Professional golfer Davis Love III was fifteen years old when his father, a golf pro, moved the family from Atlanta to St. Simons Island, Georgia. “It was great for us,” Love says. “We got to move to the beach.” He also met his wife, Robin, there. “I will say we were high school sweethearts. She will say we weren’t,” he laughs. The pair married after college and moved back to the barrier island when Love turned pro in 1985, and they’ve been islanders ever since. Even though he travels all over the world for nearly thirty weeks of the year, St. Simons and its next-door neighbor, Sea Island, haven’t lost their allure. “There’s really no other place like it,” he says. “We’ve got a five-star, five-diamond resort on Sea Island, St. Simons is a beach town, sure, but it feels like a real town. It has a real community. It’s not all about the tourists or second and third homeowners. The teachers, churches, schools…are all great.”
So when he’s not toting his golf bag all over the globe, he’s soaking up as much of his hometown as he can. Here are some of his favorite spots.
9:00 a.m.
Biscuit Bliss: “I’m probably not going to immediately go play golf when I’m home. I’m going to go to Sweet Mama’s for breakfast. Usually I’ll order a coffee and a couple of pork pops, which are these biscuits with cheese and bacon and sausage already mixed in the dough. The story goes that they didn’t know what to do with the leftover bacon and sausage, so they put it in the biscuit mix. They go fast.”
10:30 a.m.
On the Water: “After breakfast, I’ll do some paddle boarding. Where we go out is called Gould’s Inlet—the river that comes between St. Simons and Sea Island. I actually have a paddleboard shop called Paddle and Putt on St. Simons. So I will stop by there and maybe steal a board or get something I’m missing, like sunscreen, on the way to the water.”
1:00 p.m.
Hog Wild: “Lunch would have to be at Southern Soul Barbecue, for sure. I cook my own barbecue. I’m not competition level or anything, but I do compete in some charity stuff, so when I go to Southern Soul, it’s for their specialty stuff like the tomato sandwich, pastrami, or jerk chicken. Hopefully it’s Thursday for pastrami day, which is my favorite. It takes over a week to get the pastrami done. It’s brined and then smoked.”
2:30 p.m.
Fore the Win: “In the afternoon, I’ll go see my trainer at Sea Island Golf Club’s Golf Performance Center. We warm up and then go out and hit some balls at the range We’ll do our golf practice, but I might not hit too many because I want to go fishing later.”
5:00 p.m.
Cast a Line: “I’ll fish until dinner, probably just inshore. The fishing opportunities here are incredible, even just for a few hours before dinner. We’ll go out and try our best to catch something, but usually not something for dinner. I don’t want that kind of pressure.”
8:30 p.m. – until
Dinner and Drinks: “If I want to go casual for supper, I’ll go for burgers at Brogen’s—best burger on the island. If I’m going grown-up, as we call it, I’d go to Tavola over at the Cloister, because then, after dinner, we can go to the River Bar for a night cap. They have the best bourbon selection on the island. At Tavola, we always end up getting a pizza and a pasta because I can’t decide.”
