Ice Golf in Greenland

By anyone’s standards it was a difficult shot. The ball was still some distance from the flag, the group of golfers behind were growing impatient with my slow play and the round, which had started so well, was beginning to disintegrate. The main problem, though, was the iceberg.

Icebergs, quite naturally, are pretty major obstacles when it comes to golf, especially big, glistening, blue and white ones jutting out of the frozen Arctic Ocean. The weather, a mere minus 25 degrees at the time, had produced the first signs of frostbite on my fingertips and toes, and the walk down the fairway had already posed the potential dangers of crevasses and thinly concealed seal holes that could result in a dip in sea water so cold that one could not survive for longer than fifteen minutes.

Some of the many hundreds of husky dogs used as working animals in these parts lay on the ice in packs and looked on quizzically, while groups of local Inuit children gathered round, not fully understanding my sporting predicament but interested, nevertheless, to watch this strange man with his strange stick thrashing about on the ice pack.

I struck the ball (orange, of course, so that it could be seen in the ice and snow) and watched as it rebounded off a slab of 10,000-year-old iceberg and fell close to where the flag fluttered in the centre of the green, or rather “white,” leaving me with a simple putt to complete the round and, indeed, the tournament.

For 51 weeks of the year life carried on as it has always done eight miles off the Eastern coast of Greenland, some 370 miles north of the Arctic Circle, on the island settlement of Uummannaq, named after its heart-shaped mountain that dominates the island and bay.

Time, and the way the Inuits go about their business, has stood relatively still for centuries. Although recent efforts to modernise this massive outcrop of Denmark has resulted in an influx of technology in some contrast to the surrounding environment the Greenlandic people, in essence, still fish and hunt for halibut and seal, with the occasional passing polar bear thrown in for good measure, while the rest of the world goes on its troubled ways almost unnoticed.

For one week only, however, for a number of years, something utterly bizarre and implausible came to town. The World Ice Golf Championships became a permanent fixture on the island of Uummannaq, luring the 1,700 local inhabitants to observe with genuine curiosity as Scots and Americans, Spaniards and Australians, Danes and New Zealanders, English and Irish men and women battle it out.

The tournament was the brainchild of local hotelier Arne Neiman, who came up with the correct notion that holding such an event would attract guests who would require a room for a week at the one hotel in town. Although in the summer the loose sea water in the bay is the home to whales, mid-March still represents the last few weeks of winter in one of the most inhospitable environments on the planet, a time when tourists were not exactly the norm. All that changed with Neiman’s introduction to golf.

For the golfers the extreme cold is a new phenomenon. This, coupled with the strenuous walk over the lumpy, metre-thick icy surface of the sea, makes playing golf so arduous that the world championship regulations insisted that you play no more than nine holes in a morning session before returning to the warmth of the hotel to recover.

The cold is just one factor behind why this golf tournament is so unique. The snow and ice-covered landscape creates a brilliant white that threatens to give you snow blindness (a temporary loss of sight caused by the glare from the snow) unless precautions are taken. And the complete silence, save for the occasional whine from one of the thousands of huskies tied to the sledges on the sea ice and the occasional curse from a frustrated golfer, reminds you that Greenland is a very individual part of the world.

Some of the local Inuits become caddies for the golfers, puffing on their cigarettes and bent over double with the weight of a full set of clubs on their backs, while others go to the golf schools set up each year in the area prior to the first day of the tournament. It is the hope of Neiman and the citizens of Uummannaq that, one day, a local player can both enter and prosper in the tournament.

You won’t find a driving range here, a professional golf shop nor a putting green, but merely the sight of the residents of Uummannaq coming out in their hordes to follow the golf championships is as unlikely as seeing people scuba diving in the middle of the Sahara Desert.

If I was not hunting for my golf balls, submerged deep into the ice, I was falling thigh deep into soft snow or cracking my kneecaps on slabs of ice. The most disconcerting image was to see the local officials chatting happily directly in line of my proposed shot, safe in the knowledge that this would be the safest place for them to stand.

The real winners after the most bizarre sporting week in one of the remotest corners of the planet were, however, the people of Uummannaq. As the closing ceremony took place local youngsters were practising their golf shots in the snow, Arne Neiman was looking forward to a particularly good night’s business back at the hotel, and the mayor of this bitter outlet was already planning his opening ceremony speech for next year, when the frozen Arctic Ocean becomes once more the most demanding, the coldest and yet the most beautiful golf course in the world.