Most of the town’s 28,000 citizens are transplanted Northerners, lured there by golf. From the late 1980s to the early 2000s, five new courses opened every year in Myrtle Beach, until it boasted 120 courses – one for every 200 residents. Back then, golf’s popularity was soaring, and the demand for more courses seemed boundless. First the town fed on the sport’s allure, then the housing boom fed on the golf boom. Developers put homes and condos alongside every fairway of every new course, using the locations to boost the homes’ sales prices. The housing mania had so much momentum that when golf’s popularity waned in the second half of the decade, developers simply dropped golf from their equation. They leveled the courses and turned them into more housing tracts. That worked until the housing bubble also burst and real estate prices plummeted. Most of the 22 courses that closed in Myrtle Beach turned into residential developments, but half a dozen weren’t converted in time. Instead, they were abandoned. Those were the courses that interested us
There was an abandoned golf course in suburban SanAntonio, near my office: Turtle Creek, a common name for courses in Texas . . . seeing the rolling fairways woolly in neglect made me incredibly sad . . . it seems like a step backward -- civilisation wise -- if you see how I mean . . . this Salon snob has missed the essential pathos entirely . . .
