What it means
The Phoenix Open is the golf tournament, and in Scottsdale it is a season of its own. For one week in early February the city’s calendar, traffic and restaurant reservations bend around TPC Scottsdale, where the PGA Tour plays what the sponsor now calls the WM Phoenix Open. Locals rarely use the sponsor’s name. “Are you going to the Open?” “Avoid Hayden during the Open.” Everyone knows which one.
The word means more than golf. It means the 16th hole, the stadium par 3 where fans boo missed greens; the Bird’s Nest, the tent party; the Saturday crowd that fills the Stadium Course; and a week of tailgates, shuttles and hotel rates that make it Scottsdale’s biggest tourism event. The event itself has a full guide, and the survival guide covers tickets, shuttles and which day to go.
Where you’ll meet it
Every January and February on the news, on road signs around the Princess and WestWorld, at the shuttle lots at WestWorld, and in the reputation of the Thunderbirds, the Phoenix club that runs it.
Where the word came from
The tournament started in Phoenix and kept the name when it left. It was first played in 1932 as the Arizona Open, during the Depression, and ran through 1935 before lapsing. In 1939 Bob Goldwater Sr. persuaded the Thunderbirds, a booster group the Phoenix Chamber of Commerce had formed two years earlier, to revive it. For most of the next half century it was the Phoenix Open, played at Phoenix Country Club and, from 1955 into the mid-1970s, alternating with Arizona Country Club.
Scottsdale got it in 1987. The PGA Tour wanted a stadium course built for crowds, Scottsdale had federal land at the CAP canal it could lease, and on January 22, 1987 the Phoenix Open teed off at the new TPC Scottsdale. The name did not move. By then “Phoenix” meant the metro as much as the city, and the tournament’s owners were a Phoenix club.
Then the sponsors arrived. The investment bank Friedman Billings Ramsey became title sponsor in October 2003, and from 2004 through 2009 it was the FBR Open. Waste Management took over in 2010, making it the Waste Management Phoenix Open, and when the company rebranded as WM the tournament became the WM Phoenix Open from 2022. Through all of it, most locals kept saying Phoenix Open.
The nickname came from the crowd. The tournament bills itself as “the Greatest Show on Grass,” a phrase that describes its loud, social, decidedly un-golflike atmosphere; nobody has claimed credit for coining it. Since WM and the Thunderbirds made it a zero-waste event in 2013, it has also called itself “the Greenest Show on Grass.”
What it is not
It is not the Arizona Open, the name it started with, and it is not a Phoenix event in the city-limits sense: TPC Scottsdale is in Scottsdale. And it is not one of golf’s four major championships, whatever the Saturday crowd suggests.
The fine print
The attendance figures are the tournament’s boast and its problem. A five-day crowd usually runs to around half a million, by Wikipedia’s count, and the tournament and WM cite more than 700,000 fans for the full week. The single-day record, 201,003, was set on a Saturday in 2016. In 2024 a rainy, oversold Saturday forced officials to close the gates and pause alcohol sales, and the Thunderbirds responded with capped, date-specific tickets the next year.
The 16th, called the Coliseum, is the reason. It is a short par 3 surrounded by temporary grandstands for about 20,000 fans, and it is the only hole on the Tour where cheering, booing and chanting are expected. Tiger Woods’s hole-in-one there in 1997 is the moment the stadium became legend.
The money goes back out. The Thunderbirds route tournament proceeds through Thunderbirds Charities, which reported $20.1 million in giving after the 2026 tournament. WM’s partnership with the Thunderbirds runs through 2030, so the WM name is set for a while; the locals’ name, Phoenix Open, will outlast it.