What was the Frys.com Open at Grayhawk?
For three Octobers, Scottsdale was a two-tournament town. The Phoenix Open owned February at the TPC; from 2007 to 2009 the Frys.com Open, a PGA Tour Fall Series event, owned a week of October on the Raptor course at Grayhawk, the public Tom Fazio layout off the Loop 101 at Thompson Peak Parkway that is the center of the Grayhawk neighborhood.
The Fall Series was the Tour’s post-FedEx Cup season of 2007 to 2012, and Fry’s Electronics, the San Jose retailer with stores in the Valley, bought the Scottsdale stop. It paid like a full event: a $5 million purse and $900,000 to the winner. The first edition, as the Fry’s Electronics Open, ran October 18–21, 2007, and Mike Weir won by one over Mesa’s Mark Hensby at 14 under. Renamed the Frys.com Open, it produced two playoffs: Cameron Beckman, 176th on the money list and headed for Q-school, shot a Sunday 63 and beat Kevin Sutherland on the second extra hole in October 2008; and Troy Matteson shot 61–61 in the middle rounds of October 2009, a Tour record 122 for 36 holes, bogeyed the last two to fall into a playoff, and beat Jamie Lovemark and a 20-year-old Rickie Fowler on the second extra hole.
Then it left. Fry’s had wanted its tournament near headquarters for years, and in October 2009 the company and the Tour moved it to CordeValle in California for 2010; it lives on as the Procore Championship in Napa. Grayhawk’s tournament story is longer than three years, and the rest of this page covers it.
Playing the history
Grayhawk is public, unusual among Scottsdale’s tournament courses, and you can stand on the tournament’s greens for the price of a tee time.
Which course. Every PGA Tour round, the Williams World Challenge and all three NCAA championships were on the Raptor; the Talon hosted the 1995 Andersen Consulting final. The Raptor is Fazio at his most muscular, 7,289 yards at par 70 for the NCAA men; you will play it as a par 72 from shorter tees. The 17th, a par 4, is where Beckman’s 2008 playoff ended when Sutherland’s approach flew the cart path. The 18th green sits below the clubhouse patios, which is where the galleries stood.
When. The tournament ran in the third and fourth weeks of October, which is also the best time to play: the overseed has come in, mornings are in the 50s and afternoons in the 80s. The course closes for a stretch in early October for seeding; book after it reopens. Summer rates from late May are the other bargain. Our golf without a membership note covers the booking rhythm.
Getting there. From Old Town, Pima Road or the Loop 101 north to Thompson Peak Parkway, about 25 minutes.
After. Quill Creek on the clubhouse patio faces the McDowells and the 18th. Isabella’s Kitchen and Phil’s Grill, named for Phil Mickelson, Grayhawk’s original ambassador, round out the clubhouse; all three serve non-golfers.
Grayhawk’s thirty years of tournaments
Grayhawk opened the Talon in 1994 and the Raptor in 1995 as a daily-fee club with national ambitions, and it got a world championship almost at once. The Andersen Consulting World Championship of Golf was a yearlong match-play event whose finals, with $1 million to the winner, were played at Grayhawk: Barry Lane beat David Frost 2 up on the Talon in December 1995, Greg Norman beat Scott Hoch 1 up in January 1997, and Colin Montgomerie beat Davis Love III 2 up on the Raptor in January 1998. In 1999 the event became the 64-man WGC Match Play at La Costa, and Grayhawk’s run was over. The loss was softened in January 2000, when Tiger Woods chose the Raptor for the first Williams World Challenge, his 12-man invitational. Tom Lehman, playing at home, beat David Duval by three; Woods finished tenth. The event moved to Sherwood that December and is now the Hero World Challenge.
The club then built its junior reputation. The Thunderbird International Junior, an AJGA invitational backed by the Thunderbirds, the Phoenix Open’s hosts, brought 78 of the world’s best juniors to Grayhawk every Memorial Day weekend from 2000 to 2019; its champions include Ariya Jutanugarn. The Tommy Bahama Challenge, a televised team match, played the Raptor in 2004 and 2005, and from 1996 to 2012 the course hosted the Phoenix Open’s pro-ams.
The Tour arrived in 2007, and the three Frys.com Opens are the peak of the record. Their legacy was the proof: a public course in a Scottsdale subdivision could stage a $5 million tour event. When the NCAA went looking in 2017 for one site to host its Division I men’s and women’s championships three years running, the first such award in its history, it chose Grayhawk for 2020–2022, with Arizona State as host. The pandemic erased 2020; the NCAA added 2023, and the Raptor delivered three finals: Pepperdine and Ole Miss in 2021, Rose Zhang’s back-to-back individual titles in 2022 and 2023, Florida and Wake Forest in the last year.
What it says about Scottsdale golf
Scottsdale’s tournament history is mostly private: The Tradition at Desert Mountain, the Schwab Cup years on Cochise. Grayhawk is the exception, a daily-fee club in a family suburb that kept getting chosen because it had a clubhouse, a freeway exit and a Fazio course that could be stretched to 7,300 yards. The Frys.com Open left because its sponsor lived in San Jose, not because Scottsdale failed it, and the NCAA’s three years were the vindication.
The honest footnote: we could not find ticket prices or attendance figures for the 2007–2009 tournaments in any source we trust, so this page leaves them out. What it can offer is the course, open to anyone with a tee time, in the same week of October the Tour used to come.