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Grab Your Putter, and Journey to Enchanted Lands
 | | Stephen Cherry | | Herb Schoellkopf, owner of the eight Old Pro Golf miniature golf courses in Ocean City |
In Ocean City, you can journey through magical, medieval castles, step under the big top and watch clowns perform, or lead a great African safari expedition in search of wild predators.
Just one catch: You have to take your putter and colored golf ball. Only then can you can enter the faraway and fanciful realms of Old Pro Golf, where founder Herbert J. Schoellkopfs spectacles have been enchanting vacationers for four decades..
At 81, Schoellkopf has lost none of his remarkable ability to turn the products of his fertile imagination into miniature golf wonderlands. At his eight Ocean City courses, each built around a different theme, golfers marvel at his handiwork, and some ask him how he keeps dreaming up this stuff..
"My ideas mostly come in the middle of the night when I am awake but not up," Schoellkopf says. "I am thinking all the time. These things evolve out of your head."
He reminds customers that it takes considerable technical skill to translate what he imagines into these creations. "People can think of the wildest things in their minds, but it has to work," he says. "Mechanically, it has to be feasible and practical and yet still use imagination."
Blending Imagination, Engineering
Schoellkopf says Walt Disneys creative genius has always influenced and inspired his work. He likes the word Disney coined for combining imagination and engineering: "Imagineering." (Fittingly, Walt Disney Imagineering is now the name of the Walt Disney Co.'s creative division.)
Old Pro blends imagination and engineering masterfully, and Schoellkopf sees to it that every detail is just so, right down to the design of the animated dinosaurs, clowns, animals and knights that inhabit his courses. Schoellkopf has them hand-made and goes to the Naples, Fla., home of their creator to pick up each one and bring it back to Ocean City.
Over the years, Schoellkopf has been contracted to build more than 150 miniature golf courses from Hartford, Conn., to Myrtle Beach, S.C. During the late 1960s and 1970s, he owned and operated as many as 13 courses in four states Maryland, Delaware, New Jersey and South Carolina.
Schoellkopf came to Ocean City from New Jersey in 1963 to build a miniature golf course for someone else. But seeing how much Ocean City was growing, he decided to move his business here and opened the first Old Pro Golf near the Pier in 1964.
In recent years, Old Pro has consolidated the miniature golf operation, closing other regional courses and operating only those in Ocean City.
The largest and most popular Old Pro Golf location sits at 68th Street. Two courses one outdoor, one inside a building bedazzle children and adults alike. The outdoor course is home to prehistoric, man-eating giants reminiscent of the hit dinosaur movie "Jurassic Park." The largest stationary character in the Old Pro Golf course collection lives here a 15-foot tall, 1.5-ton Tyrannosaurus Rex and he's always hungry.
"I built this course two years before the movie came out," Schoellkopf says. "I jokingly talked about suing Disney for taking my idea."
The indoor facility, built around a "20,000 Leagues Under The Sea" theme, features underwater caverns and a monstrous ship with six golf holes inside. The ship, which has just been rebuilt to nearly twice the size of the original, serves as the focal point around which the rest of the course is planned.
"We try to have one large object to appeal to the eye at each course," Schoellkopf says. "When people stop and look at the figures, the water, the vegetation, and the obstacles, they typically say, Gee whiz. There is a heck of a lot thought and imagination that went into this place.' If you get a central idea of what you think might work on a golf course, then you branch out from there."
Sons Share Old Pros Passion
 | | Stephen Cherry | | One of two new gigantic fiberglass dragons towers over 'The Temple of Dragons' course. |
Schoellkopf's sons seem to have inherited their father's love of the miniature golf business. Rick serves as Old Pros general manager. Scott, facilities and operations manager, is in charge of such tasks as dragon installation and temple construction.
The brothers are finishing a facelift at the 23rd Street course, the second Ocean City Old Pro, built in 1965 and largely unchanged until 1999. Now its getting a whole new look, based on a dragon theme. "I thought it would be real interesting now that the 'Lord of the Rings' movie brought dragons into focus," the senior Schoellkopf says.
The redesign has another purpose: Old Pro wants to outshine a competitor's new miniature golf course across the street.
Two gigantic fiberglass dragons, weighing nearly 700 pounds each, tower over the holes at "The Temple of Dragons" course. A crane hoisted the dragons into their new homes 30 feet above the ground. And they won't be idle beasts, but animated figures, a signature element of Old Pro, which has 40 such figures at its courses.
Thats one way Old Pro tries to stay ahead of the competition in a 10-mile long resort with about 30 miniature golf locations.
"You have to make them fun and exciting so that everyone is enjoying themselves," says Schoellkopf, who admits hes a less-than-average putter. "A hole-in-one is still the biggest thrill in golf. If a young kid can get as many as his old man, then that's great."
Schoellkopf shares a trade secret: Old Pro makes the cups at each hole a little bigger than normal. "We cheat a little bit," he says. "That gives everyone the chance to make a hole-in-one, from grandmas who can't walk to little kids. Everyone screams and hollers when they make one. There are high fives and slapping hands. I like that. I love to see people get them."
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