South Carolina was one of the thirteen original states of the United States of America, and it was the first state to formally leave the Union in 1860 following President Abraham Lincoln’s abolishment of slavery. When Confederate troops fired upon Union forces at Charleston’s Fort Sumter in 1861, it signaled the start of the Civil War. South Carolina is the home of James Dickey, Strom Thurmond, Pat Conroy, Vanna White, shrimp and grits, beach music, sweet tea and American golf.

True, there has been more than a little 19th hole debate over this last point. But the fact remains that the South Carolina Golf Club was founded in Charleston in 1786, played by Scottish émigrés in a park known as Harleston’s Green. More than 220 years later, South Carolina remains the Golf Capital of the South, and it is rated as the country’s preferred destination for golf travelers.

Once again, the evidence is quite clear. South Carolina offers 380 golf courses from the Atlantic beaches to the Blue Ridge Mountain foothills. There are classic courses steeped in history, groundbreaking designs that helped re-define golf course architecture, and modern-day courses that serve as touchstones for the game’s next generation. While great courses abound in the Midlands and Upstate regions, much of the international attention on South Carolina is focused on the Atlantic coast and its great triumvirate—Myrtle Beach, Charleston and Hilton Head Island. All are distinctly different, yet they share a commonality of stunning natural beauty and rich history. Golf has played a major role in the evolution of all three.

Outstanding courses, prestigious tournaments, memorable events and a host of colorful characters all make South Carolina well worth celebrating. In the words of legendary University of South Carolina golf coach Puggy Blackmon, “When people think of South Carolina, they think of golf.”

No argument there.

SECTIONS:
Myrtle Beach | page 2
Charleston | page 4
Hilton Head Island | page 6

SIDEBARS:
Respecting the Classics | page 8
The Cliffs | page 9

MYRTLE BEACH

The greatest success story in golf travel is located along the 60-mile stretch of Atlantic shoreline between Georgetown, S.C. and Southport, N.C.

It has really always been about the beach, and when it comes to its popularity as the golf capital of the world, Myrtle Beach owes as much to its expansive beaches as the all-inclusive golf package it has managed to perfect, and to the small group of visionaries that tied the two parts together. 

From modest beginnings 40 years ago, Myrtle Beach has become one of the best known and most popular golf resort areas in the country with over four million rounds played annually. It is truly grand in every sense, with more than 100 courses, 90,000 accommodations, 1,600 outlets for food and drink and a dizzying array of entertainment opportunities.  

Until the mid-1960s, Myrtle Beach was just like any one of countless beach communities that thrived only during the summer. But the full story of the area’s growth and its evolution as a golf destination began a century earlier. 

Northeast South Carolina was primarily woodland in 1857 when 22-year-old Franklin Burroughs first arrived. His success at creating public structures brought him the resources necessary to acquire timberlands and businesses. Eventually, Burroughs and a partner owned several businesses as well as 80,000 acres of South Carolina beachfront forest. 

While the Burroughs name continues to be synonymous with Myrtle Beach, it was a South Carolina textile magnate named John T. Woodside who first brought golf to the area. Woodside bought 64,488 acres from Burroughs with the intent of building a destination in the tradition of The Homestead or The Greenbrier. Known as Ocean Forest, the resort would include a hotel along a four-mile stretch of Atlantic beach and myriad activities, including golf a few miles inland. Woodside’s objective, according to newspaper accounts, was to assure that the “Myrtle Beach of the future will not be merely a two- or three-months winter resort but an ideal all-year-round playground, the Atlantic City of the South.”

Woodside opened the 27-hole Ocean Forest Club golf course and clubhouse in 1927. Construction was already underway on the 10-story, 220-room hotel, a palatial edifice with ballrooms, stables, swimming pools, shopping arcades and a patio overlooking a stretch of beach that had become known as the Grand Strand. But as construction neared completion on the massive hotel in October of 1929, the stock market crash drove Woodside to the brink of financial ruin. He managed to hold on to the golf course and hotel, which opened on schedule in January 1930. But by 1933, Burrough’s company, Myrtle Beach Farms, had reassumed much of what remained of Woodside’s holdings.

