How Centurion Club is shaking up the game with the help of the Saudis

The clubhouse at Centurion Club.

Centurion Club have ripped up the playbook for how a golf club should be run. Now, they are about to showcase two of the most lucrative – and controversial – events in the men’s and women’s games. Michael Catling paid a visit ahead of the club’s 10-year anniversary.

It’s mid-morning and a noticeable hush has descended across the bowels of the impressive Centurion Club, near St Albans. The dining room has been cleared, ready for service, and only the pitter-patter of spikes outside can be heard above a wind that whips against the French doors. This is the calm before the storm. 

We are seated across from Scott Evans, the softly-spoken owner whose fingerprints can be seen on some of Britain’s best courses, as well as two highly contentious tournaments. He needs no introduction, but we receive one anyway out of politeness. It is that kind of place.

Today he is taking sanctuary in the restaurant lounge at Centurion, recalling the moment he took a call from an unknown number in the early hours of the morning in March of 2022.

The man on the other end of the phone was Majed Al Sorour, then CEO of the Saudi Golf Federation, who needed a course and a person willing to take a chance on LIV Golf. He needed someone like Scott Evans. 

At the time, Evans had already agreed to host the Asian Tour’s first-ever International Series event in Europe. But Al Sorour had other ideas. He wanted to increase the $2 million prize fund to $25 million and launch the first LIV Golf Invitational instead. Evans didn’t take much convincing.

“I said, ‘Let me think about that’,” he recalls, before pausing. “‘OK, I’ve thought about it. Let’s get it on.’ I put the phone down, then all hell broke loose!”

He wasn’t wrong. After verbally agreeing to a two-year deal, Evans got to work on delivering LIV Golf’s welcome party with just 12 weeks’ notice. The investment was significant, comparable to a Major championship in scale. 

Music was booming on the driving range. Black cabs took players to the first tee. There was even a self-driving robot offering drinks to reporters in the media tent. It all felt a little surreal.

After the golf, Jessie J, Craig David and James Morrison headlined the main stage on respective evenings. The scene resembled a small music festival rather than a golf event, but it delivered what they set out to achieve. It was loud. It was different. And it helped to put Centurion on the map.

“I did promise Majed Al Sorour and (Saudi Public Investment Fund Governor) Yasir Al-Rumayyan that
I would not let them down,” admits Evans. “That was the key. It was 12 weeks without any sleep. There was a lot riding on it. Had we not put on a good show, then the whole thing would have been dead in the water.”

It helped that the likes of Lee Westwood and Ian Poulter were giving away tickets like confetti on Twitter, but the entire week was a sell-out, and then another 10,000 fans turned up for the Aramco Team Series – London a week later.

Even more fans are expected to be in attendance this year, which Evans sees as vindication for taking a chance on two unknown entities and formats. He points to the good both events have done in reaching a younger demographic, and bristles at the suggestion that Centurion has played its part in sportswashing by taking money from the Saudi Public Investment Fund (PIF).

“Why would you not want to get involved with one of the world’s wealthiest companies?” he asks, throwing his hands up. “Too much is made about the negatives in all of this when there’s actually a lot of positives. You just need to see what’s happening in golf now and the money coming into the game and
the jobs being created in the industry. Where was that before? This is the best thing to happen to the professional game in my lifetime.

“There’s this much-used expression, ‘growing the game’, and people forget that there’s a whole world out there, in Asia and the Middle East. Golf was the first sporting event for ladies in Saudi. That was huge. When I saw that, I was like, you’ve done the right thing here, Scott.

“So, when you talk about morals, it doesn’t make sense to me. Am I not going to fill my car up? Am I not going to take an Uber? Where does it stop? It’s ridiculous. You can’t treat Aramco and LIV any differently. That’s why my conscience is clear.”

Evans knows he will never be able to please everyone, which is just as well given the attitude towards PIF in this country. Throughout the duration of the LIV event there was a police presence outside the front gates, dealing with protesters who wanted to make their voices heard. On more than one occasion he and other members of staff woke up to death threats on social media.

Evans dismisses it all as “a load of nonsense”, though he did hire a PR company to help mitigate any kind of risk to the club and its 70 employees.

