Greenville Country Club (Chanticleer)

Greenville Country Club is set in one of South Carolina’s most prestigious neighbourhoods and is one of the state’s premier golfing facilities. Dating back to 1895, Greenville Country Club was originally known as the Sans Souci Country Club and things have moved on since the original, rudimentary nine-hole course was laid out.

Today’s Greenville Country Clubs boasts two 18-hole layouts, the Riverside and Chanticleer. The Riverside course is the elder of the two courses, laid out by Donald Ross on a topographic map in 1923 and built by William Langford, but the premier course today is the Robert Trent Jones-designed Chanticleer.

The Chanticleer course is located a mile or two away from the main country club and is a traditional, golf-only facility. Seven potential routing options were presented to RTJ in the late 1960s and the site he selected provided eighteen impressive golf holes when the course opened for play in 1970. Today’s course remains a monument to RTJ’s original design.

More than half the holes on the Chanticleer course provide for inviting drives from elevated tees. The fairways pitch and roll in a pleasing manner through majestic pines and hardwoods. Babbling creeks intersect a number of holes and the greens are amongst RTJ’s most innovative. Some of the greensites are angled, others cant from front to back and vice versa, some are very wide and others are very deep. All the greens are intriguing and all require a deft putting stroke to avoid the dreaded three stabs or worse.

Every RTJ enthusiast should visit the Chanticleer course, which was renovated in 2001 by his son Rees, it's perhaps the great man’s finest ensemble.