Fortunately, the golf club had begun to achieve national attention, playing host to some of the game’s biggest stars. Embracing Woodside’s idea of a thriving, year-round destination, Burroughs embarked upon a methodical plan to create a resort community from the dense coastal pine forests. By the 1950s, the firm now known as Burroughs & Chapin had shaped Myrtle Beach into the east coast’s most alluring vacation destination. There were dozens of hotels and golf courses, including Woodside’s original course that had been sold in 1944 and renamed Pine Lakes International. Fate wasn’t as kind to Woodside’s opulent oceanfront hotel. After several years and a succession of owners, the Ocean Forest Hotel was eventually demolished.

Perhaps the most prominent of the early Myrtle Beach courses was The Dunes Club, founded by a contingent of local businessmen led by attorney and real estate magnate George “Buster” Bryan. The group hired Robert Trent Jones Sr. to build the course on a remarkable piece of land just north of the center of town, enveloped between coastal salt marshes and the Atlantic. The first nine holes opened in October 1949, but the club was forced to sell shares throughout the community to finish the course. Bryan hired Jimmy D’Angelo away from Pine Lakes as the club’s first head professional, but much of D’Angelo’s job early on was to generate support for the fledgling project.

The second nine at The Dunes Club opened in December 1950, and the course quickly became a local favorite with its subtle yet challenging design and exceptional beauty. But it was a stroke of genius by D’Angelo that would ultimately bring national prominence to the club. In April 1954 D’Angelo enticed some of the country’s top golf writers to stop in Myrtle Beach and play golf at The Dunes Club on their way to Augusta National. The scribes  returned to the Midwest and Northeast gushing of this Southern golf oasis that not only wasn’t in Florida, but was much closer to home than the Sunshine State. The Golf Writers Association of America had found a home for their annual meeting and golf championship, and Myrtle Beach had a new calling card.

The Dunes Club hosted a number of  prominent regional and national tournaments through the 1950s. Around that same time, long-time resident and Dunes Club member General James Hackler visited Pinehurst on a packaged golf trip and was intrigued by the promotional possibilities of stay-and-play packages on the Grand Strand. Visitors simply needed a reason to come to Myrtle Beach between Labor Day and Memorial Day.

Hackler sold the concept to Buster Bryan, and the pair built the oceanfront Caravelle motel in the early 1960s. In 1964 they joined a partnership that built two courses on the Grand Strand’s north end, Robber’s Roost and Possum Trot, which they packaged with the Caravelle and a few other motels under the name “GOLF-O’-TEL.” The concept was wildly successful: The Caravelle was doubled in size to accommodate the demand, and the group soon realized that more golf courses were needed. 

At the time, the package marketing effort was being managed by Cecil Brandon, a local advertising executive. Brandon understood that in order for Myrtle Beach to be taken seriously as a legitimate year-round destination, the consortium needed to expand its inventory of hotels and golf courses—including The Dunes Club, which had hosted the U.S.G.A. Women’s Open Championship in 1962.

“We were never really thought of as a golf destination,” Brandon said recently. “And frankly, we never dreamed that anyone would come here in the winter to play golf. But the hotels didn’t want golfers in the summer. When we saw what happened with the Caravelle and just a couple of courses, we knew that we could expand and make it work.”

In 1967 Bryan, Brandon and hotel owner Clay Brittain presented the idea to a group of course owners and motel operators. Despite Bryan’s untimely death from pneumonia, the group pressed forward on its new collective marketing effort with an initial budget of $43,000. This one was called “Golf Holiday.”

In the years that followed, Myrtle Beach Golf Holiday refined the packaging process to maximize the efficiency and value to its customers, ultimately becoming the dominant golf destination marketer in the U.S. It has also been the driving force behind the Myrtle Beach area’s astonishing growth. By 1987 there were 50 golf courses along the Grand Strand. Twenty years later, there are 105.