“It was our reputation on the line,” he says. “The narrative coming out of the PGA Tour at the time was making a lot of people aggressive towards it and the media were picking up on it. But I knew all the good things that were happening.

“We were probably the most talked about golf club in the world for one moment. We were on the Netflix show (Full Swing) and you can’t buy that kind of marketing.

“Personally, I don’t think we’d had enough credit for it. That’s probably our own doing, we’re not out there shouting from the rooftops about putting in a new toilet at the halfway house. But they said we couldn’t do it, so it’s not so much pride but vindication that we backed the right horse.

“How this merger affects Centurion I don’t know yet, but hopefully there are no roadblocks in our way anymore. They (LIV) have the option of a third year, but I’m not due to talk about that until after this year’s event.”

Evans, 55, speaks a lot about taking risks and being shaped by past experiences. He was 21 when he left behind a job as an assistant pro at Whitecraigs Golf Club in Scotland and flew halfway round the world to Arizona to work alongside Dana Garmany in what was the start of Troon Golf, now the largest golf management company in the world. 

He stayed there for two years before moving on again, first to Dubai, and then to England. He never stayed in the same place for long, but he was involved in the openings of Dubai Creek, Loch Lomond and Bearwood Lakes, among others.

However, it wasn’t until 2008, when he was working in Spain, that the chance to build his own golf course first presented itself. The recession helped and after the site where Centurion now sits became available, he bought the land alongside his business partners, Bert Pronk and Andre Hendriks, in 2010. 

Within three years the course opened to rave reviews and then it hosted its first tour event, the inaugural GolfSixes, in 2017. The impact is still being felt even now. There are 400 clubs in the country now offering GolfSixes for juniors – Centurion is one of them.

Other tour events have come and gone since then. The Paddy Power Golf Shootout in 2020 was only ever going to be a one-time event, a prelude to the DP World Tour’s return after Covid. There were bigger hopes for the International Crown, a women’s team matchplay competition, but then the LPGA canceled it because of the pandemic and never came back with a new date. Their loss has turned out to be the LET’s gain.

The Aramco Team Series presented by PIF is now in its third year at Centurion and will once again take place in the week after the LIV event. It represents another big show of faith by the Saudis, though Evans is mindful about devaluing members with the disruption caused by hosting multiple tour events each year. It’s a balancing act which he wants to get right.

The golf club adopts a members and guest-only policy outside of these weeks, but the ground-floor restaurant and terrace are open to the public and have become a destination for diners from all over the region. Inside, the decor is light, airy and elegant, like a high-end stately home somewhere in the Mediterranean. The afternoon teas and steak night dinners are sold out weeks in advance, while Evans claims he has yet to taste a better Sunday lunch. “And I’m the worst critic,” he says, smiling.

The dining room is deliberately kept separate, at the far end of the complex, a pitching wedge away from the golfers who huddle around the pizza oven or TVs in the spacious Courtyard. One by one, the seats start to fill up. In the summer, the roof retracts and the BBQ is fired up to create the perfect space for members and their families. Weekdays are quieter but the place is packed at weekends with golfers coming and going. The atmosphere is relaxed and in keeping with Evans’ quest to take the fine dining experience and to implement it into a golf setting.

“A lot of clubs nowadays are like old people’s homes,” says Evans. “They are stuck in a time warp. The attention to detail doesn’t exist. To make it work, you need to create a better offer and give people a reason to buy into it. We have made our golf club the hub of social life. It’s more than just playing golf. It’s about keeping people happy and delivering on what you say you’re going to deliver.

“We don’t have problems; we only have solutions. That’s our attitude. And for as long as everyone does it badly, we’re doing well. That’s the opportunity, to do things better. 

“We try to work for people’s business. We’re quite innovative in some of the things we’ve done, but we’re progressive as well. We take people with us.

“The way I see it is if we are looking after our members, they are feeding that back out into the wider world. We have more than 800 members now and I look upon it as 800 salesmen… excuse me, salespeople (smiles).”

It’s hard not to be impressed by how far Centurion has come in such a short space of time. Evans could easily be retired now, but he likes to stay involved in the practicalities and the day-to-day stuff. He still obsesses over the finer details and expects his staff to do the same.

