After Dave Hartmann carded a 90
in Disney mini-golf during a 1996 vacation, he vowed to return — and he did, 563 more times over the next 22 years. Now he works there, too.
The mini-golf course at Walt Disney World is sometimes overlooked. Who travels to a theme park to play a child’s game?
But in 1996, Dave Hartmann and his wife pulled over to check out the course nestled near the Swan and Dolphin Resort that had a view of the Twilight Zone Tower of Terror in the distance.
They were on a long Orlando vacation while Hartmann rested from heart surgery. It would be nice to play a little mini-golf again, he figured, since he couldn’t play the real thing. He shot a 90. His wife beat him. “I said, ‘That’s not going to be my last score,’ ” Hartmann recalled.
He vowed to return to Fantasia Gardens Miniature Golf, and that he did — 563 more times over the next 22 years.
Hartmann, 74, has played Disney’s course so many times, the manager suggested he might as well as work there. Disney hired him in 2007 and since then, Hartmann regularly works there a few days a week.
It’s unlikely anyone has played the course more than Hartmann, Disney says. He keeps every scorecard in bundles of 100 in his desk drawer and tallies the results on the computer for some deeper analysis.
“I’m just a little bit OCD,” Hartmann said.
He calculates his average on the 18-hole course, full of traps and tricky shots, at 57. Par is 72.
He finds joy in playing the mini-golf course that he has memorized — even that nasty Hole No. 13 with its dogleg to the left.
“It never gets old out there. Each time is a different challenge,” said Hartmann, a retired engineer who also leads a small church in Lakeland in addition to working at Disney.
He plays once a year at Fantasia Gardens with the other ministers from Polk County. But men of God can be competitive. They practice year-round to try to beat Hartmann, who held the course’s all-time lowest score of 47 for 11 years until someone bested him in July. His framed scorecard is still kept in the breakroom at Fantasia.
Still, Hartmann doesn’t himself too seriously.
At Fantasia, he is known for telling puns, the cheesier the better, while people wait for the next hole to free up.
“Do you know who keeps the oceans clean?” is saved for a little girl wearing a Little Mermaid Tshirt. “Mer-maids.”
Hartmann definitely leaves an impression, said Laura Evaldi, a guest experience manager at Fantasia.
“Our guests remember him year after year,” Evaldi said. take