Mike Brown, still celebrating 10 hours after winning the First Annual Maximum Golf Professional Putting "Wildman" Open, is leaning against the bar and wearing a stripper. When I walk up he has a silver-lip-gloss dancer with glitter on her breasts stretched across him like a Speedo wetsuit, but it's Mike's eyes I'm worried about. They have that "Take me to your leader" look. And then it happens. Suddenly I hear her whisper the dreaded words "V.I.P. Room," so I quickly run interference. Mike, one of only two Ivy Leaguers on the professional Putt-Putt tour, is legendary for many things, but restraint is not one of them. There will be no Near-Champagne ripoffs for the champ. We have somehow marauded across Tampa to a late-hours club called 2001 Odyssey, and at this point we've bonded. Mike is now My Man.

Ten minutes later, safe from the clutches of the hustler with the rhinestone eyelids, we've both become acquainted with porn star Samantha Silk--these things happen when you hang out with professional putters--and I take a moment, mid-lap-dance, to reflect on the achievements of the day.

Don't call them miniature golfers. That's the first thing I learned, at 11 that morning. Putt-Putt is not miniature golf. Miniature golf is a game played by children and giggling girlfriends who want to hit the ball into the clown's mouth and make a bell ring. Miniature golf courses have concrete rails, brick hazards, crummy carpet that doesn't have a true break, and holes that depend on pure luck. These guys, on the other hand, are pro putters. They play on one kind of course--the ones owned or franchised by Putt-Putt Golf Courses of America, Inc., which sanctions precisely 126 hole designs, all of which are par two, all of which are designed to be a test of strategy and skill. (We'll get to the special case of Danny McCaslin in a minute. Danny made the mistake of playing miniature golf and is currently serving out a two-year Putt-Putt suspension. In other words, this stuff is serious.)

At the point we reached 2001 Odyssey, to be truthful, the First Annual Maximum Golf Professional Putting "Wildman" Open had only existed for twelve hours. And like most things in the world of professional putting, it was mainly an excuse to commence the Roman revels. That morning I had become concerned about the energy level at the rather homely Putt-Putt establishment of the amiable Chuck Futch, just down the road from Busch Gardens, so I put up 500 bucks in "virtual prize money" for a five-man 54-hole tournament--the virtual part alluding to the fact that I didn't have the cash on me at the time. Putt-Putters have this need to play for money that is roughly equivalent to the inner cravings of a jonesing crackhead, so I assured the field that at some point I would be able to raise Maximum Golf high sheriff Michael Caruso on the cell phone and cajole him into ponying up sufficient simoleans. Meanwhile, we were now several holes into intense medal play, with defending Professional Putting Champion John Napoli leading by three or four strokes. John, the "old man" on the tour at age 43, had pretty much astounded Putt-Putters throughout the world when he claimed the 1999 championship at Orlando's posh Orange Creek Country Club, thereby redeeming a career that began with great promise in the seventies but never landed him the national title. John is famous for once scoring a perfect round of 18, one of only two in the 46 years of Putt-Putt history. "It actually kind of messed with my head," he told me. "I did it at a little night tournament in Columbus in 1979, and I ended up not having a good set of goals. I almost flunked out of Ohio State because all I did was play Putt-Putt."

The cell finally rings. It's the brahmin of Maximum Golf calling from home.

"Mike," I tell Caruso while hiding behind the metal elephant so the golfers can't hear, "I need five hundred bucks."

"Why?"

"For prize money. For the Putt-Putters."

"Why?"

"The only time they play for real is when they're playing for money. It's sort of all about the gambling."

"Okay, but will you play against them and give me a chance to win my money back?"

"Michael, you have no idea what you're talking about."

I was with five of the best Putt-Putt golfers in the world, virtually unbeatable by anyone except the top 25 players. They included:

* Napoli, a native of Maple Heights, Ohio, who came to Florida to teach health and coach girls basketball at Countryside High School in Pinellas County, until he became so good at professional poker, especially Texas Hold 'Em, that he found more lucrative ways to make a living and still have time for his Putt- Putt leisure.

* Dave McCaslin, a stocky 35-year-old good ole boy from the Memphis suburbs, once junior champion, winner of the Northern Open, perennial contender now living near the beach in Indiatlantic, Florida, with his schoolteacher wife. (The decision to get married is not a popular one at the highest levels of Putt-Puttdom. There are fears that Dave has lost his edge, especially when he declines that crucial fourth Mai Tai.) When not managing Island's Fish Grill, Dave collects gold albums, including some from Elvis, the Moody Blues, the Beatles White Album, and, rarest of all, "Meet the Beatles."

* Danny McCaslin, his 34-year-old bad-boy brother, the acknowledged horndog and chug champion of the tour, known as "McSway" for his unorthodox stroke, also a junior champ and winner of the Southern Open, now based in Cary, North Carolina.

 * Matt McCaslin, the 28-year-old baby McCaslin, who missed the junior championship by one stroke and never really pursued a pro career, also from Cary.

And, of course, the man of the hour . . .

