Hardly par for the course

NEED extra challenge in your golf game? For those who have mastered the sport’s intricacies and hunger for more, there is the Awesome Eight golf society, created along the lines of mountaineering’s Seven Summits challenge. But instead of scaling the highest peaks on each of seven continents, the goal is to play in the “harshest conditions the planet can throw at you,” writes Duncan Lennard in his handsomely photographed book “Extreme Golf.”

Society founder Robin Sieger has identified them all, from the northernmost (Norway’s North Cape course) to the southernmost (Argentina’s wind-whipped Ushuaia Golf Club in Tierra del Fuego National Park), the lowest (Death Valley’s Furnace Creek Resort at 214 feet below sea level) to the highest (Bolivia’s La Paz Golf Club at 10,650 feet above), the hottest (Australia’s Alice Springs Golf Club, where the summer temperature routinely spikes to 126 degrees) and the coldest (Alaska’s North Star Golf Club in Fairbanks, where Sieger’s golf ball shattered in the 15-below-zero cold.)

Lennard ticks off the good and the difficult of these sites and more in a tour of the world’s most unusual golf courses. For example, there are no tees or flags on the pockmarked track of the Kabul Golf Club, just outside the Afghan capital, a place where soldiers sometimes double as caddies to help golfers avoid the remnants of war. The path to South Africa’s Lost City Golf Course’s 13th green requires playing over a pit of a couple of dozen Nile crocodiles.

“I like to keep as much of the natural flora and fauna as possible,” explains the course’s designer, golfing great Gary Player.

The Lost City course isn’t the only one where golfers can encounter deadly extremes. Charles Lindsay’s “Lost Balls” shows a golfer trying to retrieve his ball just inches from the snout of an alligator at South Carolina’s Old Tabby Links. At the Troon North Golf Club, Lindsay photographed an abandoned ball in striking distance of a coiled Western diamondback on the saguaro-studded course in Scottsdale, Ariz. And he captures the sheer panic of three golfers fleeing a grizzly on the Yellowstone Club’s ninth green in Big Sky, Mont.

Hmmm, perhaps an armchair tour is challenge enough. *