“Myrtle Beach National is one of the
flagships of the Myrtle Beach area. It’s
synonymous with Myrtle Beach. You
have three totally different courses that
attract a lot of different golfers.”
—BRAD CRUMLING, HEAD GOLF PRO, MYRTLE BEACH NATIONAL
AS THE COUNTRY’S TOP
GOLF DESTINATION, Myrtle
Beach is chock full of great golf resorts
with multiple course offerings. Think of
Barefoot, Legends, and Grande Dunes. But
before them was Myrtle Beach National,
which became the first multi-course resort
on the Grand Strand when it opened in the
early ‘70s. The eight courses in the area
then, like the Dunes Club, the Surf Club,
and Pine Lakes, were just 18-hole facilities and didn’t have enough tee times to
accommodate all the golfers who started
coming to Myrtle in the late ‘60s.
“When I moved to Myrtle Beach in 1959
we had 27 holes of golf, 18 at the Dunes
Club and 9 at Pine Lakes,” recalls Cecil
Brandon, the man who did so much to make
Myrtle Beach what it is today. “I had been
there about 10 years and it was hard to get
a starting time. Myrtle Beach had become
so popular that when you left in spring, you
better make your tee time for next spring or
you’d have a hard time getting on.”
A developer asked Brandon if he could
find some land for a multi-course complex
and he knew just the spot.
PHOTO CREDIT HERE
THE MASTER PLAN
Brandon liked to bird hunt about 10 miles
west of town on land that was perfectly
suited for golf. “It was a high sand ridge
that drained real well,” he says. “In the
Lowcountry, you have to be careful of
your drainage.”
vsga.org
For the design, Brandon called on his old
friend, Arnold Palmer, whom he had known
since the late ‘40s when they competed
against each other in college. The original
plan called for Palmer and his design associate, Frank Dwayne, to design four courses,
but conservation easements reduced it to
three: the North, West, and South.
“The single golf courses in Myrtle Beach
were doing very, very well, so about eight
investors got together, most of them hotel
owners or partners, and they had a really
clever feeder system,” recalls Gary Schaal,
who was an assistant pro when the courses
first opened before becoming head pro a
couple of years later. “You stayed at the
hotel and they sent you to the course you
were a partner in.”
OPEN FOR BUSINESS
The North Course was the first layout to
open in 1973 with the pro shop operating
out of the enclosed end of a cart shed that
measured about 15 feet by 30 feet. There
was only one bathroom and a Coca-Cola
machine, but the tee sheet was full from the
get-go. The West opened the following year,
followed by the South, but the North has
always been the premier course, particularly
after Palmer renovated it in 1995 and the
course was renamed “King’s North.”
“The land was all the same—same
amount of elevation, same amount of
trees—but the North was the most popular,” recalls Schaal, who went on to own
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