Former Arnold Palmer architect Brandon Johnson has renovated one of the earliest Palmer designs. Adam Lawrence visited to see the new-look layout
Sitting in 2026, it is easy to think that all golf resorts resemble Bandon Dunes, such has been the impact of Mike Keiser’s Oregon behemoth.
But not all golfers seek out what is on offer at Bandon, and an even larger proportion do not want their trip to cost in the region of US$1,000 a day, which could well be the case for a summer trip to Bandon.
The Myrtle Beach area of South Carolina, often known as the Grand Strand, after the more than 60 miles of beach that the area boasts, was a golf destination long before Mr Keiser invested a dollar in golf. The first golf club in the area was Ocean Forest, now Pine Lakes, which was designed by Robert White, and which opened in 1927. Golf grew steadily in the region in the decades that followed until it exploded in the 1960s and 1970s, when Myrtle Beach became a major destination for travellers seeking golf and good weather; the region now has almost 100 courses.
The comparison between Bandon and Myrtle Beach is actually a very silly one. Not only is one a single resort with one owner, while the other is a whole region, but also, as hinted at above, Bandon, though not obviously super-luxury, is very expensive, especially when travel to such a remote destination is factored in. Myrtle Beach, throughout its history, has been basically a mid-market offering; it remains particularly popular among spring breakers, and the golf courses reflect that. The area has a substantial number of courses with ‘celebrity’ or signature designers, and in that respect, the Myrtle Beach National (MBN) club, with three courses, all credited to Arnold Palmer, is typical. MBN’s South Creek course opened in 1975, while the club’s other two, King’s North and the West, both made their debut in 1973. The Palmer design company, in which Arnold was partnered with architect Ed Seay, was only created in 1972, and certainly King’s North predates that; the course was designed with Palmer’s original collaborator, Frank Duane. The course was extensively renovated by the late Palmer associate Vicki Martz in the late 1990s.
And now it has been renovated again, by the former Palmer design architect Brandon Johnson. Johnson’s project, valued at $4.2 million, was small beer by the current standards in the American market, where clubs seem to drop 10 or 20 million on their course before breakfast. And, given the budget, Johnson wasn’t able to do absolutely everything that he would have liked; regrading the fairways on this rather flat site, was not, for example, in the scope of work.
The renovated eighth green complex (Photo: Brandon Johnson Golf Course Design)
But that said, even if the work is more subtle than it might have been, it’s none the worse for it. Johnson has rebuilt the greens with some significant contour – the collars now feature Tahoma 31 – and the crease that exits the back of the first green, for example, might be principally there as a route to drain water off the putting surface, but it makes golfers think very hard about their approach on this short par five. All the course’s bunkers have been rebuilt and lined with CapillaryFlow, with some of them moved, and quite a few eliminated – we will return to this later! He has widened fairways and added new forward and middle tees, and improved the course’s sustainability by replacing maintained bermuda grass with native areas, pine straw or waste bunkers. And he has done some selective tree work, removing a proportion of the ornamental planting that, aimed at beautifying the course, had actually disfigured it.
The late architect Mike Strantz spent a lot of his career in the Myrtle Beach area: he was very deeply involved in the Wild Dunes course a little to the south, when working for Tom Fazio, and his own courses True Blue and Caledonia are also close at hand. And, though routed long before Strantz became involved in golf architecture. King’s North has some holes that are reminiscent of some of his: the par-four third, which offers golfers a clear choice from the tee, is one. Both routes involve a water carry, but if the player is cautious, they can go right of a copse of trees and treat the hole as a conventional two-shotter, but if they are bold, they can fire straight at the pin, where a beach bunker guards the putting surface. I don’t normally have much time for beach bunkers, but this one looks rather good, and fits nicely in its environment. It is a very Strantzian hole. So, for that matter, is the par-three fourth, which measures 180 yards from the back tee, and which again requires a water carry. The green at the other side of the water is what makes one think of the Maverick; it is rather wide and quite shallow, a favourite Strantz trope.
On the tenth, Johnson has reconfigured the left fairway bunker, converted mounds on the right into a massive landform with a bunker cutting into the feature and revamped the green to tilt right-to-left (Photo: Founders Group International)
The most famous hole at King’s North is the par-five sixth, known as ‘The Gambler’, after the Kenny Rogers song. It is, in fact, a rather good rendition of the famous Alister MacKenzie Lido Prize hole. Golfers prepared to take on The Gambler can aim their drives to the island fairway in the lake on the left, and then fire over the water to reach the green in two; those more cautious must take the safer route around the dogleg to the right. It is a very dramatic hole, but in my opinion, it is weakened because the brave second shot is just too difficult. There is water both in front of and behind the green, and especially now that the greens have been reconstructed and are extremely firm, it is very easy to imagine a player hitting a career three-wood and seeing it pitch on the putting surface and careen into the water beyond. I think a large amount of fill material dumped into the lake to create a runoff at the back would make the hole more interesting, though where the fill would come from, I have no idea.
Probably the most obvious sign of Johnson’s work is on the short par-four eighteenth. Before he got to it, the hole played host to a frankly terrifying number of bunkers (47, I think). Johnson has, thankfully, removed the vast majority of the superfluous sand, and, in the process, created a rather lovely option for the player. There is a bunker to the left of the front half of the green, which is the high side. When the pin is at the back of the green, the contouring above and beyond this bunker makes it perfectly possible, and sometimes quite desirable, to play left of the sand and have the ball feed down onto the putting surface. It is a fun and playful way to finish a round.
On the closing hole, new contouring to the left of the green feeds shots towards the putting surface (Photo: Chris King)
King’s North is now by a long way the best of the three courses at MBN. It cannot have been an easy project for Johnson; though the ground is sandy, it is mostly extremely flat, and there are plenty of spots around the course where moving water was not easy, given the lack of topography. That could, perhaps, have been solved more easily if he’d had the budget to regrade the entire course, but golf architecture, like politics, is the art of the possible (with apologies to Otto von Bismarck, who, so far as I know, never saw a golf course). The other two courses at MBN are both, in their own way, rather compromised: South Creek, in particular, will be difficult to significantly improve, as it is routed through a housing development, with consequent challenges for water flow among other things. But Brandon Johnson has some interesting ideas for both courses: I hope he gets to implement them.