* Mike Brown, the 30-year-old Philadelphia native who turned pro at 18, graduated from Penn in 1993, won the Putt-Putt national championship in 1996, and since then has distinguished himself in the fields of thoroughbred handicapping, high-stakes poker, semi-pro baseball, craps, blackjack, and the gambling/putting biathlon, established in Charlottesville, Virginia, when he played poker for 16 hours straight, leaving the table at 10 a.m. on a Sunday morning with $2000 in winnings, then set the local Putt-Putt course record in a tournament he ended up winning by 14 strokes. Known as Mr. Intensity, during a tournament he has more or less permanent welts on his leg, the result of pounding himself whenever he fails to ace the hole.

As I explained to Caruso, beating these guys when money is on the line is not something the casual Putt-Putter could ever conceive of. "It would be easy to hustle this game," says laid- back Dave, the eldest McCaslin, "but there aren't enough of us. Everyone knows who the good players are." It's not uncommon for a pro Putt-Putter to win or lose a thousand in an afternoon, playing five bucks a stroke up the ladder. Then there are side bets, trick shot bets, bets on whether you can touch the hole with your foot and flip the ball with your hand into the next hole, bets on whether you can chip onto a green two holes away, nine-hole bets, and, of course, bets on who will show up sober at the tee-off time.

It's a game that, once learned, has much more in common with pool than with golf. Half the strategy is how to play the tricky aluminum rails. "This one plays a foot beyond the scratch from the two-and-a-half hole, backdoor," says Dave. Rough translation: aim for a place on the rail that looks ridiculously far from the hole, and tee your ball up between the second and third tiny holes on the front of the tee mat. If your pace is right, your aim perfect, and your stroke orthodox, you'll hit two rails and hole it from the rear.

"But how do you know that?" I ask Dave.

"We played the first 18 before you got here. Just free- popping."

"Free-popping" is the Putt-Putt term for speed golf, but watch what happens when five championship free-poppers arrive at an especially tricky hole. Everything comes to an abrupt halt while they play it five or six times, painstakingly searching for the secret--playing the left rail, playing the right rail, playing straight in, calculating every angle on every hazard, until they see what the carpet does, what the rails do, and where the not uncommon flaws are. These are the only guys I've ever seen who, playing a four-foot soft putt, can still put considerable left or right English on the stroke. Playing a rail, they can control the angle of the kick by a combination of speed, English and local knowledge that's the equivalent of fading around a dog leg at a 45-degree angle.

"It's the concrete," says McCaslin, as he watches a fairly simple putt consistently break away from the hole at the last second. "The concrete under the carpet is not poured evenly. If this was a real tournament, I would have to study this one and probably go three rails with it."

But in some cases, he would go three rails if he played the hole in the morning, two rails in the afternoon, and one in the evening, due to the complex influence of dew, humidity and wind.

"The heat of the sun changes the sensitivity of the kick on the rail," says Dave.

I accuse him of putting me on, but he holds to his heat- expanding aluminum-rail kick-behavior theory, which is later seconded by his colleagues.

Today it's Mike Brown who controls the pace, leads the field, and sets the standard for competitive intensity. At the end of the second 18, he's tied Napoli, but only because John has agreed to give up one stroke per round based on his home-course advantage. (He lives in nearby Clearwater Beach.) To give you an idea of what a gamer Mike Brown is, he once had to run for his life from a harness-track driver he accused of cheating. "I had the Superfecta boxed in the last race of the day. It was this crummy little harness track in Ohio. The number five driver clips the wheel of the number four and ruins a Superfecta of four long shots that would have paid $20,000. Yeah, I told him what I thought of him. But he came over the rail with his WHIP."

Mike tells this story deadpan, without emotion, like he was recalling the breakfast he had that morning. And then, halfway through the final 18, Mike hits his stride, pulls away from Napoli even without the gift strokes, and wins by two straight up.

"By the way," says Mike, and he's not laughing, "if you ever meet Tiger Woods, tell him I will beat his ass on a Putt-Putt course."

Even though it's a fairly balmy Saturday, we're virtually alone throughout the tournament. The affable Chuck Futch, a man whose name screams "Putt-Putt manager," offers free hot dogs and explains that business boomed after he bought the place in 1987, but then a new highway was built that changed the tourist approaches to Busch Gardens, and things haven't been the same since. Especially galling was the miniature golf course built near the entrance to the theme park a few years back.

Putt-Putt was invented and trademarked in 1954, and it's still run like a small family business from Putt-Putt headquarters in Fayetteville, North Carolina, just a nine-iron chip from Fort Bragg, where executive director Bobby Owens upholds the tradition of the sport. Only recently have standards been loosened enough to allow Chuck's decorative elephant and giraffe, both of which are located well away from the nearest green.

"The seventies were great for Putt-Putt," says Dave, who virtually grew up on the Putt-Putt course near his home in Memphis. "The nationals were televised. There were $50,000 purses in 1973 and again in 1975. And then all that went away."

"Video games," says Mike.

"Yeah, maybe it was video games," agrees Dave. "Of course, you have video games here, too, but Putt-Putt was always basically just a course, a clubhouse with a snack bar, and a 'birthday room' for parties. It wasn't exactly the most exciting place for kids in the eighties."

