I.
"I couldn't care less about Greenland," William C. Starrett II said with disarming candor shortly after arriving in the northernmost country on earth. "I'm here for the golf."
Sixteen empty beer bottles were lined up in front of the retired California bankruptcy lawyer, so he looked like a contestant in a carnival midway game. It was the last week of March, and Starrett, two photographers, and I were passing a five-hour layover inside the modest air terminal in Ilulissat, a southern suburb of the North Pole, by systematically divesting the bar of its biennial beer supply. We began by drinking all the Carlsberg and then depleted the Tuborg reserves, and we were grimly working our way through the supply of something called Faxe, evidently named for the fax-machine toner with which it is brewed, when Starrett began recounting his life's memorable rounds. Rounds of golf, rounds of beer—the distinction was scarcely worth making.
"Livingstone was an interesting course," he said. "It's in Zambia, near Victoria Falls. The greens fee is thirty-five cents, and the pro shop has one shirt. At Rotorua, in New Zealand, the hazards are geysers. Sun City, in South Africa, has an alligator pit, and you don't play your ball out of that." This summer, Starrett said, he would rent a house in County Cork ("Walking distance to the Jameson's distillery") and travel from Ireland to Iceland for the Arctic Open, played in twenty-four hours of sunlight. He was, on the other hand, unlikely ever to return to the Moscow Country Club. It has gone to seed, don't you think, after expanding hubristically from nine holes to eighteen?
I feigned a look that said, You're telling me, and shook my head world-wearily.
"It is said that once a traveler has seen the world, there is always Greenland," says the Lonely Planet guidebook Iceland, Greenland, and the Faroe Islands, which only partly explains Starrett's presence here, 250 miles north of the Arctic Circle in Ilulissat, at the exact point at which mankind's appetite for golf exceeds the capabilities of fixed-wing aircraft.
Our profane party of golfers and journalists had flown five hours to Greenland on its national airline, Gronlandsfly, after first laying waste to the duty-free liquor shop in the Copenhagen airport so that its ravaged shelves resembled those of a 7-Eleven in the hours immediately following a hurricane warning. After alighting on Greenland, the world's largest island, we required two more northbound flights of an hour each to reach Ilulissat. This was the end of the line for the four-prop de Havilland DHC-7, and we now awaited the arrival of a Vietnam-vintage Sikorsky military transport helicopter to take us the last hour-and-twenty-minute leg north, to the frozen coastal island of Uummannaq, for the first—and possibly last—World Ice Golf championship (hereafter known as the WIG).
The WIG was open to anyone with $2,000, a titanium liver, and a willingness to spend a week 310 miles north of the Arctic Circle, in one of the northernmost communities in the world. Who could resist such a powerful come-on? Every citizen of planet earth save twenty, it turns out.
Still, though the tournament was a sponsored contrivance designed to promote Greenland tourism—and a Scottish liqueur company, Drambuie—winter golf on Greenland promised to have singular benefits for the high handicapper. For starters, the island's 840,000 square miles are virtually unblighted (from a strictly golf-centric view of the ecosystem) by trees. Nor would water come into play, as 85 percent of Greenland is covered by a permanent icecap, which in places is two miles thick. Most significant, the Greenlandic counting system goes only to arqaneq marluk, or twelve, after which there is simply passuit, or "many"—an idiosyncrasy surely to be exploited to my advantage on a scorecard.
The incoming Sikorsky at last set down in Ilulissat like a great Mosquito of Death. The vehicle was so old, a Dane living in Greenland told me with perverse pride, that its manufacturer wants the relic returned for display in a museum when Gronlandsfly retires it. At this news I signaled the bartendress for a final round of Faxes, but she gestured to her glass-fronted refrigerator, now empty, and said accusingly, "No more beer."
With growing dread, I returned to my companions in the waiting area. In the lounge chair facing me was a London-based sports photographer named Gary Prior. A janitor who moments earlier had been cleaning the men's room approached Prior from behind and began massaging his scalp, and a look of supreme serenity spread across his—the janitor's—face. Prior prudently avoided any sudden movement as he mouthed, "This bloke's gone mad."
