By Rich Skyzinski

Long an overlooked outpost, Iceland is warming up to contender status in the global golf community.

Like your greens faster than center ice of a hockey rink? Prefer your fairways painstakingly manicured, as exquisite as a bride-to-be just stepping out of the salon chair? Perhaps you don't find your "A" game until long after the memory of summer's triple-digit temperatures has faded. Or maybe the last time you walked 18 holes was sometime during the Johnson Administration.

Nodding in the affirmative to any of these questions assures one thing: Iceland may not be for you. But if it's a sense of adventure you seek with your 18 holes, the tiny island in the North Atlantic Ocean is just the ticket. But bring a hard hat, and it wouldn't be a bad idea to make sure your will has been updated. For at two of that nation's 53 golf clubs — they're all public facilities, by the way; private clubs are illegal — the hazards are far more lethal than any pot bunker Pete Dye has ever created.

Just minutes from downtown Reykjavík, on a tiny isthmus jutting into the eastern Atlantic, lies Golfklúbbur Ness, a windswept nine-holer. Since the club opened in 1964, players there have learned to hit the ball straight or pay the painful consequences. The grounds are home to one of the country's greatest populations of the Arctic tern, a gull-like bird that in the spring lays its eggs in the calf-high roughs of the course.

The tern is highly protective of its eggs, and when it believes danger is eminent — and there evidently is no greater threat than a human traipsing through the tall grass, wielding a 7-iron like it was a sickle — it hovers closely overhead, furiously flapping its wings and emitting a high-pitched shriek. While the tern is generally content to do nothing but make a lot of fuss, the closer a person gets to the tern's eggs, the greater the possibility of attack by the sharp-billed creature. Hard hats are not a bad idea.

"We've had many servicemen here to play the course," one regular explains, "and when the bird attacks, they say it reminds them of when they were in the war, being bombed." Golfklúbbur Ness: perhaps the only course in the world where you'd be perfectly content never getting a birdie.

Ninety minutes to the southeast, near the center of the small village of Selfoss, sits another course. It offers no such avian threats. It merely sits practically atop two shifting geological plates, the Atlantic Rift and the Euro-Asian Rift, that are unique in that they are above sea level — most are located on the ocean floor — and they separate, creating a huge chasm in the earth, rather than rubbing against each other like you would to keep your hands warm.

Many geologists believe the next major earthquake in this part of the world will occur here. In the written history of Iceland, the country has had, on average, one major earthquake every 100 years; the last was 102 years ago.

Could we wake up one day and the golf course near Selfoss consist of . . . well, just one really big hole? Any tremor is unlikely to cause damage to that extent, but as Hannes Thorsteinsson, the deputy general secretary of the Golf Union of Iceland, quips as he drives through town, "I am not sure I would want to live here."

Such is the game in Iceland, a country of 7,000 players still trying to find its way to golf adolescence. The reasons are not complicated, and you can start with the country's location in the North Atlantic, just south of the Arctic Circle. Some 700 miles of ocean separate the country's eastern coast from Norway, it's nearest Nordic neighbor, and it's a mere 1,600 miles to the Canadian province of Newfoundland.

Logistics also complicate matters since most of the Icelandic terrain is ill-suited for anything of a horticultural nature. Of the country's 39,700 square miles — that makes it virtually the same size as Kentucky — it is estimated that upward of 60 percent is bare rock or rock material. When NASA needed a place to train the astronauts who would land and walk on the moon, it sent them to Iceland.

With a lack of home-grown expertise in two of the game's basic foundations, instruction and golf course maintenance, it is no secret why there were few players and only three courses in the entire country well into the 1960s. "I remember, we had one golf professional in Iceland," says Bjorgvin Thorsteinsson, a six-time national amateur champion in the '70s. "Back then we had British professionals come and go, come for one or two months. We had only three nine-hole courses. We would play preferred lies. It was the only way you could play."

It wasn't until the 1990s that an Icelander became accredited as a PGA teaching professional or completed formal training as an agronomist. "We are trying to become more professional in every way," said Hannes Thorsteinsson of the national golf union, whose membership numbers trail only soccer as Iceland's largest sports federation. "In the early '90s we had the first qualified Icelandic professional, which is quite important because they speak the language and they can relate to people better than foreign pros. Of the 15 qualified greenkeepers who have formal training, most of them are working here in the country. That's a huge improvement in the standard of the courses. They improve everything, the machinery, the grasses, the fertilizer treatments, and that means you are getting better surfaces to play on."

