Course Comparisons / South Carolina
Chechessee Creek Club vs. Old Tabby Links: The Okatie Choice
Okatie is not a golf destination most golfers could find on a map, which is exactly why the golf there is so good. Two private clubs sit in this Lowcountry pocket near Bluffton, built a decade apart by architects with opposite instincts. Chechessee Creek Club is Bill Coore and Ben Crenshaw from 2000, minimal and strategic. Old Tabby Links is Arnold Palmer and Ed Seay from 1992, built on Spring Island around the tabby ruins of a former plantation house, with a nature first routing and no forced carries for members. Same marsh, same live oaks, two philosophies.
Chechessee plays par 70 at 6,641 yards, with a 72.6 course rating and 137 slope. Those numbers describe the Coore and Crenshaw method precisely: short on the card, demanding in the playing. A 137 slope at par 70 means the course defends itself with angles and green complexes rather than yardage. The entire property was re-grassed in 2015, with TifEagle greens, the kind of mid life investment that signals a club protecting its design rather than redesigning it. The club hosted the 59th Junior Championship of the Carolinas in July 2008, and it has since added a 12 hole short course, The Scurry, designed by David Zinkand. A club confident in its main course builds a short course. A club worried about its main course renovates it.
Old Tabby's case rests on place. Spring Island is a private island community, and Palmer and Seay routed the course around tabby ruins, through marsh and oak, with a stated gentleness: no forced carries for members, nature first. That philosophy gets dismissed by architecture snobs as softness, and the dismissal is lazy. A members course that every member can actually play, on an island this beautiful, is a design brief executed well, not a failure of nerve. Palmer understood members golf better than almost anyone who ever held a pencil, because he spent his life being the member every club wanted.
The golf, head to head
On architecture, Chechessee wins, and the margin reflects the designers' reputations among people who study this. Coore and Crenshaw at the turn of the century were building the courses that redefined American design, and Chechessee's par 70 examination, all placement and nerve, belongs to that body of work. The re-grassing in 2015 and The Scurry addition show a club still building around the original idea a quarter century later.
On the day itself, Old Tabby can win, and honest members of both clubs would admit it. Playing through marsh and oak on a private island, past ruins older than the game in this country, at a pace set by friendship rather than a tee sheet, is a complete experience that a purer golf course does not automatically beat. Our South Carolina state ranking scores the golf first, which favors Chechessee, but the setting score is where Old Tabby closes ground that architecture alone opened.
Access settles nothing between them, because both are private in the full sense. Old Tabby's costs sit in the highest estimate tier and Chechessee publishes nothing either. The real gate at both is the same: knowing a member. Okatie's golf is a closed book to the traveling golfer, and that inaccessibility is part of why the two courses have kept their character. Nothing here has been softened for resort play, packaged for a package, or widened for a shotgun start.
The verdict
Chechessee Creek Club is the better course, the one students of design should study and the one we rank higher. Old Tabby Links is the one to pick anyway if the invitation is for a long weekend on Spring Island with people you like, because Palmer built it for exactly that, and the tabby ruins at golden hour make a case no slope rating can answer. Okatie holds both without strain: the examination and the escape, ten minutes apart, in the same Lowcountry light.
A word about the short course, because it sharpens the verdict. Chechessee's addition of The Scurry, a 12 hole short course by David Zinkand, follows the pattern of clubs whose main course is secure enough to experiment around the edges. Old Tabby has made no equivalent move, and does not need one: Spring Island itself is the amenity. The contrast is the whole pairing in miniature. One club keeps building golf. The other already owns the ground the golf was built to honor, and lets the ruins and the marsh close the argument.