What to expect from Steyn City at LIV Golf South Africa debut

JOHANNESBURG – The Club at Steyn City, a Jack Nicklaus-designed championship layout in the Highveld region just north of Johannesburg, makes history this week as the venue for LIV Golf's first-ever event on the continent of Africa.

Located within the expansive Steyn City lifestyle estate, the course is a par-71 course measuring 7,557 yards. Although the course will offer plenty of birdies, players who aren’t accustomed to playing in the region will need to account for multiple factors to succeed at Steyn City.

The thick Kikuyu grass at The Club at Steyn City will stand as the biggest challenge players will face this week. A dense, warm-season turf native to the region and common on South African courses, Kikuyu covers the fairways and the rough. On the fairways, the golf ball sits high for clean, solid strikes. 

"With these fairways, I think the main thing is that the ball sits up so high, you do get a bit more of a solid strike, so irons can go a little bit further,” said Legion XIII Captain Jon Rahm. 

The Kikuyu on the fairway, however, isn’t what will give some players nightmares this week. The Kikuyu rough has been grown thick and has a lot of “grab” on the golf club, which kills spin, restricts distance on recoveries and creates unpredictable lies. This will make greenside scrambling difficult and offer trouble to those who are errant off the tee. Bump-and-run shots will be virtually impossible, as the spongy Kikuyu will cause the ball to come out dead. 

Even the player who has arguably the best short game in the world respects the challenge of playing out of Kikuyu rough. "The rough out here, I was around the chipping green yesterday. It was about six inches long, I could barely get it out,” said Ripper GC Captain Cameron Smith. 

Smith’s teammate, Lucas Herbert, has experience playing in South Africa. “This is my fourth time,” he said, “so I've kind of got a bit of an inside track as to how to prep for South African courses. We're playing on Kikuyu grass here, so it's a slightly different preparation around the greens. You have to get used to that."

Legion XIII’s Tom McKibbin, despite being one of the league’s youngest players, is well traveled. The 23-year-old has made six DP World Tour starts in South Africa and finished in the top 25 on four occasions. 

“[Kikuyu] is obviously a very different type of grass to hit off,” McKibbin said. “Hopefully knowing that I've played on it so many times and I know what I like and dislike about it, sort of hitting off some of these lies, hopefully I can use that to my advantage a little bit and hopefully have a good week.” 

Players like Herbert and McKibbin may have played on the South African Kikuyu a handful of times, but South Africans Louis Oosthuizen , Dean Burmester, Charl Schwartzel and Branden Grace learned how to play golf on it and spent the formative years of developing their game mastering its quirkiness. This should create a significant home field advantage this week for the Southern Guards GC quartet. 

"We grew up with Kikuyu grass,” Grace said. “The rest of the field has probably never even seen it the way that we know it. But yeah, it's immaculate. It's in awesome condition." 

Burmester explained the value of hitting the fairway to avoid the Kikuyu rough: "Branden and I played three holes [Monday] just quickly, and I hit it a foot into the rough on 10 and Branden was a yard into the rough on 10, and we're both carrying 7-woods this week because of the rough, and neither of us had a chance of getting it anywhere near that green.” 

"Bryson [DeChambeau} hasn't felt the Kikuyu grass yet,” added Schwartzel with a smile. 

The other main challenge players will face this week is the altitude. At around 4,430 feet above sea level in the Highveld plateau, the thinner air provides noticeable extra carry distance —typically 10–15% more distance than sea-level conditions. While it might seem as though players can just account for the added distance, it's not quite that simple. The altitude doesn’t just shorten effective yardage; it also alters club selection, reduces spin rates, and requires recalibrated trajectories. And that’s before you factor in the multitude of elevation changes at Steyn City.

Herbert explained the complicated equation: "The altitude here, the ball is going to go a little bit further, so just dialing that in. It's just a little different for every player. It depends how high you hit it, depends how much you spin the golf ball. Those are the adjustments that you've got to make. I’ve got to do some work with FlightScopes and TrackMan and that kind of thing to figure out how far clubs are going." 

Although playing at altitude creates challenges, it also is conducive to making plenty of birdies with the further carry distance. "At altitude it also plays a little bit shorter than the distance will say on the scorecard,” noted Rahm. “You're going to have to expect some low scores unless we get some really heavy wind. Power and birdies is what you need." 

"Altitude is going to help us obviously hit it farther and carry it longer distances,” added DeChambeau, last week’s winner in Singapore. “There are areas where you can absolutely smoke it off the tee and give yourself a short wedge in.” 

McKibbin shared that he is aiming to make things a bit simpler this week and not overthink his adjustments. "The last couple of times I've been here, I sort of went back to making it a little bit simpler ... with all the different variables, with the grass and the altitude, it can become quite confusing and you can make it quite sort of a math equation ... I'm trying to make it as simple as possible and trying to make as normal golf as I can.” 

Despite efforts to toughen Steyn City, Oosthuizen knows the scoring will still be plentiful. “Definitely narrowed a lot of fairways and grew the rough quite a bit,” he said. “But there’s still going to be lots of birdies out there. We just tried to make it a little bit tougher.” 

And make it less of a bomber’s paradise. Said Schwartzel of his captain: “He wanted to give 57 guys a chance to win this tournament. You don't want to take 30% of the field out.” 

The Highveld altitude boosting distance with several gettable holes on the scorecard should produce plenty of red numbers. For the 90,000-plus fans expected across four days – most of whom are seeing a LIV Golf event live for the first time – those birdies and low scores will fuel the electric atmosphere South African crowds are known for, making this historic African debut at Steyn City a tournament to remember.