And while the Grand Strand has grown over the years, so have different segments of the market.

Myrtle Beach’s South Strand is particularly appealing. Pawleys Island and Litchfield feature the area’s greatest concentration of upscale accommodations and dining, and outstanding courses such as Caledonia Golf & Fish Club, True Blue Plantation, Pawleys Plantation, TPC of Myrtle Beach and The Heritage Club, which are all located within 15 minutes of each other. At the northern end of the Strand, the quieter lifestyle of North Myrtle Beach is complemented by some of the area’s most heralded courses including Barefoot Resort, Long Bay Club, Thistle Golf Club and Tidewater Golf Club.

Then there’s the nerve center of the Grand Strand. Central Myrtle Beach has it all: abundant shopping and dining, vibrant entertainment, easy access to the beach and the area’s most revered golf courses, from Grande Dunes and King’s North at Myrtle Beach National to the icons themselves, The Dunes Golf & Beach Club and Pine Lakes. The Dunes Club quietly celebrated its 60th anniversary in 2007, and it remains one of the most requested courses in town. And in 2002 Burroughs & Chapin purchased Pine Lakes, bringing serendipitous closure to an adventure that began 80 years ago.

There was another milestone celebrated in Myrtle Beach. Myrtle Beach Golf Holiday marked its 40th anniversary last year, and the organization remains on the cutting edge of golf travel marketing. The non-profit trade association represents 78 golf courses, 87 golf package providers and five golf schools with an annual marketing budget exceeding $7 million. It is also the host organization for some of the country’s most popular amateur tournaments and events, from the Hootie & The Blowfish Monday after the Masters Celebrity Pro-Am Tournament in April to the PGA TOUR Superstore World Amateur Handicap Championship in August, when 4,000 golfers from around the globe compete in the world’s largest amateur golf tournament.

“I predicted in the early ’70s that we would have 100 golf courses by the turn of the century, and everyone thought I was crazy,” said Brandon. “Certainly, there have been peaks and valleys along the way, but Myrtle Beach is alive and well. We’re still the best value in golf, and the best place on earth for a golf vacation.”

CHARLESTON

Past, present and future, this coastal gem is the epicenter of some of the game’s most significant storylines

Whatever side you choose to take in the debate over golf’s American birthplace, there is no argument when it comes to Charleston’s role in the evolution of the game in South Carolina golf. And it all started, apparently, in a public park not far from one of the most memorable international golf events in recent memory.

Indeed, there is significant documented evidence to suggest that golf may have first been played in the United States in an expansive public area of Charleston known as Harleston’s Green. While records exist that show shipments of clubs and balls being delivered from Scotland to Charleston as early as the 1640s, the most definitive research was done by Dr. George C. Rogers Jr., a professor of history at the University of South Carolina, who in 1980 collaborated with golf writer and historian Charles Price on a book entitled The Carolina Lowcountry—Birthplace of American Golf 1786.  

Their research uncovered records at Edinburgh’s port of Leith that show a shipment of 96 clubs and 432 balls being sent to Charleston in 1743. Price also writes of a Charleston merchant named Andrew Johnston who returned from a trip to Glasgow, Scotland, in 1759 with an assortment of goods including 12 golf clubs and some balls. Price surmised that, although Johnston died five years later, he more than likely used the equipment to beat a few balls around his sprawling Lowcountry plantation. Upon his death, the inventory of his estate listed “twelve goof sticks and balls.” 

According to Rogers, the announcement of the actual formation of the South Carolina Golf Club was found in the interminably titled The Southern States Ephemeris: The North and South Carolina and Georgia Almanac for the Year of our Lord 1788. Rogers also found several newspaper announcements about the club, including a May 28, 1788, entry that requested members of the club to meet on “Harleston’s Green, this day, the 28th” before adjourning to a local coffee house to attend to club business. Annual announcements of the South Carolina Golf Club meetings continued to appear through 1793. In 1795 the annual notice contained a revelatory bit of information: “The anniversary of the GOLF CLUB will be held on Saturday next at the Club House on Harleston’s Green.” The group had seemingly abandoned the coffee house for a new home.        

