CHARLESTON, S.C.
The Golf Trip: Don't Let Winter Put Your Game Away
   It would be difficult to consider Charleston, South Carolina, a golf destination on the rise since it’s already at the top of the heap of East Coast golf destinations. So let’s just say Charleston is on the move. The Nationwide Tour Championship will be held in October at the Daniel Island Club for the second year in a row. The 2012 PGA Championship will be played at The Ocean Course at Kiawah Island. The world-famous links course at Wild Dunes opened a redesigned 18th hole last year. And the lengthy list of resorts and destination courses that surround Charleston is still just as healthy as ever.
    For a city that arguably introduced America to the game of golf, Charleston sure took its sweet time enticing Americans to come here to play. But when it did, it did so in a big way.
    According to numerous golf historians, the ancient game officially began in the United States in 1888 when transplanted Scotsman John Reid founded the St. Andrews Golf Club in Yonkers, N.Y. Reid laid out three holes in a cow pasture and invited several friends to join him in a game as early as February of that year.
    But other historians tell us that a golf club had been chartered in Charleston more than 100 years earlier. That’s right; a formal, chartered golf club existed in Charleston in 1786. It just took Charlestonians another 200 years or so to realize that the ancient game could help do what history itself had long done for the area – entice thousands of visitors to the Lowcountry.
    It is true that the South Carolina Golf Club was chartered in Charleston in 1786 with Rev. Dr. Henry Purcell, the rector at St. Michael’s Episcopal Church, as president and merchants Edward Penman and James Gairdner as vice-president and treasurer. We know this from newspaper and almanac accounts, but we also know that the club had no formal course.
    Instead, as was customary in Scotland, members of the club played a village green, a public area much like a city park, called Harleston Green. Without a course, you could hardly expect that the South Carolina Golf Club had a clubhouse. And it didn’t … at first. According to announcements in the Charleston City Gazette, the club would play its game of golf, then meet at Williams’ Coffee House. But in 1795, a tiny item in the local paper announced: “The anniversary of the Golf Club will be held on Saturday next at the Club House, on Harleston’s Green…”
    But just when things were going good, something happened to the SCGC; it disappeared. The last known announcement of a club meeting appeared in the local paper on October 19, 1799.
    It took decades before golf would re-emerge with the founding of Charleston Country Club. Then, in 1922, Seth Raynor, an engineer and surveyor brought into the golf business by Charles Blair Macdonald, designed the current home course for the since-renamed Country Club of Charleston.
    Three years later, Raynor designed the Yeamans Hall Club just north of Charleston for a baker’s dozen of well-heeled industrialists from the Northeast. The club remains a winter retreat for prominent families, as well as a summer home course for locals. Today it has become a fixture on some top 100 rankings. But still it took many more decades before it would require more than the fingers on one hand to count the golf offerings in the greater Charleston area. While Myrtle Beach and Hilton Head capitalized on golf, the charming old port city of Charleston entered the last quarter of the 20th century perfectly content with doing exactly what it had done for decades – attracting visitors with its historic sites, fine dining and boutique shopping, broad beaches and stately plantations and gardens.
    But then a young Tom Fazio, just after leaving his uncle George’s design office and hanging out his own shingle, carved an oceanfront gem from a pristine stretch of Isle of Palms dunes. Suddenly, Wild Dunes Links and the Charleston area were at the center of golf’s spotlight, thanks to Fazio’s first solo design in America’s golf origins.
    The date was 1980 and much has happened golf-wise in the Charleston area since – not the least of which has been the development of numerous new courses that both complement and rival Wild Dunes Links. While the area’s entries on the National Historic Register continued to outnumber its golf courses, it was obvious that Charleston now had more to promote than its history.
    The fact wasn’t lost on the golf community, which rewarded the Lowcountry with a number of events that focused the golf spotlight on the area. The 1991 Ryder Cup matches christened a newly unveiled Ocean Course at Kiawah Island and produced the most dramatic theater in the 50-plus-year history of the event. Since then, the area has hosted two World Cups, the Warburg Cup Matches, two USGA events, and the Nationwide Tour; more events are on the way.
    The Senior PGA Championship came to Kiawah’s Ocean Course in 2008, and in 2012, Pete Dye’s beachfront creation – part sand castle, part torture chamber – will be the site of the PGA Championship, the first majors ever in South Carolina. Moving around the Lowcountry, there are literally dozens of other courses that welcome traveling golfers.
    Rees Jones offers a bit of handiwork at Charleston National, designed to be part of an exclusive private club. But various factors, not the least of which was Hurricane Hugo which hit the area literally hours before the course was to open, changed that. Charleston National is a daily-fee layout featuring some of the area’s more scenic and demanding par 3s, including three that require tee shots from one marsh island to another.
    For history buffs, Stono Ferry is a Ron Garl-design with three holes set directly along the Intracoastal Waterway at the site of a bloody Revolutionary War battle just south of Charleston. Earthworks that housed gun emplacements and protected soldiers literally frame the tee shot on the par-4 12th.
    Just north of town, Crowfield, Legend Oaks and Pine Forest are three courses associated with residential developments. Pine Forest is the best test for the good player, but all three offer plenty of challenge. The drive into Legend Oaks, through an avenue of ancient live oaks, has been likened to Augusta National’s Magnolia Drive.
    Arthur Hills dropped his business card more than once in the area. His layout at Dunes West is literally across the street from RiverTowne and Coosaw Creek is located just minutes from the airport in North Charleston. Westcott Plantation, located just a couple of minutes north of Coosaw Creek, offers 27 holes designed by Michael Hurdzan.
    If you thought it was tough to decide which course to play, wait until dinnertime. It’s safe to say when it comes to restaurants, Charleston rivals any city in America, regardless of size. Come to think of it, this isn’t a hard decision at all. Because of the sheer number of great restaurants and the competition that results, bad restaurants simply don’t exist… at least not for very long.
    And if you’re “golfed out,” there are scores of other things to do and see in one of America’s most historic cities. Charleston dates back to 1670 and it is a city proud of its history. Cobblestone streets lined with buildings dating to colonial times draw tourists each year and were doing so well before Charleston became a golf destination. Even today, with all of the new courses and resorts in the area, history is the one attraction that draws the majority of visitors. Historic homes, museums and public buildings, plantations and formal gardens and area fortresses, including the famed Fort Sumter, all help tell the story of an emerging city and the country that it would help shape.