Harbour Town Golf Links

Sand was still going into the bunkers while the first field played, and the lighthouse behind the eighteenth green was unfinished. Pete Dye's project had been christened on 2 July 1968, with Jack Nicklaus consulting; the PGA Tour accepted Charles Fraser's pitch for a tournament that October, and the inaugural Heritage Golf Classic teed off on 24 November 1969. Arnold Palmer won it at 40, shooting 283, one under, for $20,000 out of a $100,000 purse. It has been played every year since, now as the RBC Heritage, in the week after the Masters, and it still opens with a ceremonial tee shot into Calibogue Sound and a cannon.

The greens average 3,700 square feet. The PGA Tour average is 6,600. That one number explains the place: the fairways run in narrow corridors under overhanging oaks and pines, past palmettos and dark lagoons, to greens little more than half the size of the ones these players see every other week. Davis Love III took every one of them apart in 2025, putting some back to the shapes Pete Dye gave them and recovering hole locations lost as the surfaces shrank. The card at Sea Pines gives 7,131 yards, par 71, a rating of 75.5 and a slope of 146. The eighteenth is the exception to the trees: 472 yards out along Calibogue Sound, water left, out of bounds right, the striped lighthouse behind the green.