The billionaire’s club
Most private clubs in Scottsdale are run by committees. Scottsdale National is run by Bob Parsons, the founder of GoDaddy and the club maker PXG, and it shows. It sits in open desert east of Pinnacle Peak and north of the McDowells, with preserved land on three sides, and since Parsons bought it in 2013 it has grown from one quiet course into 45 holes, two clubhouses and a compound of member villas.
The original course, now called Mine Shaft, opened in 2003 as The Golf Club Scottsdale, designed by Jay Morrish and Dick Bailey; it plays 7,579 yards, par 72, with one bunker the club says is 13 feet deep. Parsons added The Other Course, a links-style par 72 with six par 3s, six par 4s and six par 5s, and The Bad Little Nine, a par-3 course built to be as hard as nine short holes can be.
What sets it apart is personality: the club’s single rule is that “no member shall ever impinge upon another member’s enjoyment of the club,” and its member-guest ends with the owner heckling players through a bullhorn. It is invitation-only, but, unusually, there is a path in that does not require a member.
The three courses
Mine Shaft is the original desert course, upgraded under Parsons by Jackson Kahn Design: every hole sand-capped, bunkers added on 2, 5, 8, 13 and 15, the landing area on 1 reworked, the surrounds on 14 changed and the 17th repositioned, by Top 100 Golf Courses’ account. The Other Course, by the same firm, is the eccentric one, 7,165 yards with an even split of par 3s, 4s and 5s. The Bad Little Nine is a nine-hole par-3 course of deep bunkers and hard hole locations; Parsons has a standing offer of $1,000 to anyone who breaks par when the flags are at their trickiest.
How to get on
The club lists exactly three ways to play: be a member, be a member’s guest, or be chosen for The Xperience, a three-day immersion that includes PXG club fittings for two, rounds on all three courses with the new clubs, a tour, a stay in the villas and dinners. Membership is invitation-only and the fees are not published. The fifteen villas, with sixty rooms, let members bring guests to stay, and the club’s annual Wild West Invitational is a member-guest that ends in a final round called the Stampede, played through music, jackhammer noise and the owner’s bullhorn.
Nearby
The club backs onto the northern McDowell Sonoran Preserve; the Fraesfield Trailhead is the public way into the same desert. For a meal, the restaurants of Pinnacle Peak and Troon are the closest.
From The Golf Club Scottsdale to Scottsdale National
Before Parsons, the club was, in golf writer Daniel Wexler’s words, “a decidedly low-key operation,” a course in relative isolation near the base of Fraesfield Mountain, surrounded mostly by protected land and, unlike most north Scottsdale golf, free of houses. Morrish and Bailey’s course opened in 2003.
Parsons bought it in September 2013 for $600,000 and undisclosed debt, by the Phoenix Business Journal’s report as summarized on Wikipedia, and renamed it. Early in 2014 he told the membership that some members were playing too much and contributing too little; the Business Journal’s headline put it as “play less golf or move on,” and about a third of them did. The same year he unveiled a $35 million plan for new holes and a clubhouse and bought the land around the course, including a 223-acre parcel for a reported $55 million, a 41-acre parcel for $5.4 million and a smaller tract for $2.3 million. By 2017 the second clubhouse and the member villas were finished and the Bad Little Nine was famous enough for Forbes to write it up. Wikipedia’s entry puts his total investment at about $250 million.
The result is a private club built around one person’s taste, which is either its charm or its drawback depending on who you ask. Parsons has said the club draws celebrities, athletes and politicians who come for anonymity. For everyone else, the public desert golf nearby is in our golf without a membership note.