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GEORGETOWN, S.C. - In hindsight, I should have known there would be some tears. I just didn’t expect them to arrive at lunchtime.
But there I was, half an hour after arriving back in the area, at the precipice of weeping. I was at Aunny's, one of my favorite restaurants, devouring the last of my meat-and-three - smothered pork chops surrounded by sacramental offerings of pig-feet 'perlo' rice, stewed cabbage, okra and tomatoes and a hunk of cornbread – overcome both by the feeling of familiarity and the sense it was slipping away.
The Myrtle Beach area – particularly its southern end, from Georgetown up through the communities of Pawleys Island, Litchfield Beach and Murrells Inlet – has been a big part of my life for almost 30 years. My golf life, especially. After a few family vacations when my sister and I were little, in 2000 my parents bought a condo beside the 15th tee at Pawleys Plantation Golf & Country Club, a Jack Nicklaus design whose back nine backs up to the marsh that separates the mainland from the long sandbar known as Pawleys Island proper.
For years, I was incredibly fortunate to spend vacation weeks and months there, learning golf and playing as much of it as I pleased. Most mornings, be it a chilly January or a roasting August, I would sling my bag over my back and walk to the driving range and the first tee. I would hit balls, chip, putt, play 18 or 36 holes. I couldn't get enough. After college, I even lived in the condo for a couple of years when working my first job in an ad agency with longtime ties to the Myrtle Beach golf industry.
In the last decade-plus, I had been able to take a handful of trips to Pawleys, but as my own life and family have evolved, they became fewer and farther between. Still, every time I returned and opened the deadbolt and the heavy black front door of Unit 1, I felt like a kid again, stepping back into golf paradise. The dictionary definition of a home away from home.
My parents sold their condo in April 2026, marking the end of an era for our family. Venturing up there one last time to help them pack boxes and ship furniture and other belongings, as well as bring my own things home, I felt like I was evicting that kid who practically sprinted through the heavy morning humidity to whack dew and golf balls by the bagful onto the Pawleys Plantation range. When I pulled out of their driveway and headed back south, tears stayed in my eyes halfway to Charleston.
Four months later, I was back in familiar territory to compete in and cover the Myrtle Beach World Amateur, an event I wrote about last year and which I consider one of the most important in all of golf. Time and distance hadn't quite stifled the emotions. I had already wept at Aunny's. Would I hold it together through four rounds on courses I knew and had played since I was a kid?
This would be my fourth overall World Am appearance, following 2014, 2018 and 2025. Thanks to some connections from my days living locally, I had arranged to stay in one of the gracious golf villas at True Blue Golf Club (thanks to TideLife Vacation Rentals), not far from Pawleys Plantation. I fell asleep on the eve of the World Am in an unfamiliar bed but in familiar surrounds, something of a halfway-house on the way from those fortunate past years towards whatever my future relationship to the area would be.
If the following days taught me anything, it was that one way or another, Myrtle Beach will always be a home away from home, and that few golf destinations I have visited possess one tenth of the power of welcoming that the Grand Strand is capable of exerting on a golfer.
What changes and what doesn't
Myrtle Beach has grown up over the last 30 years. The area's previous reputation for seediness and lowbrow offerings has been refined significantly by an infusion of new investment and development. The beach will always be the big draw, and sure, you can still get a $5 t-shirt, a tattoo, a lapdance and dodgy buffet food in the space of a few hours if you really want to, but the incentive to round out a Myrtle Beach trip with a sneaky-strong and constantly improving culinary scene, shopping and more wholesome entertainment, is greater than it has ever been. Lodging options continue to improve, especially for golf groups. Even something as simple as driving around the area is easier, too, with hundreds of millions of dollars in local infrastructure investment in the form of new and widened main roads and time-saving bypass opportunities.
What has not ebbed, thank goodness, is the golf. Myrtle Beach remains a potpourri of solid, affordable rounds that any avid golfer can aspire to enjoy. The post-Recession course closings have largely abated, leaving a strong core of improving higher-end courses sprinkled in with dozens of old-reliable choices that offer their own charms without breaking the bank. The laments about golf's "missing middle" are legitimate in most every other destination except this one.
Thankfully, I would not end up a blubbering mess during the tournament itself. I was able to suppress those dueling feelings of excitement and wistfulness well enough to turn in my best-ever World Am finish, a distant 2nd-place tie in the event's Gross Division.
The closest I did get to losing my composure was during a relatively dismal third round, at River Club in Pawleys Island. Amid all the change Myrtle Beach has seen over time, the southernmost quarter of the area most resembles what my core childhood memories recall. And among the golf courses there, River Club remains locked in time, its surrounding residential community having fully matured by the time I first saw it.
On that day, nearly 30 years ago, I teed up a 5-wood from the Red markers on the 122-yard par-3 17th hole and smacked a particularly good shot onto the back fringe, 18 feet from the cup. Like most 7-year-old golfers do, I walked up and hit the ball without much of a thought. It struck the pin and dropped in the cup, for the first birdie of my life, one of those early lightning-bolts that every obsessed golfer can point to as a formative moment.
Arriving at River Club's 17th a few weeks ago, I could not help but think about 7-year-old me, completely unaware of just how much golf, and Myrtle Beach, would contribute to his life over the coming decades. From some 70 yards farther away, I teed up a 5-iron and made one of the better swings of the round, a high fade into the middle of the green, about 25 feet right of a tucked left pin. I couldn't quite summon that excited little kid; he would have to stay back in the 1990s. My birdie putt burned the edge and I settled for a par. I walked off the green reluctantly, unsure when I might be back to that piece of turf that meant so much to my golf life.
But the melancholy passed. I had one hole left to play (another par). When it was over, any lingering loneliness I might have felt was erased by the spirit of camaraderie in golf that Myrtle Beach fully embodies. Even though none of us played well, the three guys I was paired with that day could not have been better company.
Competition is just the World Am's hook. Sharing the game is what makes it worthwhile. Post-round debriefs and stories of missed putts with old and new friends, beer in hand.
As I take in the scene at the World's Largest 19th Hole, at the biggest golf tournament in the world in the official Golf Capital of the World, Myrtle Beach reminds me that I am never alone, and I am always home.
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