South Carolina's Lowcountry is one of American golf's great stages. Harbour Town Golf Links on Hilton Head Island, a Pete Dye and Jack Nicklaus collaboration with the candy-cane lighthouse at 18, hosts the RBC Heritage each April—a Tour week that feels like a bike-path vacation with a leaderboard. Kiawah Island's Ocean Course, Dye's wind-battered links along the Atlantic, hosted the 1991 Ryder Cup ("The War by the Shore") and PGA Championships in 2012 and 2021. Myrtle Beach's Grand Strand is the volume play: a concentration of public-access courses that made golf a mass-tourism product without entirely erasing quality.
Inland, Congaree Golf Club near Ridgeland has become a modern private pilgrimage, and Columbia and Greenville support university and private-club cultures. Palmetto Golf Club in Aiken is among the oldest in the South. The state's golf is coastal humidity, Bermuda, and a calendar that peaks when Northerners want out of the cold and again in the Heritage-to-PGA stretch of spring.
Culture splits three ways: Hilton Head resort-and-Tour, Myrtle Beach value-and-volume, and a quieter inland amateur game. Charity scrambles are a Lowcountry social language. South Carolina's signature is Harbour Town's tiny greens and Kiawah's ocean wind, plus a Strand tee sheet that can still surprise you with a good hole between the dinner buffets. For many visiting golfers, this is the first Southern trip they take—and the one they repeat.