The course with the trophies
Of the seven courses at Desert Mountain, Cochise is the one with a scrapbook. It opened in November 1988, the second of Jack Nicklaus’s six designs at the club, and the next spring a new senior major called The Tradition was played on it. The tournament stayed for thirteen years. Nicklaus won it four times, on a course he had drawn himself, which is the kind of home-field advantage nobody else in golf ever gets.
The tour came back under the members: the Charles Schwab Cup Championship, the PGA Tour Champions’ season finale, was played here in 2012 and from 2014 to 2016. In May 2026 the USGA brought the U.S. Amateur Four-Ball.
The course itself is 7,042 yards, par 72, routed around water and rock outcrops, and its signature is a single green on an island shared by two holes, the par-3 7th and the par-5 15th. It was restored to its 1988 design and reopened in September 2024. What distinguishes it from the other six is that it was built, or at least chosen, to be watched: room for galleries, a clubhouse next door, and a finish meant for television. It is private; you play it as a member’s guest.
How it plays
Cochise is bordered by desert and laid out over rolling fairways with water and rock in play, and the club’s own advice is to think before you swing. Shorter hitters who put the tee shot on the correct side of each fairway get the safer approach; longer hitters get the risk-and-reward options, especially on the four par 5s. Bunkers, trees and rock outcrops can deceive the eye, and the greens are contoured, so being long is the miss that hurts most: recoveries from behind the greens are hard.
The club lists 7, 9, 13, 15 and 18 as signature holes. The 7th and the 15th share the island double green, approached from two directions; the 15th is a par 5 you can reach in two if you will carry the water. The 18th was the Tradition’s finishing hole, in front of the clubhouse where the crowds stood.
After the round
Cochise shares the Cochise/Geronimo Clubhouse with its neighbor: 52,000 square feet in a Frank Lloyd Wright-inspired style, with a collection of Western art, the locker rooms and the Range House for breakfast and lunch. For a dinner outside the gate, Dynamite Grille at Troon North and the restaurants at the Four Seasons are the nearest tables anyone can book.
Can I see a tournament here?
Not this year. The tour events have moved on, The Tradition to Alabama and the Schwab Cup finale to Phoenix Country Club, and the club’s next scheduled national championship is the U.S. Women’s Amateur Four-Ball in 2029.
Why the tournament came to Cochise
Cochise was not supposed to be the tournament course. In 2011 Nicklaus told members that when it opened it “was not intended to be the tournament golf course,” and he had meant Geronimo, which opened a year later, for that job. Cochise got The Tradition because it had the practical things a tournament needs: space for the galleries and the clubhouse beside the 18th. The first edition, in the spring of 1989, was won by Don Bies by a stroke over Gary Player.
Then Nicklaus took over. He won in 1990 and 1991, lost by a stroke to Lee Trevino in 1992, and won twice more in 1995 and 1996, the fourth for a total of 272, 16 under. Snow cut the 1999 edition to 36 holes, an April detail that tells you how high and how far north the course sits. Doug Tewell’s 265 in 2001 was the last score posted here; the tournament moved to Superstition Mountain in 2002 and left Arizona the year after. The Tradition guide has every winner.
The members brought tour golf back after they took over the club. Nicklaus toured Cochise with the new board in December 2011 and suggested changes for the Champions Tour finale: “It’s a good test. It’s a fair test,” he said. Tom Lehman won the 2012 Schwab Cup Championship by six strokes at 22 under. After a year at TPC Harding Park the event came back in 2014, when Tom Pernice Jr. beat Jay Haas in a four-hole playoff in front of what the club estimated at about 40,000 spectators, then Billy Andrade won a playoff over Bernhard Langer in 2015 and Paul Goydos won a three-round finale in 2016. The tour moved the event to Phoenix Country Club in 2017.
The 2024 restoration
After 35 years the irrigation, the pump station and the bunker drainage were failing, so the restoration began underground. Nicklaus Design’s Chad Goetz led a twelve-month project with the club’s agronomy and golf staff: a new zoned irrigation system, a drought-tolerant bermudagrass on the fairways, regrassed greens, new bunker liners and a 75-25 white and tan sand. Every green was laser-scanned and rebuilt to its original size and shape within a tenth of an inch, a few bunkers were removed with Nicklaus’s approval, and the tees were reworked into six teeing areas per hole. The members asked for no new bunkers, and got none. No hole or corridor was changed. The course reopened in September 2024, and Sports Illustrated’s 2024 course awards named it the best modern private course restoration.
In May 2026 Cochise hosted the U.S. Amateur Four-Ball, with Outlaw sharing the two stroke-play rounds and the 32 sides that advanced playing match play on Cochise. Lawrence Allan and Grady Brame Jr., former teammates at Southeastern Louisiana, won it over Jonathan Bale and Tomi Bowen.