Lions, leopards and hyenas run wild at this fenceless Kruger National Park golf course

Lions, leopards and hyenas run wild at this fenceless South African golf course.

Professional golfers have been known to complain about the unruly behavior of crowds, but it could be worse – at one South African course, the spectators once feasted on a giraffe in the middle of the third fairway. The audience are, quite literally, animals at Skukuza Golf Club in Kruger National Park, which stakes its claim as the “wildest course in the world.” There’s no shortage of rivals vying for the title. Fairways in southeastern Australia are teeming with kangaroos, alligators glide through water hazards across Florida, while in South Africa’s northernmost province of Limpopo, zebras, wildebeest and antelope graze across Legend Golf and Safari Resort’s Signature Course. Players at Skukuza can also glimpse all kinds of impressively large herbivores during a round, but there’s one thing they won’t see: fencing. That means predators, and lots of them. Lions bask lazily around a tee box in the afternoon sun as hyenas loiter nearby to snatch scraps from the pride’s next hunt; a perfectly camouflaged leopard prowls in the thick bush behind a green, while a Nile crocodile – fresh kill between its jaws – eyes golfers from the banks of the aptly named Lake Panic. Add tree-felling elephants, warring hippos and much more to the mix – it’s all in a day’s work for head greenskeeper Jean Rossouw.