So it was with a profound sense of foreboding that we boarded the Sikorsky, its belly filled with golf clubs, and set out to defy Robert Louis Stevenson, who wrote, "Ice and iron cannot be welded." Would this prove to be a prophecy? With a terrible shudder, the rotored beast rose above the icebergs, carrying us, its human prey, deeper, ever deeper, into a golfing Heart of Darkness.
II.
I had first heard of ice golf two summers earlier, while traveling under the midnight sun in northern Scandinavia. "You must return in the winter," implored the deskman at the Strand Hotel in Helsinki, "when we play ice golf on frozen lakes and snow, in freezing temperatures, with balls that are purple."
"Yes, well, I imagine they would be," I stammered, but truth be told the idea intrigued me. Greenland was among the last outposts—on earth or in its orbit—to resist golf's colonial overtures. Man first walked on the moon in 1969, and within two years he was golfing there. Greenland was first inhabited five thousand years ago, yet it had only a nine-hole track near the main airport, in Kangerlussuaq, to show for it. Until two months before our arrival, the game had never been seen in Uummannaq, and when the Sikorsky touched down outside the village, I had an irresistible impulse to plant a numbered flagstick, as if landing at Iwo Jima.
A week before our visit, two hundred of Uummannaq's fourteen hundred residents had turned out for a golf clinic conducted on a makeshift driving range: the frozen fjord waters that surround the island. "I think it is very difficult to hit this ball," said Jonas Nielsen, a fifty-eight-year-old resident, after taking his hacks off a rubber tee. "But the young kids, they are very interested and would like to learn more about this game."
As well they should. Greenland's fifty-six-thousand residents, 80 percent of whom are Inuits (the word Eskimo is best avoided), are said to be temperamentally suited to golf. "One thing about Greenlanders," wrote Lawrence Millman in his Arctic travelogue Last Places, "they tend to find misfortune amusing."
You have to, on Greenland or in golf. "When they contacted me many months ago to attend this event," said Ronan Rafferty, referring to the tournament's sponsors, "I thought it was a joke." Rafferty, a thirty-five-year-old native of Northern Ireland, was the leading money winner on the European tour in 1989 and a member of that year's Ryder Cup team. He was paid by sponsors to attend the WIG, but a wrist injury would prevent him from actually playing. Mercifully he had his own wines shipped to Greenland, and he was toasted at dinner by the mayor of Uummannaq as "Ronan Rafferty, the famous golfer which I never heard of."
Rafferty arrived the night before I did with another party of golfers and journalists. All told, twenty competitors and twenty noncompetitors, representing six nations, attended the WIG. From Holland came Lex Hiemstra, who won the trip in a contest and was often asked if second prize was two tickets. Joining me from the United States were Starrett and Mark Cannizzaro, a New York Post golf columnist who turned up some instructive literature on local custom. "The stomach of a reindeer is like a large balloon, and the green substance in the stomach has a very particular smell," read the section headed "Food and How We Eat It" in a Greenland publication. "It is neither delicious nor revolting, but somewhere in between." This would prove useful, as our menus for the tournament would include whale jerky, blackened musk ox, and battered auk.
Jane Westerman joined my table at the welcoming dinner in the Hotel Uummannaq. Westerman, a widow from England with a newfound love of golf ("I'm quite keen, really"), is a member of the Roehampton Club in southwest London. "We have bridge, croquet, and golf," she said. "But hardly any ice golf a-tall."
Peter Masters, also English, asked Westerman where exactly the club was located. "It's near the Priory," she replied. "Do you know the Priory? The upmarket psychiatric hospital?"
Masters did not know the Priory, but soon enough, surely, we all would. Outside the hotel, hundreds of Greenlandic sled dogs—frightening creatures resembling wolves—wailed all night at the moon. A message posted in the hotel said that alcohol was forbidden in guest rooms. A man explained that a drunk once wandered out and lay down among the dogs. In the morning all that was found of him was a button. A single button.
