What it means
Tournament week in Scottsdale has a day shift and a night shift. The day shift is the golf, the 16th hole and the walk from the parking lots. The night shift is the Birds Nest, the concert tent the Thunderbirds put up beside the entrance to TPC Scottsdale for four nights of the WM Phoenix Open. “Are you going to the Birds Nest?” is a February question with a specific meaning: a ticketed, 21-and-over show with a national headliner, a very large bar and a crowd that may or may not have watched a single shot. Plenty of people buy Nest tickets and skip the golf entirely.
The name is the only joke the Thunderbirds, the 55-member Phoenix civic club that owns the tournament, have ever told about themselves: they are the Birds, so their party is the Nest. The sponsored version is the Coors Light Birds Nest, and the Thunderbirds guide tells the club’s story in full.
Where you’ll meet it
On every hotel’s tournament-week rate sheet in the Princess and WestWorld corridor, in the rideshare surge pricing on Hayden Road around 11 p.m., in lineup announcements each fall, and in the survival guide, which treats getting out of the Nest as a logistics problem on par with getting into the course. It is also the biggest single week on the live music calendar, even if the acts are country and the venue is a tent.
Where the word came from
By the club’s telling, the Birds Nest hatched in 1972 as a small party near the swimming pool at Phoenix Country Club, the tournament’s home since 1939. It moved to a tent over the club’s tennis court, added a band, and became the place where the more sociable tour pros ended their rounds. For fifteen years it was a members’ party with a good name.
When the Thunderbirds moved the tournament to the new Stadium Course at TPC Scottsdale in January 1987, the tent moved too, pitched between the ninth green and the tenth tee. It kept growing, outgrew the course, spent some years off the grounds, and came back in 2005, when the East Valley Tribune reported a new tent of about 10,000 square feet for 3,000 to 5,000 people with the patio counted. Otis Day and the Knights, of “Animal House” fame, played the first night back. That is the version most longtime locals picture when they hear the name: a big party tent with a cover band and a line.
The modern Nest is a different animal. The 16th hole went from a few tents in 1997, when Tiger Woods made his hole-in-one, to a three-deck stadium holding about 15,000, and the Birds Nest grew with it into a four-night concert series with arena-scale acts: Dierks Bentley sold out the Thursday in 2016, Toby Keith, Flo Rida and Blink-182 shared the 2017 bill, and Jason Aldean was announced to headline Thursday of the 2027 tournament, which runs February 8 to 14. The spelling drifted along the way; the Tribune wrote “Bird’s Nest” in 2004 and the tournament now writes it without the apostrophe.
What it is not
The Birds Nest is not the 16th hole, though the two share a crowd. The 16th is a daytime golf hole with a stadium around it; the Nest is a nighttime concert tent with no golf in sight. Nor is it included with a tournament ticket in either direction. And it is not in Phoenix, whatever the tournament’s name says: the tent sits on TPC Scottsdale land, north of Bell Road.
The fine print
The record on the Birds Nest is thin where you would want it thick. The 1972 origin and the tennis-court tent come from the Thunderbirds’ own account as reported by the Tribune in 2004 and by Golf.com in 2016; no contemporary 1970s source has turned up, and the club publishes no history of the venue beyond recent lineups. The years it spent off the TPC grounds before 2005 are described only as a return “to roost again,” without a precise span. Capacity figures are the sponsor’s, and the tournament’s own site lists the Nest as a ticket product rather than describing it.
What is solid is the shape of the thing. Four nights, Wednesday through Saturday of tournament week, in a tent complex near the main gate of TPC Scottsdale, 17020 North Hayden Road. Twenty-one and over, with ID checked at the door. Separate tickets, priced by night and by headliner, sold through the tournament. Proceeds flow into the same machine as the golf: Thunderbirds Charities gave $20.1 million from the 2026 tournament. The Phoenix Open entry explains why a Phoenix club’s event has a Scottsdale address, and the Princess entry explains why the hotel next door opened the same year the tent arrived.
As for the name, there is no record of anyone proposing an alternative. A club that calls its president the Big Chief and wears silver bird pendants was never going to call its party anything else.