The last known announcement of a meeting of the South Carolina Golf Club appeared on October 19, 1799. It would take almost a century for the game to take hold in the United States,but by 1892 South Carolina would have its second golf club, Palmetto Golf Club in Aiken. The South Carolina Golf Club would ultimately evolve into the Country Club of Charleston, which remains in existence today.

Through the years, Charleston’s reputation as one of the nation’s most livable cities, as well as a fascinating place to visit, has grown exponentially. But golf purists, especially those with a fondness for turn-of-the-century architect Seth Raynor, are keenly aware of the city’s historical significance. A landscape engineer by trade, Raynor entered the golf business as an associate of Charles Blair Macdonald and honed his skills on seaside courses throughout the Northeast. But two of his finest works are in Charleston—the Country Club of Charleston and Yeamans Hall.

The original Country Club course was built in 1921; Raynor designed and opened the existing course in 1925 on a site on Wappoo Creek, overlooking Charleston Harbor. From a relatively flat, featureless site, Raynor moved remarkably little dirt and still created a course that features some of the most bold and dynamic green settings anywhere. The highlight is the 185-yard 11th hole, one of the most daunting par-threes in the Southeast, with a shelf green flanked by a pair of deep, steep-faced bunkers. Many of the country’s top amateurs have found it prudent to lay up off the tee at No. 11 during the Azalea Invitational, which has been played at the Country Club of Charleston since 1946. A few miles north of downtown, Yeamans Hall equally embodies the best elements of traditional design. In the late 1980s Tom Doak restored many of the greens at Yeamans Hall to their original size and preserved the integrity of Raynor’s imaginative contouring. As a result, the course offers impeccable playing conditions amidst a setting that is as captivating today as it was in 1925.

For many years while its coastal neighbors to the north and south evolved into two of the best-known golf destinations in the country, Charleston was attracting visitors to its myriad historic sites, broad beaches, fine dining and boutique shopping. But nearly 200 years after the Country Club of Charleston was founded, the historic port city plunged  into the world of resort golf. It has never looked back.

In 1974 work began on an expansive resort and residential community at Kiawah Island, located 20 minutes south of downtown Charleston. Over the next several years, Kiawah grew into an acclaimed golf destination with courses designed by Gary Player, Jack Nicklaus and Tom Fazio and a quaint oceanfront inn. But what ultimately grabbed the attention of the golf world was Fazio’s work to the north of Charleston, on a once-sleepy beach retreat know as the Isle of Palms.

Fazio was still garnering praise for his spectacular design at The Vintage Club in Palm Springs, Calif.,  when he unveiled the Links Course at Wild Dunes in the fall of 1980. The centerpiece of an expansive golf and beach resort, the Links Course was a remarkable achievement in routing and design. But equally amazing was the fact that developer Ray Finch allowed Fazio to utilize a valuable stretch of oceanfront property for the course. As a result, the Links Course presented golfers with a rolling adventure through moss-draped live oaks, magnolias and exotic palms, alongside giant sand dunes and saltwater marshes, and finishing against the massive, wind-blown dunes of the Atlantic. Not surprisingly, the Links Course debuted to rave reviews and captured the imagination of everyone even remotely connected to the game. Over the next several years, more courses sprang up throughout the Charleston area. Yet as the city’s entries on the National Historic Register continued to outnumber its golf courses, it became clear that golf in Charleston was going to be about quality, not quantity. 

And then, along came Mr. Dye.

From the moment that it was first announced, Pete Dye’s Ocean Course at Kiawah Island seemed destined for greatness. Long before its completion, the course had been chosen by the PGA of America as the site of the 1991 Ryder Cup Matches. The enormous challenge that lay before Dye was made somewhat less daunting by the site that he was given. Like Fazio at Wild Dunes, Dye was given oceanfront land that was worth billions of dollars in real estate value, except Dye had more of it. “It was the opportunity of a lifetime,” Dye told LINKS Magazine during construction of the course. “No one has ever been given land for 18 holes parallel to an ocean.”      