"What's the saying?" Masters asked, with more portent than he could possibly know. "Mad dogs and Englishmen …?"
III.
It was fifteen degrees below zero when I rose to play a practice round with Starrett. On the course he stood up his stand-up bag, and its plastic legs snapped in half. The bag collapsed to the ice, legs dangling at odd angles, like Joe Theismann's.
My own legs buckled at the beauty of the layout. The course was constructed entirely of ice and snow, nine holes laid out like a bracelet of cubic zirconiums on the frozen fjord waters surrounding Uummannaq. Fairways doglegged around icebergs ten stories tall. This is what Krypton Country Club must look like. My disbelieving eyes popped cartoonishly, and I had half a mind to pluck them from my face, plop them in a ball washer, and screw them back into their sockets to see if the scene was real.
The fairways were snow-packed and groomed and set off by stakes from the icy rough. The greens, called whites, were smooth ice, like the surface of a skating rink. No amount of Tour Sauce could get a ball to bite on these whites; bump-and-run, I could see, was the only way to play.
The hole itself was twice the diameter of a standard golf hole, and players were allowed to sweep their putting lines clean with a broom. Other winter rules were in effect. All balls in the fairway could be played off a rubber tee, while balls in the rough could be lifted and placed within four inches of where they landed, on a line no closer to the hole. My own balls, alas, were not purple, but rather optic-yellow low-compression Titleists, replete with the WIG logo.
I discovered many things during my practice round of ice golf. I discovered that any given golf shot is 30 percent shorter in subzero temperatures than it is at seventy-two degrees. (The course was appropriately abbreviated, at 4,247 yards for eighteen holes.) I discovered that it's difficult to make a Vardon grip in ski gloves, to take a proper stance without crampons, and to find a ball that had landed in fresh powder. But mainly I discovered that, with suitable clothes, no spouse, and no desire for country club indulgences—caddies, shoeshines, combs adrift in a sea of blue Barbicide—there is nothing to prevent you from playing golf anywhere on earth, in any season, any day of the year.
That alone seemed a more worthwhile discovery than anything Admiral Peary had stumbled on in the Arctic.
IV.
The WIG had a shotgun start. Except that a cannon was used instead of a shotgun, and the cannoneer reportedly suffered powder burns on his face and had to be treated in the village hospital. The next shotgun start employed an actual shotgun.
I was playing with Masters, an editor at the British magazine Golf World and a seven handicapper. On the second hole, a 284-yard par four with an iceberg dominating the right rough, Masters uncoiled a majestic drive. As he did so, a team of speeding dogs pulling a sled abruptly appeared to our left, two hundred yards from the tee box. The ball was hurtling up the fairway at speed x, the dogs were sprinting toward the fairway at speed y, and suddenly, as the two vectors approached each other, we were witnesses to a complicated math problem sprung horribly to life.
With what can only be described as a plaintive wail, one of the dogs collapsed. The rest of the team kept sprinting, dragging their fallen comrade behind the sled so that he resembled a tin can tied to the bumper of a newlywed couple's car. The driver glanced back at the dog and, with barely a shrug, continued to mush. Greenlandic sled drivers, in sealskin jackets and pants made of polar bear pelt, are not given to great displays of emotion, and the entire hallucinatory vision quickly disappeared into the white glare of an Arctic horizon.
Masters couldn't have anticipated this ludicrously improbable event, but a Danish woman following our foursome—she composed our entire gallery—repeatedly accused him of huskycide. "How could you?" she kept saying. "We are guests here." What the sled driver made of this act of God—a single optic-yellow hailstone falling from the sky and smiting his dog—is lost to history.
The very next hole was a right-hand dogleg—a word our foursome now studiously avoided using in Masters's presence—around an iceberg. I sliced consecutive tee shots on top of the berg and never recovered, especially as I had exhausted my one sleeve of optic-yellow Titleists and was now playing with the most garish range balls in my bag. Masters, shaken, carded a 40 on the front nine but recovered his composure to post a three-over-par 75 for the round.