Still, because mountains, volcanos and lava fields occupy virtually the entire interior of the country, leaving only the coastal areas open for development, there's precious little land suitable for golf courses, parks and other open recreational spaces. On the plus side, the abundance of promontories allows almost every seaside layout to fashion breathtakingly beautiful holes. Always dream of playing the 16th at Cypress Point on the Monterey Peninsula? Go to Iceland; it's got dozens of holes just like it.

In the area around the capital city of Reykjavík, the core of the country's population base, not even the barren, craggy fields of molten rock have slowed the construction of courses.

"I've never seen a project that is impossible," says Hannes Thorsteinsson, who has also turned into Iceland's foremost course designer with 30-some projects to his credit, of the Keilr Golf Club outside Reykjavík. "There's always a way. But it is a question of finding the best way. . . . I just walked and walked and walked. Finally I found little valleys and depressions I wanted to follow with the fairways. . . . We didn't use a single dynamite tube or anything to explode it. We just crushed the lava with the big bulldozers and that's it."

Lava fields are the perfect setting for a popular design characteristic of holes in Iceland: the half-par. At Oddfellows Golf Club, Hannes Thorsteinsson crafted the 73-meter 15th, which at 80 yards is the country's shortest hole not on a par-3 course. It's closer to being a par 2½; the ease in which players make birdie there is countered by those who hit it into the lava field and break a club trying to get out while making a snowman.

But whether the fairways rest upon volcanic remains or the sandy dunes near the seashore, there's a paucity of available topsoil to layer atop any design. It is an agronomic liability that offsets the 24-hour-a-day growing period the country basks in during the height of the summer.

If it's not one thing it's another, which brings us to the seaside community of Thorlákshofn. It had a more unique problem: wind that lifted the fine, black basaltic sand from beaches and nearby dunes and kept the town in a virtual sandstorm. Several years ago the town decided to try to keep the sand in place by building a course on a rolling tract of beachside dunes. Nine holes are in and the other nine could be ready for play late next summer, but the project has dragged on because of seeding difficulty. In the summer, when the air temperature may be a comfortable 80 or 85, the black sand literally broils, sometimes reaching a temperature of 120 degrees. Seedlings are burned to a crisp and, as a result, parts of the course have been seeded for the last five years while builders hope for moderate temperatures that will allow the seed to take, not bake.

"The golf course is the solution for the blowing sand," says Hannes Thorsteinsson, "but growing anything there takes great patience."

Though not one golfer lived in the community before the decision was made to go ahead with plans for a course, the town proceeded, which meant picking up the bulk of the tab. A unique Icelandic law states that when a sports facility obtains the necessary approval from its national federation and is accepted as a member, the town covers 80 percent of construction costs. Do you think the residents of Pebble Beach are glad they've never had this legislation introduced?

Sure enough, a major part of Icelandic golf is the elements. Because the country is virtually treeless — what trees did exist were cut for heating back in the 19th century, long before the country discovered the technology to harness the energy from the hot springs that flow beneath the earth's surface and now heat 85 percent of all the homes in the country — players are forced to do battle with the strong winds that buffet the seaside links.

"I've been out on the golf course here, playing in tournaments," recalls Karen Saevarsdottir, a native of Iceland currently struggling but trying to make a go of it on the U.S. Futures Tour, "where I've gotten blue in the face, I'm so cold and it's windy and it's raining so hard. It definitely makes you tougher."

Conversely, June and July bring non-stop daylight. "It's easier for us to play all summer than it is in Europe and the States because you can go whenever you want," says Bjorgvin Thorsteinsson. "You don't have to make a tee time. You can start in the morning, you can play at midnight. So it's easier for youngsters here to play three, four months of the year."

One of the highlights of Iceland's season is the Arctic Open, an increasingly popular event at Akureyri Golf Club on the northern coast that attracts players from around the world. Taking advantage of those days when the sun sets for just a few minutes, play is conducted at the very end and very beginning of each day. Taking a break at the turn literally means having a midnight snack.

