How about an intentionally inflammatory and completely spurious headline that I’m claiming it to be “true” in the name of the infallible Internet? However, the fact remains that no World Ice Golf Championship has been held since 2006. Additionally, one may never be held again. The sponsors canceled it the last few years because of bad weather, meaning, good weather. It cannot be played when ice turns to water.
An Actual Championship
The World Ice Golf Championship really exists, or at least used to exist. The whole concept now seems to be in serious jeopardy. First the sponsors failed to update their website and then it disappeared. It still exists conceptually. But why bother? Greenland will transform into a sauna, relatively speaking.
Actually I’m quite indifferent to golf, which makes me an anomaly with my cohorts who hit the links at every opportunity. I find it interesting that I’ve written two golf articles in just the last few weeks (I featured the so-called “world’s longest” golf course in Australia recently). The sport doesn’t impact me personally but apparently I have an intense interest in the topography of weird golf courses. Who knew?
History?
Ice golf developed fairly recently although practitioners claim [link no longer works] that it:
“…was known right back in the 17th century. A painting by the Dutch painter Aert van der Neer (1603-1677) 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’.”
Well maybe, but I have a hard time believing that a few Dutch guys on a frozen canal in the seventeenth century Netherlands have a direct connection or correlation to its nascent cousin. I sense a little revisionist history happening here. I have visions of some modern ice golfer walking through a museum, spotting the painting, and suddenly deciding to create a noble pedigree. Whatever. We all know it’s just a contrived excuse to grab a couple of drinks at the 19th hole.
Uummannaq
The championship dates only to 1997, the brainchild of a local innkeeper trying to attract tourists to a tiny island on the northwest coast of Greenland. This is the location of Uummannaq, a community of fifteen hundred people nearly six hundred kilometres north of the Arctic Circle. This sounds like a small town, and it is, but it’s still pretty significant to Greenland which has fewer than sixty thousand citizens.
Nonetheless it can’t be easy to attract visitors to a place requiring two airline flights and a helicopter ride without a marquee event to bring them there, especially during the winter. The World Ice Golf Championship filled that gap.
It became quite successful in those early years, delivering an international audience of extreme golfers and hearty adventurers to a highly competitive 36-hole tournament played over two days. Players used brightly colored balls that wouldn’t fade into the background of ice and snow. The championship even attracted a big-name sponsor, the company that makes the scotch whisky liqueur, Drambuie. I guess that kept the players feeling warm.
The Course
However, those golden years of the sport, when everything still seemed poised for international success, did not last long.
“The venue is chosen because of its unique meteorological and geological features. Strong frost makes the sea freeze and thus trap the magnificent icebergs that are en route to the open sea along the Disko fjord. 12 glaciers – among them the fastest glacier in the world – feeds into the fjord ensuring plenty of spectacular icebergs. A stable high pressure securing sunshine, blue skies and very little snowfall formulate the rest of the unique Uummannaq set up.”
It sounds spectacular, but it requires a constant temperature at or below -25°c to form properly. It also lasts only a single season before melting away. Each annual golf course must be created uniquely and cannot be repeated. That didn’t seem a problem until recently. Unfortunately balmy weather has made it increasingly difficult to sustain. Oh, there also seems to have been some schisms in the organizing committee that may have contributed to the problems. That leaves Jason Cunningham of Brisbane, Australia, as the undisputed champion since 2006.
The survival of Ice Golf hardly seemed the most pressing global warming issue. Nonetheless it presented a sad situation for the aficionados of this extreme sport. Meanwhile the water skiing golfers rejoiced.
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