LIKE MANY OTHER American cities, Gulfport, Miss., isn't what it used to be. Once it was a grand city, charged by the shipping industry by day and charmed by the elegance of the Old South by night. Running parallel to the shore, not too far from the Gulf of Mexico, were regal, expansive avenues decorated by a seemingly endless row of royal palms.

But other ports became more attractive and business went elsewhere. The old estates were sold and chopped into smaller plots of urban sprawl. The main thoroughfare through town lost much of its luster.

Tragically, the golf course most of the old-timers remember, the Great Southern Golf Course that eventually became Broadwater Beach Golf Club's Sea Course, has suffered much the same fate. Back in its heyday, it was the course in town; it took on all comers and backed down to no one. Despite its brevity -- less than 6,300 yards from the tips -- the Sea Course at the same time bordered on the impossible.

"Back then the course had real character," says Knox White, a longtime regular at Broadwater Beach. "If you hooked it on nine you pulled another ball out of your pocket. That's how thick the trees were. Today you can hit it two fairways over and get it back into play."

Mary Mills had a great instructor, but it was the Sea Course, more than any of the other places around town, where she really learned to play. How to move the ball. Keep it low, where the winds off the gulf couldn't get to it. And become fabulous with the short game, a must when you missed those small greens and had to deal with the swales and bumps and hardpan and uneven lies.

"The player I became was a result of the shots I learned growing up," Mills insists. "Every hole was tree-lined, so you had to learn to hit it straight. If you wanted to play well in that area you also had to learn how to play in the wind, which I was able to do. The greens were basically low relief, which encouraged more of a land game. Everything wasn't a high pitch into an elevated green. The greens required, and encouraged, a good bit of shot-making.

"But I could play a lot of different shots. I could work the ball right or left, at will. I could knock it down, very low to the ground, in the wind. I couldn't hit it as high as I wanted to, but I think a lot of that was strength."

Long after Mills honed her skills and went on to bigger and better things -- eight straight Mississippi Women's Amateurs, two LPGA Championships and a U.S. Women's Open among them -- Mother Nature took the fight out of the Broadwater Beach Sea Course.

In August 1969, Hurricane Camille formed just east of Jamaica, curved through the Yucatan Channel and took dead aim on the Mississippi Delta. Unleashing the full wrath of its fury, winds of 190 mph, a 25-foot-high storm wave and torrential rains that at times fell at the rate of three inches an hour, it leveled $1.42 billion in property damage upon Louisiana and Mississippi and killed 256. Nothing along the coast was spared, including the Broadwater Beach Sea Course, which sits but a three-quarter wedge from the gulf's water at high tide. An estimated 2,500 trees were lost, turning so much forest-like acreage into an amorphous flatland.

"The back nine used to be real tight," says Robbie Webb, who at age 11 met Mills at a junior tournament and soon became her daily playing companion, "and you had to hit the ball straight. There was nothing but pine trees; you hit it off the fairway and you were goin' to make 8 or 9. Now the back nine is wide open. There's no restriction on hitting the ball straight and it isn't near competition-wise what it used to be."

Another hurricane, Elena, battered the Mississippi coast in 1985, and although it carried much less devastation than Camille, another 700 trees from the Sea Course were destroyed, some uprooted and carried to distant locations, others snapped like twigs.

But the Sea Course still features one of the great trees in American golf. It's a giant oak, whose limbs stretch from one edge of the sixth fairway to the other, standing smack in the center of the 254-yard par-4. As it did 40 years ago, it serves as the ultimate evaluation of a young player's progress: at 11 or 12, Mills and Webb and the other juniors learned to take a long iron and keep the ball low, ducking under the oak's limbs and running it up the fairway; as they matured, they learned how to go around it, taking the ball out over the left rough, or the right, and bringing it back into the fairway. When they got bolder still, they were finally able to clear it on the fly. You know how to properly manage a golf ball when you can step up to the sixth at the Sea Course and knock it in front of the green all ways -- left, right, high, low.

