms!).
One can imagine all sorts of honest hole designs of varying levels of taste: for example instead of trying to putt under the Statue of Liberty you’ll have to putt across the Edmund Pettus bridge in Selma, Alabama and navigate your ball through a line of police officers dead set on keeping you from crossing because of the color of your skin. Now that’s a truly American round of mini golf warranting some serious reflection and a slow and profound pace of play.
So we’re left to daydream about a course that explores the under-explored (in mini golf) underpinnings of life in the United States, a course that is the the dark upside-down world counterpart to the elementary school textbook history on display at Golf on the Village Green.
In a world in which we are multi-millionaires we would buy the lot next to Golf on the Village Green, erect our own course called Golf in the City Sweatshops (or similar) and unleash it to the world. If not a damn person ever played, it would still be money and time well spent. By the way, just a headsup: we’re still figuring out what the admission fee on this hypothetical course would be, but in keeping with the true United States theme it should be structured like healthcare costs; we’re thinking $37,432 for 18 holes sounds about right. More if you’re out of network.