At day's end Englishman Robert Bevan-Jones, whose record 31 on the back nine gave him a first-round 70, held a one-stroke lead over Scotsman Graeme Bissett. My first-round 99 left me in eighteenth place and in a powerful melancholia, especially considering that the tournament lasted but two days. We had come all this way, and it was already half over. Long after the round ended, I remained on the fjord, seasonal affective disorder setting in, and lost myself in the endless white.
I was wallowing in a profound silence, two miles from Uummannaq on the frozen fjord, when my driver, a Dane raised in Greenland, broke the spell. "Uummannaq means 'heart,'" said Christian Dyrlov while tracing a valentine in the air with his index finger. "Because the island is shaped like a heart, or like the back of a woman."
Hours later, back in my room, I unfolded a map and concluded that it would take the entire imaginative arsenal of a powerfully lonely man, in a frigid climate, at a far remove from the rest of the world, to see Uummannaq as even vaguely resembling a valentine. Or the tapering back of a beautiful woman.
It was beginning to look like both to me.
V.
Saturday night in Uummannaq began uneventfully enough. The dinner was verbally hijacked, as usual, by the speechifying representative of Drambuie, who kept urging us, somewhat salaciously, to nose his product. Two clowns performed. Then a few of us walked through the restaurant's kitchen. Which is to say, through the looking glass.
Behind the kitchen in the Hotel Uummannaq, should you ever find yourself there, is a disco. Greenland, I kid you not, is a hotbed of something called Arctic reggae. Alas, the headliners on this night were not Bob Marley and the Whalers. Rather, two aspiring rock stars from Moldavia took the stage, and they introduced themselves as Andy and Andreas. One played keyboards, the other guitar. "Our band is called Tandem," said Andy, or possibly Andreas. "You know, the bicycle with two seats?"
Andy and Andreas, singing from a notebook filled with handwritten lyrics to Western pop songs, performed phonetic covers of such unforgettable standards as "Unforgeteble" ("Like a song of love that clins to me / How a follow you that stins to me") and "Country Roads" ("Almost heaven, Vest Virginia / Blue Ridge Mountain, Shenandoah River"). A toothless woman forced me, at beerpoint, to dance with her, while leathery Inuit fishermen watched our group of golfing toffs and scrawny scribes pogo to the music and decided—for reasons known only to them—not to kill us with their bare hands.
"Why do you laugh during Mustang's Alley?" Andreas (or maybe it was Andy) asked as I flipped through his notebook at a set break.
"It's 'Mustang Sally,'" I replied, and a lightbulb buzzed to life above his head. "Ahh," he said, as if his world had finally begun to make sense. "Thank you." Forget love and Esperanto. The only two international languages are music and sports.
While Greenland has a home-rule government, it remains a province of Denmark, and just fourteen hours had elapsed since Denmark played Italy in a qualifying match for soccer's European Championship. The match had been broadcast live on Greenland's lone television network. This qualified as event programming; the fare on another day consisted principally of a travel agent riffling through brochures for tropical resorts.
I now understood why our gallery had been infinitesimal earlier in the day. Oblivious to golf, Greenlanders are soccer obsessives. The only permanent athletic facility visible in Uummannaq is a soccer pitch. Every fifth child wore a Manchester United ski cap. Man United's goalkeeper is Peter Schmeichel, who is also captain of the Danish national team. Additionally, England had played Poland that afternoon, and Man United star Paul Scholes scored all three goals for England.
So wired Uummannaqans were not ready to retire when the disco closed at 3 A.M., and we all repaired to a house party, which is when things began to get surreal. Just inside the door was a pair of size-twenty clown shoes. Fair enough. On a shelf were several impressive ivory souvenirs—swords, perhaps, or walking sticks—that are difficult to describe. An English photographer was twirling one like Mary Poppins's umbrella when the Faroese hostess materialized to say, "I see you found my collection of walrus penis bones."