“We want people to come in here and feel at home,” he says. “No job should ever be too big or too small. That’s the answer. It’s not service, it’s hospitality.”

The uptake in membership, especially among families, would suggest it’s working. There is a big drive for equality, to move away from the elitist, male-centric attitudes that proliferate elsewhere. Centurion doesn’t feel anything like a normal club golf club, which is precisely what Evans set out to achieve. A membership is far from cheap (prices range from £15,000 to £121,000), but as Evans explains, you are paying for a very different kind of experience. There are no committees or club captains here, nor will you find any reference to senior sections, team matches or dress codes.

“I haven’t got time to look at the length of someone’s socks or worry about it,” he says, chuntering.

“It’s a waste of time asking someone to do that. If someone didn’t come dressed appropriately here, they would stand out like a sore thumb. We are not in a business to tell people how to dress. It all seems like common sense to me, but that’s where golf has lost the plot.”

Part of Centurion’s appeal owes a lot to Evans’ foresight and unwavering desire to carve his own path. He was actively involved in building the course, which is untraditional in almost every sense. It is not wedded to one particular style or look and even has a ‘19th hole’ which allows them to close another hole for renovation. 

Evans opted against the fanfare of a high-profile architect and brought in Englishman Simon Gidman, who was involved in drawing up designs for the original site. Tasked with revising his plans and building a course of championship status, he crafted three new holes on a newly purchased piece of land and molded the rest from what was already there. In a nod to the Roman history of the local area, each hole was then given its own Latin name, such as Alma Mater, Pro Forma and Ad Infinitum.

The first five holes look like they have been transported from Woburn and play through an avenue of pines and bold bunkers before opening out to reveal rural Hertfordshire. The middle stretch is framed by long swathes of grass and intermittent water features before returning to more wooded landscapes for the final five holes. 

“It’s like a links, but it’s not a links,” says Gidman, a former assistant of the Hawtree design team. “There aren’t enough trees to deem it wooded and you can’t really call it parkland. It’s a thinking person’s layout because there are various ways of playing it.”

A choice of five teeing areas means the course can play as short as 5,507 yards, or as long as 7,084 yards. For last year’s LIV event it played to a par 70, but a round can consist of up to seven par 5s. Evans likes the flexibility and sees positives in adapting to the needs and wants of everyone. He talks a lot about building a club for the modern golfer and has made a commitment to reinvest in the course every year.

Plans have been submitted to build a new nine-hole course and Evans has just undertaken a big recruitment drive to help prepare for the two DP World Tour events, as well as the club’s 10-year anniversary celebration, next month. It is a lot to take on, though you sense Evans wouldn’t have it any other way. At a time when the world of golf appears to be suffering from an identity crisis, Centurion Club knows exactly what it is and has emerged as one of golf’s great disruptors.

BOOK YOUR TICKET FOR LIV GOLF LONDON
Phil Mickelson, Brooks Koepka, Cameron Smith and Dustin Johnson will all be in action at Centurion Club, from July 7-9. Prices range from £35 to £40 for a tournament day ticket and under 12s go free. To book, visit livgolf.com/events/london

About the author

Michael Catling
Features Editor

Michael Catling is Today’s Golfer‘s Features Editor and an award-winning journalist who specializes in golf’s Majors and Tours, including DP World, PGA, LPGA, and LIV.

Michael joined Today’s Golfer in 2016 and has traveled the world to attend the game’s biggest events and secure exclusive interviews with dozens of Major champions, including Jack Nicklaus, Jordan Spieth, Tom Watson, Greg Norman, Gary Player, and Justin Thomas.

A former member of Ufford Park and Burghley Park, Michael has been playing golf since he was 11 and currently plays off a handicap of 10.

Away from golf he’s a keen amateur chef and has his own healthy recipes website. He also loves playing squash, going to the gym, and following Chelsea FC.

Michael uses a Ping G driver, Ping G 3-wood, Ping G Crossover 3-iron, Ping G Series irons (4-PW), Ping Glide wedges (52º, 56º, 60º), TaylorMade MySpider Tour Putter, and Srixon AD333 golf ball.

Get in touch with Michael via email and follow him on Twitter.