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." Gene Bates also had a chilling wildlife encounter while working at Sun City Resort in South Africa. Staking a hole along an undisturbed area of the property, Bates heard a ruckus?as though something were running toward him.

"I looked up and there was this huge baboon," says Bates. "And the scary thing was, he had this big grin on his face?which was really a growl, I guess?and he had fangs sticking out of his mouth that were two or three inches long. And he was coming right at me. He was about 15 yards away when I threw my hammer at him and ran."

According to some Zulu workers on site, had Bates wandered another 15 or 20 yards further into the jungle, he would have encroached on the animal's territory. "And that baboon would have been all over me," he says with a shudder.

Given how much travel their job requires, it's no surprise to hear globe-trotting course architects tell of transportation-related perils. Topping J. Michael Poellot's list of close calls was a short hop in a helicopter that turned into a thrill ride he hadn't bargained for.

"In the late '80s we were doing a lot of mountaintop projects in Japan, and this was September, typhoon season," Poellot recalls. "We were picked up at a golf course in Chiba Prefecture, started our flight to Tochigi Prefecture and ran into a huge series of thunderheads. The prudent thing would have been to land, but the owner was so determined to see the site that day, he told the pilot to go over the storm.

"Well, we got ourselves stuck above that storm. We spent two hours trying to find holes in the clouds in order to get down. Occasionally I would catch a glimpse of treetops or mountaintops, then the chopper would zoom back up. Then fuel became an issue and we had to go down. We'd go around one set of big puffy clouds, then get blocked in by the next group. Finally, by the grace of God, we made it down and landed on a little country road."

One day at Alabama's Shoal Creek, Bob Cupp and Morrish?do we sense a pattern developing here??were being chauffeured across the property by the course superintendent in a rental car.

"At the second hole, we came to a stop at a crossing where a huge 988 Caterpillar loader drove past," says Cupp. "The superintendent, Jimmy, began to pull forward. Just about that time the Caterpillar operator mindlessly threw his vehicle in reverse and started to back up. Jay yelled, 'Get us out of here!' Jimmy panicked and thought he put the car in reverse; unfortunately, it had slipped into park and zoomed to about 10,000 rpm before the Caterpillar ran right over the hood. It was horrendous. Nobody got hurt, but we sure were shaken up."

Natural hazards may pose the greatest danger of all. For example, an earthquake once threatened the well-being of?who else?Jay Morrish, along with that of a legendary golf trio: Jack Nicklaus, Tom Weiskopf and Ben Crenshaw.

"We all had top-floor rooms at the Okura Hotel," recalls Morrish. "About 6 in the morning, everything broke loose and all of a sudden I was watching my furniture do the Funky Chicken across the room. I thought, 'I need to do something.' Then I remembered I was on the top floor, so at least nothing would fall on top of me. I just got back in bed, and it lasted about 15 seconds, although it felt like 10 minutes. When it was over, I stuck my head out the door and there were three white faces looking back at me from their doors down the hall."

Ron Fream's adventures include escaping a flood (in Korea), battling heatstroke (in Tunisia) and suffering from frostbite (in Finland, where he's built six courses, including one just 50 miles from the Arctic Circle).

Gary Linn of Knott-Brooks-Linn in Palo Alto, Calif., describes his philosophy toward such hazardous job locales. "I've got a wife and three kids, and here I am in Colombia," says Linn. "My family has watched "Miami Vice" and "Clear and Present Danger," so they have an idea of what these places are like. And I'm wondering, 'What in the world am I doing here?' This job will teach you to trust in God out there, that's for sure."

It doesn't hurt to be packing a loaded derringer, either.