Town Rankings / South Carolina
The Best Golf Courses in Pawleys Island
Two Mike Strantz courses face each other across a road in Pawleys Island, and they do not agree with each other at all. Caledonia, on one side, is intimate, shaded, exact. True Blue, on the other, is wide, loud and built at a scale that makes Caledonia look like a garden. Same architect, same town, opposite answers to what a golf course should be. Pawleys Island is lucky enough to host the argument.
This is the south end of the Grand Strand, slower and older in feel than Myrtle Beach proper, hammocks and rice plantation ground and live oaks that were mature before golf arrived. The golf here is the best public stretch on the Strand, course for course, and this ranking rewards the golf first, then the day, then access. The Strantz pair takes the top two spots. The only real question is the order, and the order matters.
1Caledonia Golf and Fish Club
Caledonia was Strantz's first solo design, opened in 1994, built on a former 18th-century rice plantation and routed through a canopy of centuries-old live oaks. First solo designs are supposed to show a young architect trying everything at once. Strantz did the opposite. He built a restrained, low, precise course that asks for placement over power on almost every hole, and trusted the oaks and the ground to supply the drama.
It worked so well that the course has lived among America's top 100 public courses ever since, and the finish explains part of it. The par 4 18th plays over water to a green set in front of the clubhouse porch, where people sit and watch groups come in. It is a Grand Strand signature because it combines the two things Caledonia does best: a shot you have to commit to, in a setting you remember on the drive home.
The concession is the one its fans skip. At peak fees around $150 to $200, Caledonia is expensive for the Strand, and its intimacy means a bad driving day turns into a cramped one, punched out from under oak limbs. It is still No. 1 here, and the gap to second is about finish and feel rather than raw quality, but the gap is real.
2True Blue Golf Club
True Blue opened in 1998 on a former indigo plantation site, directly across the street, and Strantz used the second canvas to do everything Caledonia would not let him do. Very wide fairways. Huge waste areas. Large greens. A Pine Valley and Pinehurst inspired scale that lets you swing hard almost everywhere and then sorts you out around the greens, where the course keeps its teeth.
It has ranked on Golf Magazine's Top 100 Courses You Can Play, and as a pure test it might be the harder of the two. So why second? Because scale is easier to admire than to love over repeat rounds, and Caledonia's best holes stay with you longer than True Blue's biggest ones. The concession in True Blue's favor deserves stating plainly: play one round in Pawleys and pick Caledonia, but play a week here and True Blue is the course whose variety holds up, round after round, without repeating itself.
Both are public at Pawleys Island premium pricing, and the correct trip move is both of them, one per day, in either order. Just know that the quiet one across the road wins.
3Pawleys Plantation Golf and Country Club
Jack Nicklaus designed Pawleys Plantation in 1988, and its back nine does something neither Strantz course attempts: it plays out into open salt marsh, to island style greens, where the wind is a full participant rather than a local condition. The short par 3 13th, played into marsh wind, is the signature, a small target and a big margin for embarrassment in front of anyone watching from the tee behind you.
The club is semi-private with resort and package access, and Nicklaus's design is a fixture on South Carolina public access lists despite that club status, which tells you how much of the local rotation it anchors. The concession is split personality. The marsh stretch on the back is memorable enough to carry a ranking; the inland holes in front of it are solid Nicklaus resort golf without the same sense of place. Third here is a compliment in this town. Most Strand courses would trade their best nine for that marsh run.
4Heritage Club
Dan Maples built Heritage Club in 1986 on a former rice plantation, with giant live oaks, a plantation cemetery on the property, and an avenue of oaks at the entry that has become a Pawleys signature image. It is part of the Legends Resorts group, fully public, and ranked among the Grand Strand's best public courses.
Heritage gets the least room here because the ranking above it is unusually strong, not because it lacks a case. The setting rivals Caledonia's, the oaks are every bit as good, and on value it may be the smartest play in town. The concession is that the golf itself, hole for hole, sits a clear step below the Strantz pair and the marsh nine at Pawleys Plantation. In almost any other South Carolina town this course finishes first or second and nobody argues. In Pawleys it finishes fourth, and that says more about the town than the course.
That is the Pawleys problem in one list: a fourth place course most towns would build a brochure around, sitting ten minutes from two of the best public courses in the South.