Jay Morrish was staking a golf course in Tucson, Ariz., one afternoon when ominous
thunderclouds began to gather. No big deal, Morrish figured. He'd keep a weather
eye out and continue working; the storm might even pass and let him finish his
day's work. Instead, the bottom dropped out, and Morrish wound up making a mad
dash for the car.
Back in his hotel room, the designer realized how narrowly he
had escaped peril?but not due to floods or lightning. "I stuck my hand in one of
my boots to oil it and pricked my finger," Morrish recalls. "I looked, and there
were two fangs. A rattlesnake had bitten through my boot and even reached my
sock, but because I was running, the fangs snapped right off.
"Somewhere out there, a snake is gumming rabbits," he says
with a chuckle.
And you thought golf course architects just sat in front of a
drafting table all day.
Staring down loaded guns, sidestepping irate cobras, mixing
it up with angry natives?all part of a day's work when course designers bring
their sketches to life out in the field. When told their profession might be one
of the most dangerous around, most course architects will simply laugh. It is,
however, a nervous laughter. What follows is a collection of some of their most
harrowing tales.
California-based architect Mark Hollinger was working on a
project in Cambodia in 1995 during a period of
civil unrest.
"You'd go into a public place and people would be checking
their guns with their coats and umbrellas," recalls Hollinger, a partner in the
JMP Golf Design Group. "It was like we were back in the Wild West. One night we
went to a restaurant outside the city, and my client's bodyguards looked like
two ninjas?they were all dressed up in black and had M-16 rifle attachments on
their motorcycles."
The governmental structure in place at the time had Samdech
Hun Sen sharing authority with the son of longtime Cambodia leader
Prince Sihanouk. On Hollinger's last night in the country, there was an
attempted coup against Sihanouk's son.
"Tanks were in the street, M-16s were being fired all night
long, and all I could do was sit in my hotel room looking out the window,"
Hollinger says. "The fighting lasted most of the night. I woke up and got out of
there as quickly as I could the next morning, but the locals were going about
their business like it was just another day."
Sometimes the remnants of wars past can threaten course
designers and builders. Morrish once visited a site in Japan that had
been used as an ammunition dump. "We flew in there in a helicopter," he recalls,
"and the pilot got out and picked up this pipe about two feet from where I was
standing. 'I wonder what this is,' he said. And another guy said, 'That's a
phosphorous bomb and I would suggest you lay it down very carefully.'"
At least Morrish had prior experience with explosives and
firearms. An avid big-game hunter, he's used to hefting high-powered rifles to
his shoulder. While assisting Jack Nicklaus at Shoal Creek in Birmingham, Ala.,
however, he needed only a small derringer and a box of ratshot to take out
venomous water moccasins?an almost daily occurrence.
"One day," Morrish recalls, "I almost stepped on a
rattlesnake. I took a couple of fast steps, pulled out that derringer and
drilled him." Call Morrish the Fastest Gun in Golf.
One of Hollinger's partners, Bob Moore of Chapel Hill, N.C., recalls an encounter with an even
deadlier reptile. Walking a site in Indonesia, he happened upon a cobra
with its hood spread, poised to strike.
"I jumped and landed about six feet away," he says. "[Former
NBA great and legendary leaper] David Thompson would have been proud. And the
snake was gone in a heartbeat."