"It is golf in a way golf was meant to be played," says Don Gaumer, president of the outerwear division of Sun Mountain Sports, a U.S.-based manufacturer and the Arctic Open's sole sponsor. "It's not about pretentiousness. It's not about greenery. You might play with the town plumber just as easily as you might play with a bank president. They're courses created the way God meant them to be created.

"I've done the Scotland and the Ireland thing, but my experiences in the Arctic Open, if there was one trip to take, this would be the one."

Largely because of its isolation, Iceland has had to make a go of producing home-grown talent on its own. It has been an arduous task. Recently, however, it has begun to make Mount Hekla-type rumblings.

A decade ago, "Úlfar Jónsson, Iceland's most decorated player with four national Juniors and six Amateur titles, became the first player to test his wings in America. He was so impressive in finishing second in the Doug Sanders Junior Tournament in Aberdeen, Scotland, that Sanders himself vowed to help Jónsson. Sanders contacted Dave Mannen, the coach at Houston Baptist, and convinced Mannen to offer Jónsson a scholarship. Jónsson arrived at Houston Baptist the year after Colin Montgomerie departed, played for the Huskies two years, then transferred to Southwestern Louisiana for the rest of his college eligibility.

"It meant that I was able to go to another level," Jónsson says. "You can only go so far practicing here."

Adds Saevarsdottir, "Winter in Iceland means practicing indoors. Sooner or later, though, you need to see where the ball's landing."

"Going to the United States meant that I was able to become a professional," continues Jónsson. "I probably wouldn't have been able to try that by staying here. I was playing great golf courses with excellent competition and it was just a fantastic time."

Jónsson played one summer in Europe, tried the U.S. mini-tours for a while, then was unsuccessful in two attempts to gain his card on the PGA European Tour.

"Being such a small population of players here, the competition is not going to be as good as it is in the U.S.," he says. "This is just my theory, but when you have a small pond, you can more easily be the big fish. You have better opportunities to win tournaments here, and I got used to winning very early. I got very confident, which made it easier, I believe, to become a better player. That helped me when I went to the U.S. I felt like I could win there."

There's no question the country is beginning to produce better players, but Iceland isn't ready to tackle the world — at least not yet. A more reasonable goal is to be competitive among the other Nordic countries, and there has been the occasional hiccup when a team or individual has exceeded expectations. Jónsson won the individual title at the 1992 Scandinavian Amateur — he remains the only Icelandic player to hold that distinction — and in 1997 Iceland reached the A flight (finishing in the top eight) among 20 entries in the European Team Championship.

"If you take it statistically," reasons Hannes Thorsteinsson, "then Iceland should never be a golfing nation as such. But we will in golf, as we have in other sports, occasionally have this character who makes golfing headlines on an international level. We are lacking the breadth other nations have. Chances are we will not have a good six-man team to beat, say, Britain or Scotland. We are pretty much content, I think, if we could place third, fourth, in Scandinavia every now and then."

Two players, Örn Hjartarson and Birgir Hafthorsson, who's playing the PGA European Tour's Challenge events, appear to have the greatest potential to put Iceland on the map. "People are just beginning to realize now," says Hafthorsson, "that there's golf in Iceland. They've been asking me if I lived in a snow house. They don't know anything about Iceland. They don't believe I've lived in Iceland all my life."

"They think I'm lying when they ask me how many golf courses there are in Iceland and I tell them," says Saevarsdottir of the American spectators she meets. "I'll have people come up to me on the first tee and say, 'You're not really from Iceland, are you? You just have a grandpa or someone who came from Iceland. Isn't that it?' Now they're finally starting to realize there's an island out there and those people there can play golf."

Iceland is not alone in that it has pretty much been overmatched when it has ventured onto the world stage. But there is reason for optimism. At the 1994 World Amateur Team Championships in Versailles, France, the Icelandic women's team beat five others and the men's squad finished ahead of nine nations. It was the best combined finish Iceland teams have ever produced.

Because of the great expense involved in traveling to and from Iceland, the country's national teams have to pick their competitive venues carefully.

"We had no expectations," Bjorgvin Thorsteinsson recalls of two World Cups in the late '70s. "We were amateurs, the others were pros." Thorsteinsson smiled when he remembered starting one of those events with a 79, "the same score as Bernhard Langer," who, he went on to admit, "was better for the rest of the tournament."

That was not unexpected.