Indeed, The Ocean Course, located on the eastern-most end of Kiawah Island, has more seaside holes than any other course in the Northern Hemisphere: 10 directly bordering the Atlantic and eight running parallel to those. Originally designed to be nestled behind the dunes, Dye’s wife, Alice, suggested raising the entire course to afford unobstructed views of Kiawah’s stunning coastline from every hole. The change also made the course substantially more demanding, exposing each hole to the brisk and often unpredictable sea breezes. 

The Ocean Course gained instant notoriety with the 1991 Ryder Cup Matches, the dramatic “War by the Shore” decided literally by the final putt of Sunday’s final match. In 1997 The Ocean Course hosted the World Cup of Golf, with the world’s finest golfers from 32 countries competing in the team stroke play tournament. In 2002 and 2003, Dye returned to oversee some significant renovations, which included rebuilding all the greens and tees, and moving the 18th green 40 yards toward the ocean—creating an even more magnificent closing hole.

Last year, The Ocean Course unveiled a new clubhouse in the footprint of the old 18th green, just prior to hosting the Senior PGA Championship. And in 2012 The Ocean Course will host South Carolina’s first major tournament—the PGA Championship. It will be just the fourth course to host each of the PGA of America’s major championships.

Chances are, everything you’ve heard about The Ocean Course is true. Just as likely, everything you’ve heard about Charleston is true. Widely acknowledged as America’s most beautifully preserved city, it remains a living monument to 300 years of American history, not to mention the home of American golf.

HILTON HEAD ISLAND

Perhaps no golf destination in the United States has continually reinvented itself, and subsequently solidified its utopian reputation, more effectively than Hilton Head.

Infantile in historical perspective to its neighboring coastal communities, Hilton Head’s legacy as a world-renowned vacation spot was secured by two momentous events that occurred in the mid-1950s. One was the opening of a set of two bridges connecting the 41-square-mile barrier island with the South Carolina mainland. The other was the creation of Sea Pines Plantation, a groundbreaking residential/resort community by a young Georgia businessman named Charles Fraser.

A little more than 50 years ago, Fraser crafted a model for responsible land development at Sea Pines, the sprawling resort community on Hilton Head’s southern tip that flew in the face of convention. Fraser’s stringent land-use restrictions and covenants—a “reverse bill of rights” someone once wrote—dictated that the Lowcountry’s extraordinary natural features be carefully accommodated by planned development and not vice-versa. It’s not surprising that Fraser’s work at Sea Pines became a benchmark for master-planned development around the world.

This high level of environmental integrity also prevailed on the island’s earliest golf courses, which were noteworthy for their pristine ambiance and myriad natural hazards, from tidal marshes and lagoons teeming with alligators to massive oaks draped in Spanish moss. Golfers continue to flock the area by the millions, drawn by the bounty of world-class courses found within the Lowcountry’s resorts and residential communities. 

George Cobb designed the island’s first course, the Ocean Course at Sea Pines, in 1961. But Hilton Head truly began its ascent into golf lore with the 1969 opening of Harbour Town Golf Links—the host site of the PGA Tour’s Verizon Heritage for more than three decades. Also opening in 1969, amid far less fanfare than Harbour Town, was the Robert Trent Jones Course in Palmetto Dunes.

In his autobiography, Bury Me in a Pot Bunker, Harbour Town designer Pete Dye admitted to being influenced by Jones’ work at Palmetto Dunes, albeit somewhat differently. “As I watched [them] carve out long tees, huge bunkers and large greens, I wondered how I could design something that could separate my identity from his,” wrote Dye. “It was intended to show no disrespect to [Jones] or his great collection of designs. I simply wanted to establish my individual identity.”

