True Blue

True Blue opened in 1998, Mike Strantz's fourth solo design and, in his own words, the boldest—wide fairways, oversized greens, and waste areas that swallow entire hillsides rather than framing them politely. Every bunker on the course is a true waste bunker: ground your club, take your practice swing, play it like sand instead of a hazard.

The front nine plays across the scale of a former indigo plantation, opening with a 499-yard par 5 that doglegs left along a wall of sand to a green fronted by a creek. Water takes over as the main defense for the closing three holes, a different kind of test after two hours of sand.

The waste bunkers

Every bunker here is a waste bunker

Strantz treated the whole property as one continuous sand base—there's no rough-lined trap here, just open waste areas you're allowed to ground your club in and swing through like a links bunker. It changes how you think about a miss: the sand isn't really a penalty so much as a different kind of shot.