The tour course anyone can book
Most famous tournament courses in America are private. TPC Scottsdale is the exception that made Scottsdale a golf town: you can book the Stadium Course, the one that hosts the WM Phoenix Open every February, online, the same way you book a dinner.
There are two courses at 17020 N Hayden Rd, between the Loop 101 and the Fairmont Scottsdale Princess:
- The Stadium Course is the 1986 Tom Weiskopf and Jay Morrish design built for the Open. Par 71, 7,261 yards from the back, with spectator mounds on every hole and the par-3 16th that becomes the loudest hole in golf for one week a year.
- The Champions Course is the 2007 Randy Heckenkemper layout built over the old Desert Course next door. Par 71, 7,115 yards, through washes and foothill desert. It is the course locals actually play.
The honest advice: play the Stadium once, for the story. It is a fair, wide, beautifully kept resort course, not a brute, and the 16th from the tee in an empty bowl is worth seeing. Then book the Champions for the golf and the money you save.
Booking it, and what it costs
Tee times are booked through TPC Scottsdale’s own site. Guests at the Princess next door get preferred times, which matters from February to April, when the good morning slots go first.
Green fees follow the season more than anything else on the Valley’s golf calendar. In the weeks after the Open, when the course is at its best and the snowbirds are in town, reported Stadium Course rates have run from about $436 to $550. From May they fall to around $300, and twilight is cheaper still. The Champions Course runs well below the Stadium all year. Check the booking page for your date: the rate depends on the day and the hour as much as the month.
The closures are the part visitors miss. Both courses close in turn every autumn to overseed the Bermuda fairways with winter rye, usually starting in early October. The Stadium Course also closes for weeks around the Open while the tournament builds the grandstands, skyboxes and hospitality village, and again while it takes them down. If you are planning an October or late-January trip around the 16th, look at the course calendar first.
On the course, expect a cart, a GPS screen and generous fairways. The trouble is the desert between the tee and the short grass on a few holes, the water on 15 and 18, and greens that run quick in season. The 16th outside tournament week is a short iron to a green ringed by bunkers, with nothing around it but grass slopes where the stands go.
Afterwards, Toro at the clubhouse looks over the 18th green, and the patio is open to anyone, golfer or not.
How a flood basin became the Phoenix Open’s home
By the mid-1980s the Phoenix Open had outgrown Phoenix Country Club. The Thunderbirds, the civic group that runs the tournament, wanted room for crowds, and PGA Tour commissioner Deane Beman wanted another course in his new Tournament Players Club network: courses designed for spectators, with mounds and amphitheaters built into the routing, on the model of TPC Sawgrass in Florida.
Scottsdale’s mayor, Herb Drinkwater, had the land. North of the CAP canal, the Bureau of Reclamation owned a large flood-detention basin built to protect the canal from desert runoff, and its contracts with the city let Scottsdale manage that land for recreation. On December 10, 1984, the city signed a lease and management agreement with Tournament Players Club of Scottsdale and the PGA Tour, and in June 1985 the Bureau turned about 400 acres over to the city for it. The same basin holds WestWorld. A 1991 federal audit complained that the Bureau collected nothing for the arrangement (the TPC land deal page has the story); the city, for its part, got a tour course and the week that now anchors its tourist calendar. The agreement runs to 2035 with an option for 25 more years, and the city has amended it several times since, most recently to allow a sports book in the clubhouse.
Construction began in August 1985, by the city project manager’s account, or January 1986, by the TPC’s. Weiskopf and Morrish routed the Stadium Course through the flat basin and built its theater from the dirt they moved: the spectator mounds along the fairways, the bowl around the 16th, the lake that guards 15 and 18. The Open moved over in January 1987 and has never left.
The 16th was a modest hole on paper and stayed that way until the crowds found it. The Thunderbirds kept adding seating until it closed the hole in completely, and Tiger Woods’s hole-in-one in 1997 turned it into the image the tournament sells. Today it seats about 20,000, and roughly a dozen players have made an ace there during the Open.
Weiskopf came back in 2014 with Landscapes Unlimited to renovate the course he had built, resurfacing every green and moving greens, tees and bunkers to bring it up to modern tour distances; it reopened that November. The Champions Course had already replaced the original second course, the Weiskopf-Morrish Desert Course, in 2007, when Randy Heckenkemper rebuilt it as a more interesting desert layout for everyday play.
That is the arrangement that makes the place unusual: a federal flood basin, a city lease and a tour network, producing the home of the best-attended tournament on the PGA Tour, which you can still book on a Tuesday in May for less than the price of a resort night.