Dye achieved his goal with overwhelming success at Harbour Town; its tight corridors, small greens and dramatic bunkering ushered in a new era of golf course design. The country’s top golf writers were beside themselves with praise. In a Sports Illustrated story entitled, “What A Little Instant Character Can Do,” the great Dan Jenkins wrote, “Harbour Town is sort of a Pine Valley in a swamp, a St. Andrews with Spanish moss, and a Pebble Beach with chitlins.” It didn’t hurt that Arnold Palmer broke out of a 14-month winless slump to capture the first Heritage Classic. Hilton Head Island was firmly embedded on golf’s radar screen. 

The island evolved into an extraordinary golf destination through the 1970s and ’80s, thanks to a proliferation of quality courses from George Fazio, Jack Nicklaus, Rees Jones, Arthur Hills, Tom Weiskopf and Bob Cupp. Yet it’s the venerable Jones Course at Palmetto Dunes that remains one of the island’s signature layouts. The stature of this oceanfront classic was greatly enhanced with a major restoration supervised by former Jones protégé Roger Rulewich in 2002. Today the Jones Course and its oceanfront signature hole, the par-five 10th, remain an indelible image for millions of Hilton Head Island visitors.    In the 80s, national media attention returned to the Lowcountry with the opening of several stellar private courses, most attached to upscale residential communities. Not surprisingly Dye was once again leading the way. As a follow-up to his stunning, controversial Stadium Course at TPC Sawgrass, Dye returned to Hilton Head Island and created the antithesis of target golf with Long Cove Club. Noted golf writer and historian Charles Price offered the following review: “To compare Long Cove to the TPC Course is to compare the Last Judgment to a cartoon...[this time]Pete Dye left himself out of the design, giving the course a timeless transparency as though it had been designed by no one in particular.”

There were actually many hands in the design of Long Cove, most sharing the same last name as the head man himself. In addition to construction superintendent Bobby Weed, Dye credits his son P.B. for many of Long Cove’s strongest features, including “some of the finest mounding ever created.” And as with Harbour Town, Dye’s wife, Alice, had a significant role in the creation of Long Cove. In his autobiography, Dye recalled the meticulous work on the course’s 15th green during a long, grueling Lowcountry summer day. Dye proudly displayed the result to Alice, who without hesitation responded, “I think the inside shapes on that green make it look like a toilet bowl!” Damaged ego not-withstanding, Dye knew she was right. “I went back and fixed the damn thing,” he admitted.

Long Cove remains one of the country’s most revered courses, and it has been joined in the ranks of golf’s elite by several neighboring clubs. As growth spread from Hilton Head Island to the mainland, so did the proliferation of outstanding private courses: the Dye and Jack Nicklaus courses at Colleton River, 36-hole complexes by Tom Fazio at both Belfair and Berkeley Hall and, a little further inland in the Okatie community, Arnold Palmer’s stunningly beautiful course at Spring Island.

In 2001 Ben Crenshaw and Bill Coore left their mark on the Okatie area with Chechessee Creek Club, an old-style course of infinite character and beauty that celebrates the game and its rich traditions. Nicklaus made a triumphant return to the Lowcountry in 2004 with the opening of the May River Golf Club, built on the idyllic site of a former riverfront hunting preserve known as Palmetto Bluff. And at Tradition Hilton Head, a sprawling self-contained private community near historic Hardeeville, Tommy Fazio (Tom’s nephew) has recently opened Tradition National, an “old-school” 18-hole design that lives up to its name.   

In a little over a half-century of existence, Hilton Head Island continues to evolve as a destination of scope and sophistication. Two of the island’s earliest golf clubs, Port Royal and Shipyard, are now under the guidance of the California-based Heritage Golf Group, and the company’s top-to-bottom enhancements include a magnificent new clubhouse that anchors Port Royal’s 54-hole facility. Heritage Golf also owns Oyster Reef Golf Club and the terrific 36 holes at Palmetto Hall (with 18-hole courses from Hills and Cupp), where a new PGA TOUR Academy instructional center is headquartered.

