Skip to content
Visiting or new to Scottsdale? Start here
Scottsdale.tips
Landmark day • Thursday, January 22, 1987

January 22, 1987: The Phoenix Open Tees Off at TPC Scottsdale

The Thunderbirds move their tournament from a Phoenix country club to a stadium course in the empty desert — and Scottsdale acquires the event that now draws 700,000 people a week.

Illustrated plaque for January 22, 1987 in Scottsdale history JANUARY 22 1987 THE RESORT METROPOLIS

What happened

The Phoenix Open opened its 1987 edition on Thursday, January 22, at TPC Scottsdale, the Stadium Course that Tom Weiskopf and Jay Morrish had designed on Bureau of Reclamation land specifically to hold enormous crowds. After decades at Phoenix Country Club, the Thunderbirds — the civic group that had run the tournament since 1939 — moved it to what most of the field considered the middle of nowhere. Paul Azinger won on Sunday, January 25, for his first PGA Tour victory.

Why it matters

The move made the tournament Scottsdale's and gave it room to grow into the largest-attended golf event on earth, with the stadium 16th hole as its signature. Beside the course the Scottsdale Princess opened that December; together they anchored the north Scottsdale resort economy of the Drinkwater era.

Out where the pavement ended

The Phoenix Open had been played at Phoenix Country Club since the 1950s, run by the Thunderbirds, a booster group Bob Goldwater Sr. had talked into sponsoring it in 1939. By the 1980s the event had outgrown a members’ course inside the city: parking was a nightmare, galleries spilled into neighborhoods, and the PGA Tour was pushing its new Tournament Players Club model — stadium courses with mounded fairways built for spectators rather than members. The Tour commissioned Tom Weiskopf and Jay Morrish to build one on Bureau of Reclamation land north of Bell Road, in desert that Scottsdale had annexed only a few years earlier and that most Valley residents had never driven to.

TPC Scottsdale opened in 1986, and on Thursday, January 22, 1987, the Phoenix Open teed off there for the first time. Players remembered chiefly how far out it was. The course sat in raw creosote flats with a two-lane road in and almost nothing around it; the Scottsdale Princess, going up next door, would not open until December. Paul Azinger, then a 27-year-old without a Tour win, led through the weekend and closed it out on Sunday, the 25th, for the first of what became a Hall of Fame career.

What the desert became

The Thunderbirds had bet that a course built for crowds would draw them, and the bet paid faster than anyone planned. Within a decade the par-3 16th, ringed by grandstands, had become the loudest hole in golf; Tiger Woods’s hole-in-one there in 1997 made it famous. Attendance passed half a million for the week, then 700,000, and the tournament settled into its role as the best-attended golf event in the world and the single biggest week on Scottsdale’s calendar.

Around the course the empty desert filled: the Princess in December 1987, then WestWorld, Kierland, and the whole north Scottsdale resort corridor of the Drinkwater years. The tournament’s own history is in the event guide. The year’s other landmarks — CAP water arriving and the Mayo Clinic opening in June — are at 1987, and the decade in the 1980s chapter.