Golf lives here.
It lives in the charm of this village where the U.S. Open has come at last to be played and the spirit of the game has a year-round residence. It lives in the mountains to the west, up where courses are laced with streams in which trout lie in the shadows, and where rhododendron and mountain laurel and autumn leaves dazzle with their beauty. It lives along the coast, on a strip called the Grand Strand, where more than 100 courses lie head to toe and are whipped by the lashes and lunges of hundreds of thousands of tourists each year. It lies in South Carolina's Lowcountry, in lovely old cities and on picturesque islands where white herons glide across black waters to alight in trees set back in dark coves, and deer peer curiously at intruders with golf clubs rattling on the back of their carts. That's not something that can be proven by statistics.