Golf gag gift

Glowing golf balls!

SOMEBODY turned out the lights, and it was a good thing, too, because an alternate universe emerged full of purple dinosaurs glowing out there in the dark.

And the electric-blue fish and the dragons burning a nice nuclear- radiation green and the shark looming out of the ground and the neon- pink boulders that could easily sit at the bottom of a tropical fish tank. There was also the psychedelic hippie-bus flowers floating across the walls.

We know what you're thinking, and no, none of this had anything to do with illegal substances or even a nip of nefarious nog.

Instead, we were at The Putting Edge -- a glow-in-the-dark black- light-lit miniature golf course that recently opened at The Great Mall in Milpitas, and it's the best thing to happen to miniature golf since the windmill.

It's indoors -- a good thing this time of the year -- so if teeth chatter during a kiss on a typical miniature golf first date it will definitely be nerves not the cold. Although your teeth will be glowing, and who knows what that will say about you.

"It's like a DayGlo 'Jurassic Park,' " says Darin Forrester, 40, of Oakland, who on a recent trip was putting for his seventh shot on a little par 3 -- he kept ricocheting off a luminous fossil on some of those fish-tank rocks. Undaunted by his wife's taunts, he persevered, addressing the ball, lining up his shot. "Here we are at Augusta," he said, then ricocheted yet again.

This is the first Putting Edge in California. The company already has courses in half a dozen cities nationwide and even one in Canada. The local version is currently open only Fridays through Sundays, but there are plans to expand soon.

And that's a good thing, because it is very cool. It's like playing miniature golf in the middle of a giant Lite Brite game. Or in the old hokey haunted house ride at the Santa Cruz Beach Boardwalk where your shoelaces glow.

Somehow there's also something a little naughty about it. Like sneaking into your big brother's bedroom with all his lava lamps and those fantasy Dungeons & Dragons and AC-DC and "Heavy Metal" posters. Or shopping at one of those Spencer's gag-gift stores (there's one of those at the Great Mall, too), which is one of the few places where you can actually buy black light bulbs when it's not Halloween.

The Putting Edge course is laid out in a series of high-ceilinged rooms

where the carpet, ceiling and walls are black, with pink, yellow and green golf balls radiating in the eerie glow, bouncing around the fairways like so many excited electrons. Even your score card glows in the dark, so those 12s you get on the tough holes really show up.

A round of golf here is a little pricey. It's $8 for adults, $5 for seniors and kids younger than 6. And it has to be said that the course itself, for mini-golf aficionados everywhere, is not the most challenging.

While it is a full 18 holes and visually a lot of fun, there are no tiny swinging doors at which you have to time your shot just right. No rushing water hazards into which you may duff your ball and then get yelled at when you wade in to retrieve it.

Guess they figured playing in the dark was enough for folks.

"I think playing in the dark is challenging enough," says Scott Bridge, manager at the Milpitas site.

Indeed, black carpet does make it a little tough to read the greens.

The experience was most certainly challenging for Forrester, who tried to putt through the tentacles of a glowing pink octopus and catch the angle off an orange treasure chest but instead managed to play through about three holes over and wound up in King Arthur's Court.

He tried to call out a weak "Fore!" to warn the group on that hole, but it was too dark to hear.

Operating hours are 10 a.m. to midnight Fridays and Saturdays and 10 a.m. to 10 p.m. Sundays. For more information on The Putting Edge glow-in-the-dark miniature golf, call (408) 262-0600 or visit www.putting-edge.com

You can reach Angela Hill at ahill@angnewspapers.com or call her at (510) 208-6493.