August 3rd, 2007
Southern Comfort : FROM MYRTLE BEACH TO CHARLESTON TO HILTON HEAD, SOUTH CAROLINA IS HOME TO GREAT GOLF
Changes in latitudes, changes in attitudes. With apologies to Jimmy Buffett and all his Caribbean-carousing Parrotheads, the concept was never truer than it is meandering south on Highway 17 down the coast of South Carolina. From Myrtle Beach to Charleston to Hilton Head, it’s a case of bright lights fading into old times followed by quiet reflection. Take your choice, or enjoy all three.
Myrtle Beach
The Vegas of golf
Where else in the world could you see the Lord’s Prayer inscribed on a cherry pit, a portrait of Vincent Van Gogh rendered entirely in jelly beans and a human-hair bikini while playing 36 holes a day on pretty darn good golf courses for nearly two months and never see the same course twice? Where?
Of course, there’s more to Myrtle Beach than just “Ripley’s Believe It or Not” and Pete Dye’s pot bunkers. There’s the marvelously retro Pavilion, where you can play the same game of skeeball (probably on the same machine) that you played 30 years ago and still parlay a $1 investment into enough tickets to score a blue OO7V water pistol, Made in China, and a three-pack of Smarties from the prize counter. Imagine a world in which prize tickets were coin of the realm. What if you got them in return for green fees? Play Pebble Beach, drive home in a Yugo.
Myrtle Beach is the Rodney Dangerfield of golf. It gets no respect. Too many high-rises, too many lowbrows. Too much goofy golf, too much deep-fried Calabash food. Too many muscle shirts, too many tattoos, too many strip clubs, though in some circles that would be considered an impossibility. It has enough mega golf superstores to make old, historic Nevada Bob’s seem like a British butcher shop. And it is ground zero for every theme restaurant known to the civilized world, from race cars to Hollywood stars.
I’m convinced Myrtle Beach is an acquired taste, and I confess I’m infected. It is what it is, and a certain suspension of disbelief is mandatory. How can you not love a perfectly delightful oceanfront beer-and-burger joint, Bummz Beach Cafe, that admonishes its clientele not to park their motorcycles on the deck? Or, for that matter, not marvel at the Real Life Church (the Wild Wing Cafe in a previous incarnation), whose guest preacher was Meadowlark Lemon? Life’s lessons are served up whole here, usually in a discount package.
Much of the golf that’s played and the hotel rooms that are booked in Myrtle Beach are done through packages, and there are a number of companies that are quite capable of catering to groups of men and/or women in any number. While the pace of building courses on the Grand Strand seems to have finally throttled down from warp speed, discounts are up. And that includes some of the best layouts on the beach.
Tidewater Golf Club, closed for just shy of six months to have the greens and bunkers redone after years of extensive play, has reopened, no longer under the auspices of Troon Golf. The new management, bowing to the peculiarities of the local marketplace, immediately lowered green fees and began accepting package play again. That doesn’t mean it’s cheap, just cheaper. The new greens tend to show ball marks a bit, but they putt extremely well. Ken Tomlinson, who designed this wonderful layout that plays back and forth between the Intracoastal Waterway and the marsh overlooking the beach houses of Cherry Grove, consulted on the restoration.
The new behemoths in town are the four courses at Barefoot Golf & Resort. There’s one each by Davis Love III, Greg Norman, Tom Fazio and Pete Dye. I can’t say with any certainty which is the best, but I am prepared to reveal which is the most difficult: The Dye Course is a brute, a ravager of handicaps and a plunderer of par. It is Visigothic golf, reminiscent, in fact, of the Tournament Players Club in Ponte Vedra before that devil was defanged. There are moguls and waste areas and pot bunkers stacked on top of pot bunkers. The fifth hole has so many beehive bunkers on it, it looks as if it was built through a geyser field in Yellowstone National Park. The greens are small and wavy, like warped plastic. And I feel quite certain that the putting carpet on virtually any hole at Mt. Atlanticus Minotaur Golf has more surface area than the 17th hole of the Dye Course. In short, this is a bit of hard work.
While tourists occasionally dream of driving a stake through Dye’s heart, and I actually heard considerably worse fates suggested, the Love, Norman and Fazio courses all seem to have garnered their share of praise, with the Norman layout and its holes along the Intracoastal Waterway perhaps eking out a slim plurality.
Across Highway 17 Bypass from ye olde Dixie Stampede, is the new Grande Dunes, a 7,618-yard Roger Rulewich layout. It’s part of a huge development complex that will include marinas, shopping malls, a hotel, an oceanfront beach club and real estate on more than 2,000 acres spreading to both sides of the Intracoastal. While it’s unlikely any mortal will be playing from the back tees in my lifetime, even if you back off a couple of sets of tees, it’s still plenty long, with big greens and a handful of picturesque holes along the waterway.