The courses in the Pawleys Island area of Myrtle Beach, to the south of the main center, are known as the “plantation” courses. Many occupy land that was once under cultivation for cotton, tobacco or indigo during the Antebellum area of slave labor, and Scarlett O’Hara’s fiddle-dee-dee days of languid living and grand social events. Those days are long gone and now replaced by the more gentile game of golf. The semi-private River Club course is one of several in the area that drip with this new tradition in its Old South setting of magnificent hardwoods, rolling terrain and that languid way of life. Tom Jackson designed this course with lots of water: it comes into play no less than 15 times. He also threw more than 100 bunkers into the mix for good measure. It sounds perfectly impossible, but in fact there is room for the driver off most of the tees, but the approach shots to the greens must be true and the correct distance in order to avoid high digits on the scorecard. You can expect many holes that bend around a lake or pond, and others, such as the par three 14th, where the green protudes into the lake and demands a nerveless swing. And then there’s the 18th, a difficult par-five made even more difficult by the approach shot which must fly the water but not carry over the green and into one of the deep bunkers waiting there. Come to think of it, “fiddle-dee-dee” might be the weakest epithet heard around the environs of the River Club course. Frankly, my dears, you’ll probably give a damn!