Ice Golfing

Ice Golf? In Greenland? With glaciers and icebergs?

Apparently, yes.

In fact, according to the World Ice Golf Championship website, Ice Golf has been played, more or less, for centuries. "A painting by the Dutch painter Aert van der Neer (1603-1677)," explain the competition's promoters, "shows players with a club in their hands attempting to get a ball into a hole in the ice covering a frozen canal in Holland. At that time the game was called 'kolven'." It took centuries, however, and the entrepreneurial spirit of "Arne Neimann, a local resident and hotel proprietor on a small island called Uummannaq, off Greenland's North West coast" for the game to go "global."

What impresses me most about this rather extreme version of golf is that it is, in many ways, truer to the spirit of golf than the official sport has ever been. Golf has always been a game that connects us to the environment - even the highly manicured and artificial environment of a golf resort. But to build a course in the relative wilderness of the near arctic is not only a natural extension of golf, but also a celebration of our connection to nature itself. "The real architect of the course every year is the ocean," explains the site's author, "which interacts with the weather and the formation of icebergs in January and February to create an external framework for the course. The course itself is laid out in March on the fjord ice, close to the town a week prior to the actual championship. Its shape is determined largely by the positions of icebergs in the fjord."