Durban Country Club

In 1965 Papwa Sewgolum won the Natal Open here for the second time, with Gary Player second, and was handed his trophy outside in the rain: under apartheid the club could not let him into the clubhouse without risking its liquor licence. The pictures went around the world and made him a symbol of the sporting boycott. The course opened in 1922, laid out by George Waterman with Laurie Waters, who had won four South African Opens: 1903, 1904, 1907 and 1920. Eighteen South African Opens have followed, from 1924 to 2025. Gary Player won his first here in 1956, Ernie Els won in 1998 and 2010, and Dylan Naidoo won a rain-shortened 2025 in a playoff.

Golf Data rebuilt the course after the 2022 floods, cutting a burn through the far holes and laying eighteen new bent-grass greens; it reopened in March 2024. The twelfth, Prince of Wales, is a par three along a steep ridge to a narrow tabletop green that falls away on both sides. In the second round of the 2025 South African Open, the Englishman Dale Whitnell holed out from the tee at both the second and the twelfth. But the holes people describe afterwards are the second and the third, where the opening stretch drops through the sandhills above the Indian Ocean; the third is a par five falling from a high tee into a valley between the dunes. No official course record has been set since the reopening.