Best golf courses near Garden City, SC

Its ocean-side dunes are mostly covered with turfgrass and mature trees now, but when Robert Trent Jones built The Dunes back in the late 1940s, the property was primarily windswept sand dotted with lagoons. Those lakes come in prominently on many holes, particularly on the 11th through 13th, dubbed Alligator Alley. (The boomerang-shaped par-5 13th is called Waterloo.) The home hole, with a pond in front of the green, started as a gambling par 5 but today is a daunting par 4. The course has hosted three USGA championships, including the 1962 U.S. Women's Open and most recently, the 2017 U.S. Women's Amateur Four-Ball.

A Dan Maples design, The Heritage Club weaves along the Waccamaw River Trail and borders vast abandoned rice fields. This Pawleys Island course is complemented by lush native flowers along its rolling fairways as well as passerby boats on its riverside holes.

Caledonia was Strantz’s first solo design in 1994, and his creativity shines on this golf-only, oak-dotted, sand-dune parcel abutting the marshes and rice paddies of Pawley’s Island. The design is ordered and composed, twisting low through the heavy tree canopy while setting up classic hole strategies into angled greens. There are touches of Pete Dye and just enough quirk to suggest something more intense and experimental brewing under the surface. Subdued and rhythmic, Caledonia is currently ranked 85th on Golf Digest's latest 100 Greatest Public ranking (it’s been as high as 66th). Two musts: The chowder at the turn, and a drink on the porch behind the 18th hole.

Strantz returned to Pawley’s Island just a few years after Caledonia opened, nearly to the exact same place, in fact. True Blue is Caledonia’s sister course, located on an inland property that sits just across the street, though sequestered from any marsh views. But what it lacks in scenery it makes up for in volume. Everything at True Blue is bigger and more heroic. Greens erupt out of sand barrens, fairways are 60 to 90 yards wide and holes take on the form of ambling caterpillars. The abrupt, hi-contrast shaping, made possible by the sandy terrain, is a not so subtle nod in the direction of Pine Valley.

This Jack Nicklaus design would contend not only for the best in Myrtle Beach but the best public courses in South Carolina. Pawleys Plantation lies among the natural saltwater marshes and boasts some strong par 3s. According to Nicklaus, each hole has a distinct intended strategy shaped by hazards, trees, bunkers, and even a double green shared by two holes.

A past member of our 100 Greatest Public list, King’s North is one of three layouts at Myrtle Beach National. The Arnold Palmer design features some of the Grand Strand’s most notable holes, including the par-5 sixth hole, aptly nicknamed “The Gambler.” Off the tee, players must choose one of the two fairways, either the island strip that shortens the hole, or the safer option to the right, making it a three-shotter. The par-3 12thfeatures an island green, and though it’s more generous than the famous TPC Sawgrass original, the wooden bulkheads lining the green provide similar intimidation.

Once the host of the Senior PGA Tour Championship and now home to Dustin Johnson’s annual World Junior Golf Championship, TPC Myrtle Beach is designed to challenge even the pros. Numerous water hazards, strategically placed trees, and forced carries make this track a tough, but enjoyable test.

A member of Golf Digest's 100 Greatest Public ranking from 2003 to 2007, the Love course is one of the best in Myrtle Beach and yet ranked as the third-best at golf-rich Barefoot Resort (just a few tenths of a point behind the Fazio course, according to our panelists). This is Love Golf Design's only work in Myrtle Beach, and it makes good use of the land with a good variety of holes—long, short and doglegs in each direction.

Grande Dunes reopened in September 2022 after a complete greens and bunker renovation over the summer. Spectacular views of the Intracoastal Waterway and Grande Dunes Marina make this links-style golf course well worth the visit. Designed by Roger Rulewich Group, the course was built on a high bluff—the ideal setting for a picturesque sunset round. Expansive fairways littered with penalty areas throughout define Grande Dunes as a difficult, yet enjoyable resort course.