"It became uncool," says Mike. "It's still uncool, but in the eighties it was totally uncool."

But maybe that's changing now. This year Putt-Putt Golf Courses in America will put up $180,000 in total prize money for four national and several state and regional events. Biggest of all is the Professional Putters Association National Championship, held at the home course in Fayetteville in early August. The winner after eight rounds gets $50,000, the biggest purse in three decades, and the top 32 pros move on to a match- play system that will eliminate all but four, who will duke it out on the televised ESPN championship. On the pro tour, golfers constantly talk about the number of times they've "made TV." (Mike has made TV five years in a row.) The prize money on ESPN is actually much less--only $10,000 to the winner--but TV exposure, on an edited and tape-delayed program, it's what they live for.

"The only reason they're jacking up the prize money this year is that they've finally got competition," volunteers one of the McCaslin brothers as we sit down at a local tavern for post- tournament toddies. I can't remember which McCaslin said this, but it was probably Danny, recently martyred by being banned from the PPA for two years. Danny entered a professional miniature golf tournament in Myrtle Beach, South Carolina, and was caught red-handed when Bobby Owens decided to police the event personally.

"I think it's a violation of my civil rights," says Danny while trying to pick up a Bennigan's waitress. "Can he do that? What about free agency?"

Danny is, in fact, famous for his free agency. He proudly accepts the mantle of "number-one partier on tour" and big brother Dave recounts the time at the Nationals when Danny managed to have all-night marathon sex on both Friday and Saturday night of the final two rounds, almost missing his tee time both days. Dave tried to rein his brother in, for the good of his game. "I kept telling him, 'You know, you really have a chance to win this. You should really take this seriously.' And he said, 'This is making me feel good.' And so I backed off. He was right. The sex was improving his game."

Was this an actual Putt-Putt groupie, I ask.

"No, we don't really have groupies," says Dave, "unless you count the girls who actually work at the Putt-Putt courses. A lot of them were more than willing, but those were the days when we were all underage."

It's not exactly the image the Putt-Putt home office is striving for, since the organization once got upset when girls from Hooters were allowed to carry scoreboards during a tournament. They want to be known as a family entertainment center, so they're not apt to sanction, for example, the now legendary "hooker auction," held during a mid-seventies tournament in Greenville, South Carolina. Or the years in which the "birthday room" at a Deep South Putt-Putt course was used to run a gambling operation.

"Actually the most hookers I've ever seen at a single Putt- Putt tournament," says Dave, pausing and reflecting on the experience of more than 20 years, "would be right there in Fayetteville. In 1980 there were at least 200 hookers in a four- block area, so many of them that we got group rates. They would just knock on your door at the motel, and if there were four guys in the room--well, I think she asked for 25 and I got her down to 19, just because there were so many of us."

She worked a volume deal?

"Yeah. I mean, she left with almost 80 dollars, and I know at least one of us--I won't say who it was--was too drunk to have actual sex anyway. I know because I used my Bic lighter to shine on his little white ass while it was bobbing up and down."

Which brings us back, in an odd sort of way, to 2001 Odyssey, where Samantha Silk is finishing her lap dance and chatting about her personal friendship with Ron Jeremy. There's a poker game in progress somewhere across the bay, a Mardi Gras- type event in progress in trendy Ybor City, and so there are lots of goals to achieve before we sleep. There will be beers, girls, Tequila shots, more girls, mixed drinks, more girls, and, when we arrive at an all-nude place that didn't allow alcohol, the spectacle of new champion Mike Brown disappearing for twenty minutes and turning his khaki cargo pants into an illicit bar, complete with airline-sized liquor bottles, that allow him to process precise drink orders for the next two hours. I was impressed. I've been at places where rock stars party, but I'd never seen men as dedicated to it as these guys.

"Well, it's not like we make a lot of money," says Danny. "We like to have a good time."

The most amazing thing is that, after the party was finally over, we all made plans to play Putt-Putt again the next day. We decided to invade Orange Lake Country Club in Orlando, a place so protective of its image that it denied permission for Maximum Golf to shoot pictures. It's a condominium development given to seafood buffets and group singing, but they have one of the best- maintained Putt-Putt courses in the country, and it's frequently used for major Putt-Putt competitions. (The national championships are almost always at either Fayetteville or Orange Lake.) Armed with the local knowledge of both Dave and Mike ("Use the five hole, play six inches past the groove"), I played two rounds and managed a four-under 68. "What will a 68 get me in tournament play?" I asked.

They snorted.

At the course in Fayetteville where this year's nationals will be played, Mike once shot 22-23-23-22 for a four-round 90, or 54 under par. That gives him a good shot at challenging Greg Ward of Atlanta, the most consistent Putt-Putter for the last ten years, for the $50,000 top prize. But it doesn't have anything to do with the course itself. When you play at Orange Lake, one of the back nines is located next to a swimming pool where babes in bikinis are always sunbathing.

"Mike can't concentrate around that," explains Dave.

It's like whispering "V.I.P. Room" in his ear. And even "Mr. Intensity" can't deal with that level of pressure.