Broadwater Beach was her classroom, but Mills blossomed in part because of great instructors who included former PGA champion Johnny Revolta, who wintered as the head pro at nearby Gulf Hills.

"My parents wanted me to have the best because I think they knew quickly I had an exceptional talent," Mills says. "I don't remember him teaching me a lot of theory, just swing plane, position, a lot of knock-down shots, a marvelous short game -- the little chips and delicate wedges. He was a master at that." And because it was demanded at Broadwater Beach's Sea Course, and Revolta helped sharpen her edges, one thing Mary Mills could do was use that creative artistry she's always had and get up and down from all kinds of predicaments.

In practically no time at all Mills was on her way to becoming the best player the area had ever produced. At the tender age of 14 she won the Mississippi State Women's Amateur, an event that would fill her trophy case for several years to come. Incredibly, she won the tournament for the next seven years as well. "There wasn't much in the way of competition for me to play in," she says, "so I played with the boys, from their tees, and that made me better . . . stronger."

"Being a girl, there wasn't a whole lot for her to compete with," recalls Webb, "and to us she was just one of the boys. She played on the Gulfport High [boys'] team for four years, and when she got lessons from Johnny Revolta, that really turned her around. Then she went to Millsaps College and played on the men's golf team there.

"She had a man's ability in that she hit the ball long and was very straight. She was different, winning the ladies' state amateur eight straight times -- not only win it, but walk away with it every year. But she worked real hard. She practiced a lot, played every day."

The greens were never the most difficult part of Broadwater Beach. Hitting them, not putting them, was the trick. True to form, the strengths she learned as a child were the strengths she parlayed throughout her professional career. "I was a shot-maker and not a great putter," she says. "Even going back as a child, I don't think I practiced putting as much as the big game. Like kids today, I was enthralled by hitting the ball out there in that big motion, the big movement."

Ironically, one of the few shots she recalls from her Women's Open victory was the putt at the 72nd hole. "We didn't have the leader boards you do today," she explained, "and I thought I had to make an eight-foot putt to tie, because Louise Suggs and Sandra Haynie were shooting almost the same thing and I didn't know where I stood for sure. But I made the putt and actually won by two.

"After it was over it seemed easy. The hardest thing was to stay in control and not get excited before I pulled it off. . . . I remember going to that tournament feeling good about my game and sort of being above the pressure. I didn't have a lot of technical things about my swing going through my mind; it was just happening."

When she was still a child, but one who knew golf would be a focal point in her life, Mills, as she does today, enjoyed her time alone. She'd find her way to Broadwater Beach, sling the bag over her shoulder and play all through the hot summer days, even those sultry, oppressive August afternoons. But there were rewards. There were those perfect evenings, when all the other players had departed, darkness emanated from the golf shop and a 14-year-old girl was the only one left on the course. She would make her way to the 18th tee and look down the fairway. And when the last sliver of sunlight gave way to dusk and the moon rose just right over the gulf, the moonbeam glimmering on the water seemed to extend the 18th fairway all the way across the Caribbean. Talk about a land of enchantment.

"The competition is fun," she admits, "but the most enjoyable times I had were being out by myself late in the afternoon, in the shadows, and the beautiful feeling that I was the only one in the world playing the game. It was me and the course and the elements. Those were the memorable times I look back on, and it's great because I can get those again. I don't have to be shooting in the 60s or the low 70s to have those moments, and I think that's one of the great things about the game."

Mills, now 56, moved to South Florida almost 25 years ago, and it's been nearly that long since she last played Broadwater Beach's Sea Course, but she thinks about it regularly. Having just earned her master's in landscape architecture, she recalls the subtleties of her old home course and how they affected her game. Which is precisely what she hopes to do in her new career of golf course architecture.

She wants to take her ecofeminist side, a balance of equality for nature as well as women, and work on course designs that emphasize the local uniqueness of an area. Minimalism, she believes, is good. After all, that's the way it used to be at Broadwater Beach . . . and so many other places.

-- Rich Skyzinski