On the afternoon of April 30, four golfers stood on the 18th tee at Pawleys Plantation with a PGA Tour start on the line. Grant Horvat, the most-watched golfer on YouTube, needed a par to force a playoff. He pushed his drive into a sandy waste area under a tree, was forced into a low running 5-iron, and watched his approach settle into the pond guarding the green. Ryan Ruffels made a routine par on the 435-yard hole to close it out, shot a 1-under 71, and earned an unrestricted sponsor exemption into the PGA Tour's ONEflight Myrtle Beach Classic.
If you live inside the gates at Pawleys Plantation and missed this, you are not alone. It never aired on television. The entire finale streamed on the Bryan Bros YouTube channel, and the whole event, called The Q at Myrtle Beach, is built for an audience that watches golf on their phones rather than cable. But Golf Channel covered Ruffels' comeback story, Forbes wrote about what the win meant for the shifting economics of professional golf, and the course where it happened was the one at the end of your street.
What actually happened on your back nine
The Q started as match play at Rivers Edge Golf Club, where eight creators with a combined social following north of 8.9 million people were cut down to four. The survivors, Horvat, Ruffels, Micah Morris, and Luke Kwon, moved to Pawleys Plantation for an 18-hole stroke-play shootout to decide who got the exemption.
It came down to the closing stretch. Horvat birdied his first four holes and looked in control, but Pawleys does not let anyone run away from it. He bogeyed 6, 7, and 9, and the group turned for home separated by two strokes. On the par-3 13th, the hole that plays over marsh to a peninsula green, Horvat's tee shot hit the green and bounced into the water. He drained a long downhill putt to save par anyway. On 17, he bogeyed again while Ruffels made his par. Kwon's tournament ended on the same hole after he put two tee shots into the marsh for an 8. That left Ruffels and Horvat separated by one shot walking to 18, where the pond decided it.
Ruffels, a 28-year-old Australian who had bounced between the Korn Ferry Tour and PGA Tour Americas for a decade, used the win to make his 21st career PGA Tour start at the Myrtle Beach Classic, played May 7 through 10 at The Dunes Golf and Beach Club. He is not the first: Matt Atkins won the inaugural event in 2024, and Nathan Franks won in 2025. Both used their exemptions the same way Ruffels did.
| Year | Winner | Result |
|---|---|---|
| 2024 | Matt Atkins | Inaugural champion, earned Myrtle Beach Classic start |
| 2025 | Nathan Franks | Second champion, earned Myrtle Beach Classic start |
| 2026 | Ryan Ruffels | Won at Pawleys Plantation, made 21st career PGA Tour start |
The format has real teeth behind it. The PGA Tour gave The Q its "Best In-Class Element" award in 2024, and it has become the template other creator-golf events now copy.
Why the tour picked your course
Pawleys Plantation was not a random choice. The course opened in 1988 as one of only two Jack Nicklaus signature designs on the Grand Strand, and for most of its life it looked its age. Greens had shrunk from decades of mowing patterns and foot traffic. Bunkers had lost their original edges. Trees planted decades earlier had grown into the sightlines Nicklaus originally designed around.
In 2018, Nicklaus came back to walk the course as part of its 30th anniversary and left notes on what needed to change. Founders Group International, the company that owns Pawleys and 20 other Myrtle Beach courses, closed the course in the summer of 2023 and brought in Nicklaus Design's Troy Vincent to run the project. Every green complex was stripped and rebuilt to its original specifications, adding nearly 40,000 square feet of putting surface and bringing total green space to roughly 117,000 square feet, a 48 percent jump. The new greens went in as TifEagle Bermuda, replacing turf that had drifted from the original strain over the years. Sprawling bunkers on ten different holes were replaced with smaller fairway bunkers and native areas, widening driving lines without softening the course for better players. The course reopened October 2, 2023.
Nicklaus explained his own thinking about the course years earlier, before the renovation, in a comment that has followed the course ever since:
"I made Pawleys Plantation too difficult for the members."
That line captures exactly what the 2023 work was designed to fix. The course had been built as a hard test in an era when Pawleys Plantation was a private club with limited outside play. It is not that anymore. It carries outside golfers every day, tourists booking through Myrtle Beach golf packages alongside members and residents, and a difficult, tightly guarded design does not serve a course that depends on public tee sheets. The renovation made Pawleys more playable for a wider range of golfers without stripping out what made it hard in the first place, which is also exactly the kind of course a national qualifying event wants: forgiving enough to keep a broadcast watchable, demanding enough that the last two holes can still swing a result.
The part of the club you can actually use tonight
The same 2023 project that rebuilt the greens also opened Palmetto Jacks, the clubhouse restaurant that replaced what used to be a more limited pro shop grill. It opened October 24, 2023, and the ownership was direct about the intent: broaden what the property offers beyond golf.
Palmetto Jacks is open to the public seven days a week, 7 a.m. to 8 p.m., with dining service running until 7 p.m. and the bar open an hour later. Breakfast runs until 11 a.m., lunch carries through the afternoon, and dinner entrees are available starting at 4 p.m. The menu leans into small plates like calamari, she-crab soup, and street tacos, plus a rotation of salads. The outdoor deck looks out over the tidal marsh that lines the back nine, the same marsh that swallowed Grant Horvat's approach shot on 18.
You do not need a membership to eat there, and you do not need to be a golfer. If you live inside the gates and have never walked into Palmetto Jacks, it is worth doing on a weeknight when the course is quiet and the deck catches the evening light over the marsh.
What this means if you live here
The easy read on a story like this is that a famous golf name showed up, played a round, and left. That undersells what actually happened. A course that most of you drive past on the way to Highway 17 spent one Thursday afternoon as the deciding venue for a real professional golf opportunity, covered by outlets that do not normally write about Pawleys Island. The reason it could host that moment traces directly back to a renovation completed less than three years ago, one that reshaped greens you may have three-putted on, rebuilt bunkers you have splashed out of, and opened a restaurant that now serves everyone in the neighborhood, not just members carrying a bag.
None of this changes what it costs to live at Pawleys Plantation or what your HOA covers. The golf club and the residential community operate separately, and that separation is exactly what let a national qualifier land on your course without disrupting anyone's daily routine. But it does mean the course behind your gate has a bigger footprint in golf right now than most people who live next to it realize. Next time someone asks where you live, you have an answer better than the zip code.
If you are weighing whether now is the right time to make a move within Pawleys Plantation, or you are just curious what a home along that back nine is worth given everything the course has been through, The Taylor Keenan Team knows this community from the inside. Start your Lowcountry search, or just ask us about the neighborhood, and we will give you a straight answer.
