What it means
Desert golf is what Scottsdale sells to the rest of the country, and the phrase means something specific. On a conventional course the grass runs wall to wall and a bad shot finds longer grass. On a desert course the grass stops at the edge of the fairway, and beyond it is the Sonoran Desert exactly as the bulldozer found it: decomposed granite, creosote, cholla, saguaro, and the occasional boulder the size of a bus. You play from one patch of turf to the next, which is why the other name is target golf. A drive ten yards off line is not in the rough. It is gone.
You will hear it as praise (“real desert golf, up by Pinnacle Peak”) and as a warning (“it’s target golf, bring balls”). It is also the reason the courses are beautiful: the holes sit in the landscape instead of replacing it. The no-membership guide tells you which of these courses will sell you a tee time; this page is about where the idea came from.
Where you’ll meet it
North of Bell Road, mostly. Troon North and the Four Seasons, the Boulders on the Carefree line, Grayhawk off the 101, and the gated clubs of Desert Mountain and Desert Highlands. The older courses through central Scottsdale, around McCormick Ranch and along the Greenbelt, are parkland golf with lakes, and locals will correct you if you call them desert courses.
Where the word came from
Nobody has claimed to have coined “desert golf,” and the phrase is plain enough that nobody needs to. What Scottsdale can claim is the thing itself. In 1983 Lyle Anderson, a Seattle engineer who had come to Scottsdale to buy land, opened Desert Highlands on 850 acres wrapped around the base of Pinnacle Peak. He hired Jack Nicklaus, who had never designed in the desert, and Nicklaus threaded the fairways between the boulder piles rather than clearing them. Saguaros in the way were dug up and replanted, a program that became the industry’s standard practice. Nicklaus Design’s own account says the course “put desert golf on the map” and made Scottsdale and Phoenix a world golf destination; the Lyle Anderson guide tells the fuller story.
It needed an advertisement and got the best one in the sport. The first Skins Game, a made-for-television match among Nicklaus, Arnold Palmer, Tom Watson and Gary Player, was played at Desert Highlands in November 1983 on NBC, the day after Thanksgiving. Player won. The event returned in 1984, and by then the lots were nearly gone. The country had watched four of the most famous golfers alive play through saguaros, and the picture sold the product.
The 1980s built on it: the Boulders in 1985, with Jay Morrish laying two courses between granite piles; TPC Scottsdale in 1986, desert golf built for a crowd; Desert Mountain from 1986, where Anderson repeated the formula at ten times the scale. Then came the course that made desert golf public. Troon North’s Monument opened in 1990 and its Pinnacle in 1996, both by Tom Weiskopf and Jay Morrish, and anyone with a credit card could play what had been a members’ secret. The hallmarks were set: narrow turf corridors, forced carries over wash and rock, elevated tees for the view, and a scorecard that punishes bravery.
What it is not
Desert golf is not any course in Arizona. The Valley’s older courses, Papago, Phoenix Country Club, the McCormick Ranch and Gainey Ranch layouts, are grass from fence to fence, with lakes and trees, and they are the better choice for a high handicapper’s first round here. And “desert course” on a scorecard does not mean dry: the fairways are as green as anywhere, which is where the water argument begins.
The fine print
The grass is the whole argument. A desert course works because turf is confined to the playing corridors, and in Arizona that confinement is partly law. Courses in the state’s Active Management Areas operate under water allotments tied to their turf acreage, and in arid regions generally, as the standard reference puts it, builders “are often prohibited from growing and maintaining non-native grass on areas of the course other than the fairway.” The look that photographs so well is also the look that uses less water than wall-to-wall grass would, which the industry says often and its critics say is not the point.
Scottsdale’s answer to the critics has a date. On March 24, 1993, the city’s Reclaimed Water Distribution System went into service, carrying treated wastewater north to the golf clubs, which paid for the pipelines. Twenty-three courses now irrigate with it, and the city estimates it spares about a billion gallons of groundwater a year; the Scottsdale Water guide has the system’s history. Whether that settles the question depends on whom you ask in a Colorado River shortage.
The record is thinner than the marketing. This site has not seen turf-acreage figures for the first Desert Highlands course; the “first desert course” title rests on Nicklaus Design’s own history and the golf writers who repeat it. Nicklaus Design restored the course for roughly $10 million and reopened it in November 2025, relocating a few saguaros again. Forty-two years on, the first desert course is still being edited.