Pete Dye’s famously difficult Ocean Course at Kiawah Island Golf Resort. (Image: KiawahIsland.com)
(Last updated November 2022.)
South Carolina’s Kiawah Island Golf Resort, home to the famously difficult Ocean Course, is still riding the high of having hosted the thrilling 2021 PGA Championship, the resort’s second staging of the major tournament in less than a decade.
Just shy of his 51st birthday, Phil Mickelson defeated Father Time (and runners-up Brooks Koepka and Louis Oosthuizen) to claim his second PGA Championship, and sixth major. Mickelson’s victory was a one-for-the-ages bookend to the 2012 tourney, when Rory McIlroy’s four-round score of 275 on what many consider the sternest test of golf in the United States came in at 13-under-par, a record eight strokes better than his nearest challenger.
Designed by Pete Dye, the Ocean Course is the headliner of five courses at a luxurious retreat set on a wind-swept barrier island 24 kilometres south of Charleston. Dye’s course, which offers panoramic views of the Atlantic Ocean from all 18 holes, also famously hosted the 1991 Ryder Cup (remembered as the “War by the Shore”) and the 1997 and 2003 World Cups.
Kiawah has twice hosted the PGA Championship on its Ocean Course. (Image: KiawahIsland.com)
Depending on how the wind blows, golfers can expect as much as a three-club difference on any hole from one round to the next. There are 10 holes hugging the Atlantic, with the others running just inland.
After ticking Dye’s Ocean Course off their must-play list, golfers can choose from among the resort’s four other excellent designs:
- Turtle Point is one of Jack Nicklaus’s earliest designs, featuring narrow fairways, evilly placed water hazards and small greens.
- Osprey Point is a Tom Fazio design that plays around four large natural lakes and fingers of saltwater marsh.
- Oak Point is a picturesque Clyde Johnston design built along the banks of the Kiawah River on the site of a former cotton and indigo plantation.
- Cougar Point is a strategic Gary Player design offering dramatic vistas along the Kiawah River.
Après-golf activities at the resort include kayaking, nature tours, tennis on hard or clay courts, and bicycling around the property’s 4,000 wooded oceanfront hectares.
But many visitors are content to lounge around Sanctuary Hotel, a sumptuous 255-room waterfront hotel and spa opened in 2004. The five-star hotel includes pools, a fitness centre, boutiques, and more than a dozen restaurants and cafes. In 2020, Travel + Leisure ranked Sanctuary Hotel among the top 15 resorts in the southern United States.
