The Dunes Club and the Golf Capital of the World
Near Myrtle Beach, South Carolina
They call Myrtle Beach the golf capital of the world, and it is not just marketing. The Grand Strand packs roughly one hundred courses into these sixty miles of coast, more golf per square mile than almost anywhere on earth. And the course that lit the fuse for that boom sits right here, the Dunes Golf and Beach Club.
The idea started in the newspaper. In the late nineteen forties, local boosters argued that the town needed recreation to draw visitors in the off season. A local attorney named Buster Bryan rallied his neighbors, land was provided by the Myrtle Beach Farms Company, and to design the course they hired a young architect named Robert Trent Jones.
The Dunes Club, which opened in nineteen forty nine, became one of his early celebrated designs, and Jones would go on to be called the father of modern golf course architecture. Its most famous hole, a great sweeping par five that curves around a lake, is known as Waterloo. The Dunes proved that golfers would travel here, and course after course followed, until the whole coast became one long fairway by the sea.
