08/17/2017
Stephen Jordan ’75, M ’83 and Patricia Aspinwall Jordan M ’83 are proud of what they’ve built as co-owners of Shipwreck Amusement Center on State Route 13 in Cortlandville, N.Y.
They offer family-friendly, year-round fun in the form of miniature golf, including a glow-in-the-dark indoor course, as well as a paintball target arcade and a bounce house. The Jordans also have given hundreds of Cortland-area teenagers their first jobs and taught the lessons of accountability, responsibility and hard work.
A Guinness World Record is just the cherry on top. The Jordans were recognized on June 26, 2017 for creating a par 14, 459-foot, six-inch long 18th hole that is now registered as the world’s longest.
“It’s out there now so we get people who are coming from all over,” Patricia Jordan said. “We’ve had people from Ontario (Canada) and from all over the place coming to play it. It’s pretty cool.”
Patricia Jordan submitted an application to Guinness in August 2016. Certified surveyors and witnesses descended on the outdoor course at Shipwreck Amusement last summer. The Jordans used a drone to capture aerial photography of the 18th hole and then submitted their evidence. Guinness had checked and double-checked around the globe for nearly a year before awarding the world record to the Jordans.
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| Stephen and Patricia Jordan. |
Guinness receives approximately 5,000 applications for records each week. Only 5 percent of applicants are awarded records due to Guinness’ strict certification process.
“People are very pleased and they’re excited,” said Stephen Jordan. “We’re working on creating a logbook where you can sign in saying you’ve played the world’s longest hole and list where you’re from. We thought that would be a fun thing, not only for ourselves, but for people to say that they’ve played the longest hole. We are getting people coming to play that hole exclusively because it’s different.”
The Jordans both retired from more than three decades of teaching in 2011 — Patricia taught math at Cortland High School and Stephen was a history teacher at McGraw High — yet the pair had opened Shipwreck Amusement on June 1, 2005. Their inspiration was simple. They were looking for a steady secondary stream of income.
“We had six kids who needed to go to college. Seriously,” said Patricia Jordan.
The business continued to grow and expand over the years, as the Jordans opened the indoor miniature golf course on Dec. 26, 2010. Patricia Jordan in particular turned her attention to improving the outdoor miniature golf course. She was looking to add something novel and challenging that would entice customers to make return trips or come out of their way to play the Shipwreck Amusement course.
Shipwreck Amusement’s outdoor course plays as a “resort style” course for the first 17 holes, forcing players to use billiards-like strategy of mastering angles and bouncing the ball off the borders to putt the ball into the hole. The 18th hole, however, is much more in the “traditional style” of miniature golf with obstacles all along the 460 feet.
The extended 18th hole was a world record idea. Patricia and Stephen Jordan had no idea what they had created.
Once the hole had been designed and built, they started hearing about the possibility of a record. Chucksters Miniature Golf in Vestal, N.Y. bills its 200-foot-long hole as the world’s longest. A course that opened in April 2017 in Cape Coral, Fla. claims that its 264-foot hole is the record.
Thanks to Guinness’ thorough accreditation process, the Jordans are proud to say that this record is theirs and theirs alone.
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“We’re in a very elite, small group,” Stephen Jordan said. “In fact, this was a whole new category. They never had a category for longest mini golf hole.”
Patricia and Stephen explain their story as they are getting things ready in the kitchen on a summer morning. A local teenager stops in before business hours to check with the Jordans on the status of her job application. Patricia Jordan drops everything to give this young girl her full attention. She wants to know how close this potential employee is to getting her driver’s license and the details of her fall sports practice conflicts.
This — teaching children — is the Jordans’ true passion. The world record has been wonderful for the business but the Jordans have remained humble since it was made official in June. They’ve laminated the certificate and keep it displayed on the wall with a thumbtack pushed through the top.
Patricia and Stephen Jordan have been working with young people for the last 30-plus years, trying to get them ready for the real world by teaching them history and math. Now, they’re doing a similar thing in a completely different setting, using a part-time job to teach teenagers a different kind of life lesson.
“It’s a good experience. It’s good for them,” said Stephen Jordan. “For a lot of kids, it’s their first job and they’re learning responsibility and how to work and meeting a schedule. It’s pretty cool. It’s a nice experience.”
Plenty of SUNY Cortland students have also found part-time work at Shipwreck Amusement. The Jordans try not to ask too much of their Red Dragon workers, but they do hope the students bring their homework. After all, education is just as important around here as holes-in-one and world records.
“It allows them to earn money while going to school,” Stephen Jordan said. “It also gives them flexibility. If we’re having a really slow day in the fall and they have all of their work done, we allow them to do their schoolwork. We want them to move themselves forward. For us, as teachers, that’s important. That gives them a chance to move forward and it helps us and it helps them, too.”