What it means
Say “sixteen” in Scottsdale in February and nobody asks which course. The 16th hole is the par-3 on the Stadium Course at TPC Scottsdale, 163 yards from the back tees, and for four days of the WM Phoenix Open it is the most famous hole in golf. The Thunderbirds wrap it in three stories of temporary grandstands and corporate suites that hold roughly 20,000 people, making it the only fully enclosed hole on the PGA Tour. Inside, golf’s rules of silence are suspended by common consent. Good shots get a roar, missed putts get booed, players walk in to music, and a hole-in-one brings down a storm of beer.
Locals call it the Coliseum, the tournament calls it “the loudest hole in golf,” and the players call it the one week a year they know how a quarterback feels. For 51 weeks it is an ordinary short hole on a public course, which is its own strange pleasure: you can book it, play it, and hear a quail. The survival guide covers getting in and out of the real thing.
Where you’ll meet it
On television in early February, in every sports highlight of a Phoenix Open ace, on the tournament’s merchandise, and on the tee sheet at 17020 North Hayden Road the rest of the year. The grandstand footings, the mounds and the walk from the 15th green are the giveaways when you play it in July.
Where the word came from
The hole was built to be looked at. When the PGA Tour commissioned Tom Weiskopf and Jay Morrish to design a course to host the Phoenix Open from 1987, the brief was a “stadium course”: mounded fairways and natural amphitheaters so that galleries could see. The Stadium Course opened in 1986 on federal and city land beside the CAP canal, and the Open moved there from Phoenix Country Club in January 1987. The 16th, a short par-3 in a bowl between the 15th green and the 17th tee, was the natural place to concentrate a crowd.
The crowd concentrated itself. Through the late 1980s and 1990s the Thunderbirds added bleachers, then skyboxes, until the ring closed and the hole became the enclosed stadium it is now. The moment everyone cites is Saturday of the 1997 tournament, when a 21-year-old Tiger Woods, in his first season as a professional, holed his tee shot and the gallery threw cups, hats and whatever it was holding onto the tee. The tournament’s own history treats that ace as the birth of the modern 16th; the grandstands kept growing afterward and the behavior kept getting louder.
Traditions accreted. Caddies started racing the 150 yards from tee to green with bags on their shoulders, to bets in the stands, until the PGA Tour banned it after 2013. Players began walking in to songs, throwing swag into the seats, and treating the hole as theater. The holes-in-one kept coming: Jarrod Lyle in 2011, Francesco Molinari in 2015, Sam Ryder and Carlos Ortiz both in 2022, Nick Taylor in 2024, and, as of 2025, a dozen in all, Emiliano Grillo’s the latest. Attendance followed the noise. In 2016 the tournament drew 201,003 people on Saturday, the largest single day in PGA Tour history, and 618,365 for the week.
Nobody has claimed the nickname. “The Coliseum” appears in the tournament’s own copy and on TPC’s site, and sportswriters have used it since at least the 2000s, but no one has stepped forward as its coiner, and this site has not found a first printed use.
What it is not
The 16th is not the whole tournament, though a quarter of the Saturday crowd never sees another shot. It is not a permanent stadium; the structure goes up over weeks each winter and comes down in March. And it is not, by design, a difficult hole, which is the joke: the shot is a wedge, and the hard part is the 20,000 people.
The fine print
The rules of the Coliseum are unwritten and strictly observed. You may cheer, boo and heckle within reason; the volunteers will remove you for the unreasonable kind. You may not run on the course, though the sprint from the gates to claim the lower general-admission rows at 7 a.m. is a local genre of video. You should not throw anything unless someone has just made a hole-in-one, at which point you will throw whatever you are holding, and so will everyone around you. Bring a hat you do not love.
The record has a 2024 asterisk. On a rainy Saturday that year the crowd between the 10th and 16th holes outgrew the course; public safety officials closed the main gate around 2 p.m. and alcohol sales stopped in general-admission areas. The Thunderbirds answered with capped, date-specific digital tickets, an end to any-day passes and resale, and a second entrance for 2025, all described in the Thunderbirds guide. The 2026 tournament ran its rounds February 11 to 14. The hole is as loud as ever; the week around it is more controlled.
Two numbers wobble in the sources. The yardage is given as 163 on TPC’s scorecard and 162 in the tournament’s record, a difference of one tee marker. The capacity is “roughly 20,000” everywhere and audited nowhere, because the grandstand is rebuilt every year and suites change configuration. Treat both as the order of magnitude they are. The surer figures are the aces and the attendance, which the Tour counts, and the fact that the quietest sport in America chose a wedge shot in the Scottsdale desert as the place to make noise.