‘Mister Mini Golf’ competing on ‘Holey Moley’
Karl Barth goes by the nickname “Mister Mini Golf.” And the West Bend-based mini golf fanatic is doing everything he can to live up to his name.
In 2017, he launched the Mini Golf Reviews website. The following year, he created the “Jack-Putt” mobile holein-one mini golf course for fundraisers and parties. Last year, he was able to leave his full-time job, adding director of miniature golf at Swing Time in Germantown and host of the “Par 4 The Course” mini golf podcast to his résumé. And he helped raise $6,000 for the Leukemia and Lymphoma Society with a stay-at-home mini golf putting contest last month.
Now “Mister Mini Golf ” is going prime time on ABC’s extreme mini golf competition show “Holey Moley,” also known as “Holey Moley II: The Sequel.”
He’ll be on the show at 7 p.m. Thursday, locally on WISN-TV (Channel 12).
“There wasn’t a television show revolved around mini golf two years ago,” Barth said. “I was never expecting to be on anything people would be watching, let alone a national television show that potentially would be seen by millions of people.”
Barth fell in love with mini golf as a toddler in his native Elgin, Illinois.
“One of my earliest memories that I have is getting a mini golf game called Gator Golf when I was 2 or 3 years old,” Barth said. “There’s a picture of me at that early age getting that laser-like focus on the golf ball and getting ready to play. I have been playing mini golf the rest of my life.”
Barth has played several hundred courses across the country, but the “Holey Moley” course is by far the craziest.
“It didn’t matter how much training or practice I had, they threw several curve balls in the designs and really stepped it up from season one,” Barth said.
Barth couldn’t reveal if his performance Thursday will get him a shot in the finale, where a $250,000 grand prize is up for grabs. But a synopsis and press photos show that celebrities Josh Duhamel and Jon Lovitz get in on the action, joining regular hosts Joe Tessitore, Jeannie Mai and comedian Rob Riggle.
They also reveal that Barth got to ride the show’s famed putter zipline to a pole at the end, which he had to do without his glasses.
“I have no depth perception,” he said. “So it wasn’t me jumping towards a pole, it was me hitting a pole. But that was a cool experience. There’s no place else where you can do something like that.”