What was The Tradition?
For thirteen springs, from 1989 through 2001, one of the biggest tournaments in senior golf was played in the far north of Scottsdale, on a course most locals will never set foot on. The Tradition was staged on the Cochise Course at Desert Mountain, the gated golf community Lyle Anderson started in 1986 on the old Carefree Ranch. The PGA Tour counts it as one of the five majors of what is now PGA Tour Champions, and in its Arizona years it was played in early April, when the Sonoran Desert is at its best and the snowbird gallery was still in town.
It mattered to Scottsdale for the same reason the first Skins Game at Desert Highlands did: it put Anderson’s new kind of community in the national golf news, with Jack Nicklaus, who designed the courses, winning on them. Nicklaus took four of the thirteen titles at Desert Mountain. Then, after 2001, the tournament left. It spent one year at Superstition Mountain in Gold Canyon, went to Oregon in 2003, and has been played in Alabama since 2011 as the Regions Tradition.
Desert Mountain is private, and nothing on the property is set up for visitors, so this is a page about a lost event rather than a place to go. The Desert Mountain neighborhood guide covers the community itself.
The thirteen champions
The winners, as the tournament’s own record lists them:
- 1989: Don Bies, 275 (−13), by one over Gary Player.
- 1990: Jack Nicklaus, 206 (−10), by four over Player, in an edition shortened to 54 holes by rain.
- 1991: Nicklaus again, 277 (−11), by one over Jim Colbert, Jim Dent and Phil Rodgers.
- 1992: Lee Trevino, 274 (−14), by one over Nicklaus.
- 1993: Tom Shaw, 269 (−19), by one over Mike Hill.
- 1994: Raymond Floyd, 271 (−17), in a playoff with Dale Douglass.
- 1995: Nicklaus, 276 (−12), in a playoff with Isao Aoki.
- 1996: Nicklaus, 272 (−16), by three over Hale Irwin. His fourth.
- 1997: Gil Morgan, 266 (−22), by six over Aoki.
- 1998: Morgan again, 276 (−12), by two over Tom Wargo.
- 1999: Graham Marsh, 136 (−8), by three over Larry Nelson, in an edition cut to 36 holes by snow.
- 2000: Tom Kite, 280 (−8), in a playoff with Nelson and Tom Watson.
- 2001: Doug Tewell, 265 (−23), by nine over Mike McCullough.
Two things jump out. Snow stopped a professional tournament in Scottsdale in April 1999, which tells you how high and how far north Desert Mountain sits compared with the city most visitors know. And Tewell’s 265 in the final Scottsdale edition was so far ahead of the field that it still shares the tournament’s scoring record, tied by Steve Stricker in 2023.
The money and the name
The winner’s check tracked the growth of senior golf: $90,000 for Bies in 1989, $120,000 to $127,500 in the early 1990s, $150,000 for Nicklaus’s last two wins, and $255,000 for Tewell in 2001. The event was simply The Tradition through 1999 and became The Countrywide Tradition in 2000, a name it carried to Superstition Mountain in 2002.
Watching it today
You can’t, here. The Tradition is now played each spring at Greystone Golf and Country Club near Birmingham, Alabama. If you want the desert-golf experience that drew the tour to Scottsdale in the first place, our golf without a membership note covers the public courses built in the same target-golf style.
Why it came, and what it proved
Desert Mountain was the second and much larger version of the idea Anderson had proved at Desert Highlands in 1983: a gated community around a Nicklaus course, where buying a lot bought you into the club. The first Skins Game had sold Desert Highlands on national television. A senior major, played every spring at Desert Mountain and won four times by Nicklaus himself, did, by our reading, the same work for the bigger project through its first decade of building, as the courses multiplied and the homes went in. Our Lyle Anderson profile tells that story.
The 2002 move did not take the tournament far from Anderson. Superstition Mountain in Gold Canyon, where the 2002 edition was held, was another of his communities. Why the event left Desert Mountain after 2001 is a question we could not answer from the published record. The likely places to settle it are the PGA Tour Champions media guide, which carries each event’s full history, and the Arizona Republic and Scottsdale Progress sports pages from the fall of 2001, when the move was announced.
What the record still doesn’t say
This page relies on the tournament’s published winners list. Several things a full history would include are missing from it:
- Attendance for any Desert Mountain year.
- Total purses, as opposed to the winner’s share.
- Sponsors before 2000, and who organized and ran the event locally.
- Exact dates for each edition beyond “early April.”
- Course changes to Cochise for the tournament, and where the galleries stood.
The PGA Tour Champions media guide, the Scottsdale Progress on microfilm at the Scottsdale Public Library, and the Arizona Republic’s April issues from 1989 to 2001 would fill most of that in. The 1989 and 2001 year pages are where the opening and the farewell belong in the city’s longer story.