Championship Format
The Alfred Dunhill Championship is an official co-sanctioned Order of Merit event on the DP World Tour and Sunshine Tour. A total of 156 professionals play the 72-hole stroke play championship, with 18 holes played each day.
If a playoff is required, it will be sudden death over the 18th hole. Play is in three-balls over the first two days, and in two-balls on the last two days after the cut.
A pro-am takes place on the Tuesday before the tournament.
Prize Money
The Alfred Dunhill Championship features a selection of the finest professionals on the Sunshine Tour and DP World Tour competing for a total purse of €1.5 million (approximately R26.8 million).
The Alfred Dunhill Championship enthrals world golf as one of the most unique tournaments on the Sunshine Tour and DP World Tour when it is played at the magnificent Leopard Creek Country Club.
The incredible setting of the golf course on the banks of the Crocodile River and overlooking the Kruger National Park, one of the world’s most iconic game reserves, makes the Alfred Dunhill Championship one of the flagship events on both Tours and a favourite of the world’s leading professionals.
Championship History
The Alfred Dunhill Championship has an illustrious history with a list of former World Number One golfers, Major winners, Ryder Cup and Presidents Cup players having played in the tournament over the years.
Alfred Dunhill’s support of golf in South Africa includes the sponsorship of the Alfred Dunhill PGA Championship at Houghton Golf Club from 1996 to 1999, whose winners include Ernie Els, Nick Price and Tony Johnstone. This was one of the first tournaments the European Tour ever co-sanctioned globally, thus helping to launch the Tour’s highly successful co-sanctioning strategy. In 2000, the Alfred Dunhill Championship teed off at Houghton Golf Club as a standalone tournament, before moving to its current home at Leopard Creek in 2004.
The Alfred Dunhill Championship has hosted a list of former World Number One golfers, Major winners, Ryder Cup and Presidents Cup players over the years, including Rory McIlroy, John Daly, Ernie Els, Lee Westwood, Darren Clarke, Trevor Immelman, Louis Oosthuizen, Charl Schwartzel and Branden Grace.
Three renowned names recorded their first professional wins at the Alfred Dunhill Championship – former Masters champion Adam Scott in 2001, Justin Rose in 2002, and four-time Alfred Dunhill Championship winner Charl Schwartzel in 2004.
Branden Grace is the only player to have achieved the double of winning both the Alfred Dunhill Championship and the Alfred Dunhill Links Championship.
Fellow South African, Charl Schwartzel, has won a record four Alfred Dunhill Championship titles claiming victory in 2004, 2012, 2013 and 2015. In 2012, he won by a record 12-shot margin, recording a superb 24-under par score, which so far has not been beaten. Amazingly, he has also finished runner-up four times at Leopard Creek.
One of the primary beneficiaries of Alfred Dunhill’s proud history in golf is the South African Golf Development Board (SAGDB). Both the Alfred Dunhill Links Championship and the Alfred Dunhill Championship donate tournament proceeds to the SAGDB.
The Harold Riley for Alfred Dunhill Collection represents a truly unique collection of works in sport and in golf.
The collection spans twenty five years of work and documents Alfred Dunhill golf championships all over the world during this period.
Harold captures the essence of the people, landscapes, wildlife and moments that make his work so special.
Harold Riley was born in Salford in 1934. In 1951 he won a scholarship to the Slade School of Fine Art and went to study in Italy and Spain before returning to Salford, where he has lived ever since. He believed his main work was to document the city and his life-cycle in Salford in paintings, drawings and photographs which cemented a friendship with L.S. Lowry which began when Harold was a student; together they worked on a project to record the area and its people, a project which Harold continued until the end of the twentieth century. Harold was commissioned to paint portraits of Prince Philip, Duke of Edinburgh as well as Pope John XIII, Pope Paul VI, Pope John Paul II, Nelson Mandela, and United States Presidents John F. Kennedy and Gerald Ford. These portraits alongside his sporting pictures, particularly of golf and soccer are amongst his best known work.
Sponsors
The Alfred Dunhill Championship is delighted to be partnered with:
