The Early Days of Golf in Myrtle Beach

When it comes to sports titles, the one synonymous with Myrtle Beach is Golf Capital of the World, a moniker earned at the end of the last century when we had upwards of 120 courses within the 60-mile span we refer to as the Grand Strand from the North Carolina line down to Georgetown.  And with more than 50 putt putt courses, we’re the Miniature Golf Capital of the World too!

You know, for such a prolific achievement, we had a bit of a slow start.  It began in 1927 with our first course, initially known as The Ocean Forest Country Club.  That name changed in 1944 to what we know today as The Pine Lakes International Country Club.  Its nickname is “The Granddaddy” because it was our first.  Today, it is the home of Myrtle Beach’s Golf Hall of Fame.  And its claim to fame is that it is the birthplace of Sports Illustrated.

We didn’t get our second course until more than twenty years after the first.  The Dunes Club opened in 1948, on the exclusive north end of Myrtle Beach. Granted, we had had The Great Depression and a second world war in the meantime.  But it took almost that long again to get our third one without any obvious impediments.  The Myrtlewood Golf Course that is located at 48^th Avenue North didn’t open until 1966. 

Then, in the following year, on what had to have been a leap of faith since we had only built three courses in forty years, a group of local businessmen founded Golf Holiday, a non-profit to promote golf tourism in Myrtle Beach.  The idea behind it was that, when you make your hotel reservation, you also reserve your tee times, as opposed to waiting until you arrive to plan your itinerary.  We now call those golf packages.  Apparently the concept worked.   As more tee times were reserved, more courses were built with the vast majority of them being constructed in the 1980s and 90s. 

Some of the biggest names in golf have designed some of these courses from the very beginning.  Pine Lakes was designed by the first president of the PGA, Robert White.  Our second, at the Dunes Club, was done by Robert Trent Jones.  That course is the host of the PGA’s Myrtle Beach Classic.

Sometimes golf-playing legends become golf course designers.  A few of the greats who have designed a course along the Grand Strand also have some of the more memorable nicknames in professional golf:  Jack Nicklaus, The Golden Bear; Greg Norman, The Great White Shark; and Arnold Palmer, The King.

But I’d like to tell you a little more about our first designer, Robert White.  Born, appropriately, in St. Andrews, Scotland, the birthplace of golf, he came to America in 1894, at the age of 18 with no money in his pocket but love in his heart.  He was engaged to the beautiful Mary Bonar back home, called the “Fair Maiden of Perth” by her friends, and he was determined to earn enough money to bring her over to the States for them to get married as soon as possible…before someone else caught her eye in his absence.  Time was of the essence.

White had been a student golf teacher in Scotland and soon got a job teaching the game to the daughters of a man from Cape Cod.  Afterwards, he went to Boston and worked in a sporting goods store six days a week. On the seventh day, he designed golf courses.  For $25 a course, we would survey what was usually a farm, imagine the course in his mind, sketch it out and then put survey sticks where the tees and greens should go. 

Within the year, he was able to send for Mary.  Her father escorted her across the Atlantic, just to make sure everything was on the up and up, and the young couple was married in February of 1895.  

They started a family while moving around the country creating courses.  In retrospect, White is thought of as the Johnny Appleseed of American Golf.  He was the first who took a scientific approach to course maintenance by attending agricultural school classes, but in his case, his crop was golf course grass.  Meanwhile, he brought his parents and siblings over and put his dad in charge of his golf club manufacturing business. 

His stellar resume got him the job of designing the first course here.  It was an amenity for the Ocean Forest Hotel that had been located on the oceanfront directly across Kings Highway from where the course is now.  What we now know as The Pine Lakes International Country Club, was the Ocean Forest Country Club when it opened in 1927, two years before the hotel.  In fact, the clubhouse initially had 40 transient accommodation rooms upstairs, but they are now used for storage and offices. 

Of the hundreds of golf courses he is associated with, I dare say his favorite may have been Pine Lakes.  In 1928, he chose to build his winter residence on Woodside Avenue overlooking the course.  It became his permanent home from 1931 until his death in 1959. The street on which he retired was named after the Greenville, SC, natives, The Woodside Brothers, who were the visionaries behind the hotel and course. 

But when the historic stock market crash occurred at the end of October of 1929, the Woodsides ultimately lost those properties along with their Greenville investments.  After a while, when conditions improved some, Robert White and two other investors bought the golf course.  White’s daughter said years later that her father worked like a dog to keep it afloat.  Then, in 1944, the same year that his beloved wife, Mary, passed away, the business partners sold the course and that’s when its name changed to the Pine Lakes. 

Ten years later, a call came into Mr. White’s House from THE White House.  President Eisenhower was a golf enthusiast and wanted to have a putting green created at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue.  Who better than the Johnny Appleseed of American Golf to do the job.  It would be the perfect conclusion to a resume that included over 100 courses that he designed throughout his career in addition to being one of the first golf pros to design and make golf equipment. 

While Pine Lakes, The Dunes Club and Myrtlewood are the three courses that really launched Myrtle Beach’s golf legacy.  There was another that came about in 1962, but it was located on the Myrtle Beach Air Force Base. 

Major General Gilbert Meyers, for whom Meyers Avenue is named within the Market Common District that was once the base, was the commander there from 1960 to 1963.  Under his command in October 1962, during the Cuban Missile Crisis, all four squadrons stationed in Myrtle Beach were deployed to Florida to Homestead Air Force Base near Miami and to what was then McCoy Air Force Base.  Today, it is the Orlando International Airport. That’s why the three-letter airport code for Orlando is MCO.

You would think helping to save the world from nuclear annihilation would be legacy enough for Meyers, but he may actually be better remembered for something he did that spring.  When he took command of the base two years before in 1960, he had come across a set of plans for a nine-hole golf course on the base.  With $23,000 appropriated for the course, he got the project underway. 

Knowing that you can’t build a nine-hole golf course for that little money, he got the airmen involved as a self-help project and was out there himself cutting down trees.  He was proud that they carved the course out of the woods and, in a month’s time, Whispering Pines Golf Course opened for the men of the Air Force Base and their families to enjoy for $5 a month fee.  The clubhouse was built in 1985 and an additional nine holes were added in 1987. 

The course, located across from the entrance of today’s airport on Harrelson Boulevard, is now owned and operated by the City of Myrtle Beach.  The historical markers conveying our local military history that are located throughout the Market Common District are also found at each tee.  So, if you want to play a course built by the bare hands of a Cold War hero, then you should try it.