There has been a series of high-profile enhancements to the island’s resort facilities, but none as dramatic as the $9 million renovation of the old Sea Marsh golf course at The Sea Pines Resort. Not surprising, it was  Dye taking center stage at the unveiling of the new Heron Point course last September. In describing his transformation of the Sea Marsh course into Heron Point, Dye was true to form, simple and straightforward. “You have to stay ahead of the game,” he said.

That’s a philosophy that Hilton Head Island has embraced from day one. Fifty-odd years later, it’s still ahead of the game.

At the Cliffs Communities, THE HITS JUST KEEP ON COMING

The Cliffs Communities consists of seven private master-planned residential communities located within The Carolina Preserve—an area encompassing over 1 million acres of protected parklands between Asheville, N.C. and Greenville, S.C.—along the leading edge of the Blue Ridge Mountains. Property owner members at any of The Cliffs Communities enjoy reciprocal privileges at the more than $100 million in private club facilities, programs, and services, including golf courses designed by Jack Nicklaus, Tom Fazio, Tom Jackson and Ben Wright. 

The past couple of years Cliffs Communities founder Jim Anthony announced two extraordinary additions to The Cliffs’ already staggering portfolio. The first was that Gary Player would be joining the Cliffs’ extended family by designing its seventh golf course, The Cliffs at Mountain Park, in the border town of Travelers Rest, S.C. In addition to the Player Signature course, The Cliffs at Mountain Park will also include the Gary Player Life Performance Center and a commercial pedestrian village where the Gary Player Group’s U.S. headquarters will be located.

In 2007 Anthony announced that Tiger Woods would design his first course in the U.S. at The Cliffs at High Carolina, nestled in a mountaintop mea-dow with spectacular panoramic  views of the Blue Ridge Mountains. The walking-encouraged course will complement the emphasis on health and fitness that serves as a common thread throughout all of the Cliffs Communities.

“When I got to the top of the mountain and looked across those meadows I knew this would be the site of my first American design,” said Woods at the project’s announcement. “I hope this will become one of the most talked-about views in the country.”

To learn more about The Cliffs Communities, please visit CliffsCommunities.com/links

RESPECTING THE CLASSICS

The Dunes Golf & Beach Club The Dunes has always been a joy to play, but a major renovation of its greens in 2003 has now made it de rigueur for Grand Strand golfers. The project was overseen by Rees Jones, who was seven when his father designed the original Dunes Club in 1949. It’s a subtle masterpiece set hard by the sea, with evil seemingly lurking around every turn.

Greenville Country Club (Chanticleer) Another Robert Trent Jones beauty, Chanticleer opened in 1970 after Jones reportedly spent three years deciding on just the right location. It was time well spent. Chanticleer rolls gracefully through the foothills of the Piedmont. Rarely has a golf course fit so perfectly into its setting.

Country Club of Charleston Architecture buffs claim that this is one of Seth Raynor’s most original designs, a valid claim given the site’s exceptionally flat terrain. The brilliance of the course lies in its green settings, with boldly contoured putting surfaces and some truly dastardly bunkering. In an ironic twist of fate, Hurricane Hugo swept away many trees that had been planted long after the course opened in 1929. The resulting openness and expansive views accentuate Raynor’s ingenious work. 

Yeamans Hall Club  It’s almost inconceivable that Charleston has two extraordinary Seth Raynor courses in such close proximity. Opened in 1925, Yeamans Hall exudes the timeless elegance of the era, with fairways flanked by massive oaks and intertwined by tributaries of Charleston Harbor. Tom Doak’s restoration of the course in 1998 revived many of the original shot values from Raynor’s design and has helped give another generation of golfers a glimpse of tradition in its grandest sense.

Palmetto Golf Club  Dating from 1892, Palmetto is the oldest, continuously operated 18-hole golf club in its original location in the Southeast. In 1932, when Dr. Alister MacKenzie had completed the Augusta National Golf Club, he was asked to draw up plans for converting Palmetto’s sand greens to grass and lengthening the course. Tom Doak restored much of MacKenzie’s design characteristics in 2005. Suffice to say, comparisons to its Augusta neighbor are no exaggeration.