Fazio's entry at Barefoot Resort will challenge the best players—with the routing constantly changing direction to account for the seemingly ever-present wind—but is playable for the resort player. The par-5 fourth hole stands out—lined with bunkers and a sentinel pine up by the green. The 18th hole is a great finish, playing up to the clubhouse with a huge porch, perfect for watching players come in.

From Golf Digest Architecture Editor emeritus Ron Whitten: In the mid-1980s, I was researching a Golf Digest article on reversible golf courses, and one of the people I called was real estate developer Wallace Pate, who had laid out a reversible 10-hole course for his beach home development at DeBordieu Colony Club (pronounced "debby doo") in Georgetown, S.C., south of Myrtle Beach. "You've called too late," Pate told me. He had sold the course the year before, and Pete Dye was at that moment in the midst of replacing it with a conventional 18-hole course to be called DeBordieu Golf Club. When I visited the Grand Strand in the spring of 1987, I stopped by DeBordieu to see the newly finished Dye design and played the course with Dan Avant, the new owner, who was the perfect tour guide. Pate had actually laid out an 18-hole reversible course within his land plan, Avant explained, but had only been able to construct 10 greens. Dye was more or less limited to Pate's routing because the corridors were positioned between plotted home lots, but he was not necessarily restricted to Pate's green sites. Avant also told me that Pete had turned over most of the design and construction responsibility to his younger son, P.B., and when Pete played the reversible course with Wallace Pate as a partner in a press outing, they found P.B. already on a bulldozer carving up a hole at the far end of the property. In retrospect, I'm certain that Pete kept P.B. on a short leash, because DeBordieu is certainly one of the more mild creations from the Dye family, nothing at all like some of P.B.'s later outlandish work. Located less than quarter-mile from Atlantic Ocean, it plays over sandy, rolling terrain lined with moss-covered oaks, majestic pines and palmettos. Dark lagoons edge most of the holes. A few were on the original reversible plan—LaBruce Pond and Teal Pond along the closing two holes, in particular—but P.B. excavated the other ponds to generate fill for what I think he intended to be grass-covered sand dunes. But they are too symmetrical for my tastes, so I just consider them accent mounds. The biggest of those knobs sits behind the green on the par-3 fourth, a classic Dye hole over water and a wooden bulkhead—with the tee boxes for the fifth hole atop it, a good 12 feet of elevation change, quite a bit for this area. The hole I admired the most was the par-4 12th, with a humped fairway and four random, mounded pot bunkers posing a semi-blind approach to a green backdropped by water and a beach bunker. I was a little disappointed with the 17th and 18th, as they both play in the same direction with same basic strategy: Aim up the left side for a decent angle into the green. The 18th, a short par 5, struck me as the mirror image of the 18th at Harbour Town, with a 100-yard-wide peninsula fairway poking into water. I finally returned to DeBordieu 30 years later and found it remarkably well-preserved. A few trees were gone (I don't remember such a clear view of the lagoon to the right of the second, for instance) and somebody had positioned fan-shaped railroad ties into the faces of some bunkers, I guess to remind us this is a Pete Dye design. (I think that was done by Myrtle Beach architect Craig Schreiner, who has been the club's consulting designer in recent years.) But overall, DeBordieu hasn't changed much at all. If someone were to tell me that they dislike Pete Dye's architecture because it's too penal, I'd send them to DeBordieu. It's lovely and low-profile, generous off the tees, doesn't have a harsh bounce anywhere and is extremely playable.

The Founders Club at Pawleys Island opened in 2008 and was built over the existing Sea Gull golf course, which dated back the mid-1960s. Instead of rough, the fairways are lined with sandy waste areas, making the course feel older than it is. The scenic layout has nice variety, with tree-lined doglegs moving in each direction and some elevation changes.

Myrtlewood’s 36-hole facility includes the Palmetto course, which has gently sloping fairways, large greens and a variety of hazards. The Myrtle Beach layout hosted the second U.S. Women’s Amateur Public Links in 1978. As part of a 2019 renovation, every bunker on the course was redesigned, with many of them being moved closer to the fairways. New Bermuda grass greens were installed the same year as well.