Durban Country Club: The Tour Comes Back, and So Does the Question

In 2023, while Durban Country Club was being rebuilt, the SA Top 100 Courses site asked a question on its website: “can bent survive the Durban heat and humidity from January to March?”

From 25 to 28 February 2027, the answer should be on television, in Britain and Ireland on Sky Sports and in the United States on Golf Channel, the DP World Tour’s broadcasters there. The Alfred Dunhill Championship, co-sanctioned by the DP World Tour and the Sunshine Tour, will be played at Durban Country Club for the first time. Its greens are bentgrass. The week falls at the height of the Durban summer.

A great deal has been written about this course, and most of it repeats the same few things. This piece is about the others.

Built Because of a Flood

Durban Country Club exists because of bad weather. The city’s golf was played at the old Durban Golf Club until a South African Open there was all but washed out by flooding. The response was to build a new course. It opened in December 1922, in the dunes above the Blue Lagoon estuary, laid out by Laurie Waters and George Waterman.

A hundred years later, the water came back. In April 2022, the club’s centenary year, floods put much of the course out of play for weeks. What followed was a rebuild that SA Top 100 Courses, reporting in 2023, expected to cost about R30 million (roughly £1.3 million or $1.6 million at 2023 exchange rates), half of it from the club’s benefactor and board member Nic Jonsson. A burn now runs through the course, kept full by ground water. The old Bermuda greens were replaced with bentgrass.

Bentgrass is a cool-season grass, and a Durban summer is hot and humid. That is why the question at the top of this story was asked. Durban Country Club is not the only course on this coast to try it. Zimbali Lakes chose bentgrass greens from the start. At Prince’s Grant, and on The Woods at Mount Edgecombe, reviewers for SA Top 100 Courses report greens overseeded with it. That makes four of the five courses in this series, and in February the most watched of them will be tested on television.

The club was founded to escape a flood. It was rebuilt after one.

The Man It Kept Outside

In January 1963, Papwa Sewgolum won the Natal Open here, one shot ahead of Denis Hutchinson and Bobby Verwey. He was a self-taught golfer of Indian descent from Durban. Apartheid law did not allow him inside the clubhouse, so his trophy was presented outside.

The accounts of that day differ. The club’s own 1982 history describes rain coming down “in pounding torrents.” Verwey later said it was barely raining, and that the other prize-winners chose to take their prizes outside with him. Murray Leyden, the club’s golf captain in 2007, was nine at the time. He remembered Papwa receiving the trophy outside while everyone else went in. What nobody disputes is that the winner could not go in.

The club has since acknowledged it. In 2007 Leyden told Golf Digest that it may have been beyond the club’s control under the laws of the time, but “we regret that it happened.” By 2007, a plaque at the club saluted “the talent of this self-taught legend of the game.” By April 2026, a painting of that 1963 victory by the artist Nanda Soobben hung in the club’s dining hall.

In March 2025, Dylan Naidoo won the South African Open at Durban Country Club in a playoff against England’s Laurie Canter, after a final round lost to rain. IOL reported him as the first South African golfer of colour to win the national open, 62 years after Papwa’s win at the same venue. In the second round, Naidoo shot 61.

The Course Itself

The two holes that everyone writes about are here, and they are worth a line each. The 3rd is a par 5 that the golf writer Pat Ward-Thomas chose for his ideal eighteen holes. The 12th is a short par 3 named after the Prince of Wales, who is remembered for a score on it that no two sources agree on.

The names on its winners’ list make the stronger case. According to SA Top 100 Courses, the club has held a record 18 South African Opens. Bobby Locke won two of them, in 1939 and 1950. Gary Player won three, the first of them in 1956. Bob Charles, the New Zealand left-hander, won in 1973. Ernie Els won in 1998 and again in 2010, when the club hosted the 100th South African Open. In 2013 and 2014, Louis Oosthuizen won the European Tour’s Volvo Golf Champions here, both times by a single shot.

Five of those men, Locke, Player, Charles, Els and Oosthuizen, have also won the Open Championship. Between them they have won it eleven times.

The course is ranked No. 4 in the SA Top 100 Courses list for 2026.

Why the Dunhill Matters for a Visiting Golfer

For a golfer who does not follow the tour, some background. The Alfred Dunhill Championship began in 2000. It is co-sanctioned by the DP World Tour, formerly the European Tour, and the Sunshine Tour. Its early winners include Adam Scott in 2001 and the Englishman Justin Rose in 2002, more than a decade before Scott won the Masters and Rose the US Open, both in 2013. Charl Schwartzel has won it four times, and won the 2011 Masters between his first and second titles. Ernie Els won it in 2005, and Louis Oosthuizen in 2023.

For most of the past two decades, the Alfred Dunhill Championship was played at Leopard Creek, on the edge of the Kruger. In December 2025 it moved to Royal Johannesburg. Moving it to Durban in late February 2027 puts a DP World Tour event in the middle of the coastal summer.

For a golfer planning a trip from Britain or the United States, that changes what February means: the course on the screen is on the same coast as the four others in this series. For a golfer who lives in Durban, it is a chance to watch the world’s professionals play a course they can drive to, and to find out on their next round whether they would have played the 3rd the way the professionals did. The rebuilt course has already had one February on the professional calendar: the Jonsson Workwear Durban Open, a HotelPlanner Tour and Sunshine Tour event, was played here from 19 to 22 February 2026. The Dunhill brings the DP World Tour’s field and cameras. The course will be prepared for the professionals. The weather will be what it is. The 2025 South African Open showed that rain can stop a championship here. February 2027 will show, on a bigger stage, whether the rebuilt Durban Country Club was built for the season it is about to be tested in.

Why We Include Durban Country Club

STA builds every journey outward from a course. Durban Country Club is the oldest course in this series and the one with the longest tournament record. It is also the one where, by April 2026, a painting of a man who was not allowed through the door hung inside. That tells a visiting golfer something about this country that no scorecard will.

Each reader will come to it by a different door. A British golfer may know that its 12th is named for a Prince of Wales. An American may first see it on Golf Channel this February. A South African golfer knows the name in the painting.

Play the 3rd. Then go and find the painting.

Durban Country Club at a Glance