Nicklaus touts newest creation;
Golden Bear unveils May River Club

Courtesy of Jeff Kidd, The Island Packet
Published Saturday, October 30th, 2004

BLUFFTON, S.C. - With more than 200 golf courses in his design portfolio, Jack Nicklaus has dabbled in mediums ranging from desert highland to mountain vistas.

On Friday, he returned to one of his favorite canvases -- Beaufort County's Lowcountry.

Nicklaus -- winner of 20 major championships and designer of such reknown courses as Murifield Village, Shoal Creek and Castle Pines -- was on hand to introduce media and club members to one of his newest creations, The May River Golf Club in Palmetto Bluff.

"Look over my shoulder," said Nicklaus, fielding questions while seated on a patio overlooking the 18th green at the private club. "What do you think? Pretty isn't it?"

Nicklaus' Lowcountry creations include courses at Colleton River, Indigo Run and Melrose on Daufuskie Island. He also collaborated with designer Pete Dye to produce Harbour Town Golf Links, site of the PGA Tour's annual MCI Heritage.

While those works were laid across parcels more similar than dissimilar, Nicklaus said a good architect notices subtleties in the land and imparts something unique to each course.

"Even if the land you're working on is in the same (type of) country, they might not be very much alike," Nicklaus said. "Each one is very special in themselves."

The Golden Bear test drives the Champion Bermuda greens on Friday (photo courtesy of The Island Packet).

Nicklaus said that certainly is the case at Palmetto Bluff, where he worked with land that once was the site of a centuries-old vacation retreat for the rich and famous and, later, a wildlife and nature preserve.

The course twists through 300-year-old live oaks and plays out to the salt marsh bordering the property, providing the kind of spectacular scenery typical of Lowcountry designs.

But the 7,100-yard, par-72 May River Golf Club also introduces some firsts to the area, including the use of Pro/Angle sand shipped from Ohio. Its angular grains keep the sand in place on slopes, allowing it to be flashed up bunker faces at steeper angles than other varieties.

According to a club press release, the course is also the first in the area to have tee boxes, fairways and rough planted with Paspalum grass. Once a native coastal grass, Paspalum has been mutated and engineered into a turfgrass, Nicklaus said.

Paspalum takes on the brilliant-green hue of a cool-season grass but also has a reddish tone during certain parts of the year. It is stiff-leafed and waxy, so it doesn't accumulate moisture and allows the ball to sit up high.

Additionally, Paspalum requires little irrigation and should help the club conserve water, Nicklaus said.

That was a key selling point at a development predicated on preserving as much of the land's natural beauty as possible.

"When we bought Palmetto Bluff (in 2000), we bought it because it was the last great land treasure on the East Coast," said Jim Mozley, president and chief executive officer of Palmetto Bluff. "So when we started thinking of concepts for the project and decided we wanted a great golf course, we decided to turn to the gold standard in golf and have Jack's team come and design this course."

Palmetto Bluff is a 20,000-acre tract -- a landmass roughly two-thirds the size of Hilton Head Island and one-and-a-half times the size of Manhattan. With so much land available, Nicklaus' designers and Palmetto Bluff's developers considered several course routings.

Mozley said Nicklaus convinced him to cherry-pick a few prime spots for tee and green sites. Nicklaus also prevailed upon him to allow a few holes to play out toward marsh-front property, in one spot routing the course through an area originally reserved for a small village.

"Jack's point to me was that you want to know you're playing golf in the Lowcountry," Mozley said. "I'm glad he won both arguments."

Even at that, freshwater wetlands were avoided almost entirely during design and construction, and vegetative buffers also were planted to help protect the river and its edge. And where the course ran near water, Nicklaus chose to provide windows of the surrounding scenery with select tees, fairways and greens, rather than routing entire holes lengthwise along the bank.

The golf course itself also will be spared all but minimal development because each hole will be bordered only by four or five homesites, where as many as 20 might be more typical, Mozley said.

"From the start, Jack and his team have shared our vision for creating a golf course that intrinsically blends into the natural landscape that is so unique to Palmetto Bluff," Mozley said. "By doing so, we found that not only does this course look and feel different from any other course in the country, but it actually plays differently."