The clown shoes belonged to a thirty-one-year-old American named Joel Cole, who was visiting Uummannaq from his native Shakopee, Minnesota, a town nearly adjacent to the one I grew up in. The odds against us meeting near the North Pole were roughly six billion to one, but by this time I had come to expect anything in Uummannaq. Cole was once the national track and field coach for the Faroe Islands and led them to a respectable showing at the 1989 World Island Games, a kind of Olympics among Greenland, Iceland, the Isle of Wight, the Isle of Man, the Faroes, Shetlands, Gilligan's, and so forth. Cole now clowns—he used the word as a verb—in the world's underprivileged places for the real-life Patch Adams, whom Robin Williams portrayed in the film of that name. Indeed, Cole was the man who had clowned us at dinner just before we nosed our Drambuie. Said Cole, memorably, "I've clowned in Bosnia."
By 6:30 A.M. the evening was running out of steam, and I made my way back to the hotel with four journalists turned English soccer hooligans. As all twenty-nine-thousand of northeastern Greenland's sled dogs howled in unison, we strolled the streets—or, rather, street—of Uummannaq and sang (to the tune of "Kumbaya, My Lord"):
He scores goals galore, he scores goals. He scores goals galore, he scores goals. He scores goals galore, he scores goals. Paul Scho-oles, he scores goals.
I was due to tee off in two hours.
VI.
I neglected to answer my wake-up call. I neglected to request a wake-up call. And I certainly neglected to "spring ahead" one hour in observance of daylight saving time. So I missed my tee time. Which is why in the final WIG results, listed in several international newspapers the next day—from the New York Post to the Times of London—my name would be followed by the ignominious notation WD. Which stands, I gather, for Was Drinking.
Having officially withdrawn from the WIG, I was free to follow the leaders. The gallery pursuing the final foursome on this soccer-free Sunday numbered several hundred townsfolk, whose mittened applause sounded like a million moth wings flapping.
Ronan Rafferty emerged from the hotel to watch the tournament play out. "You can cut the tension with a knife," someone said to him when three strokes separated the top three players with three holes to play. "Not really," said Rafferty. "You could maybe chip away at it a bit."
The improbable leader, by a single stroke, was Peter Masters, who had put his game and life back together after dropping a dog in the first round. When he finally holed a short putt to win the first WIG with a final round of 67, two under on the tournament, he was rushed by a jubilant gallery. An old woman thrust a napkin at him, and Masters, brand-new to Greenlandic fame, didn't know whether to blow his nose or sign his name. He signed with a felt-tip pen. "Being on the other side of that," said the journalist, more accustomed to interviewing golf champions than being one, "was surreal." There was that word again.
"What does Peter win?" asked Graeme Bissett, the Scotsman, who finished third, two strokes behind Masters.
"A ten-year exemption," I speculated.
Bissett chewed on this and said, "From coming back?"
On the contrary, returning is almost compulsory. Masters won an all-expenses-paid trip to defend his WIG title next year. Organizers were quite keen, really, to make this an annual event. Said a representative from Royal Greenland, the prawn-and-halibut concern that cosponsored the affair: "Bringing golf here shows we are not a static society." Imagine that. For the first time in recorded history, golf was a symbol of unstodginess: of forward-thinking, bridge-building multiculturalism.
Life is too often like the stomach of the reindeer, I reflected at dinner: neither delicious nor revolting, but somewhere in between. We had all come to the end of the earth to be delighted or revolted—to be anywhere but in the everlasting in-between of daily life. In that regard Greenland—without sunlight in winter, without moonlight in summer—succeeded on a grand scale.
"There are many difficulties here," said the mayor of Uummannaq. "The difficulties are darkness and harsh weather." He paused and added, "But there are also many beautiful times. The beautiful times are days like this."
The men, women, and children of the Uummannaq village choir appeared from nowhere and began to sing a cappella in their native tongue. One didn't have to speak Greenlandic to recognize the hymn. It was "Amazing Grace."
In that instant it occurred to me: Uummannaq is a Rorschach test. It really does resemble a human heart, for those willing to look long enough.
(May 17, 1999)
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