What it means
In most of America a Thunderbird is a car or an Air Force jet. In the Valley, and especially in Scottsdale during the first week of February, the Thunderbirds are the 55 Phoenix businessmen who own and run the WM Phoenix Open, the best-attended golf tournament in the world. “A Thunderbird” is a man in a purple velvet top with a silver bird pendant on a leather cord, directing traffic, hosting a skybox or deciding who gets a tee time at the pro-am. “The Thunderbirds decided” is how locals explain any change to the tournament.
The word carries weight because the club does. The Thunderbirds have put on the Phoenix Open since 1939, moved it to TPC Scottsdale in 1987, and through Thunderbirds Charities have given more than $226 million to Arizona causes. They are also a closed, self-selecting group. The Thunderbirds guide tells that whole story; this page is about the name.
Where you’ll meet it
At the tournament, where every gate and skybox has one; on the charity checks and school grants announced each spring; in the survival guide, which explains their rules; and in Scottsdale’s own vocabulary, because the city’s businessmen copied the model in 1961 and called themselves the Charros. Locals say “a Charro” and “a Thunderbird” in the same breath.
Where the word came from
The name came off the Chamber’s letterhead. In 1937 the Phoenix Chamber of Commerce, acting as the city’s convention and tourism bureau, picked five young executives to stage events for winter visitors and called them a special events committee. The Chamber’s emblem carried a thunderbird, a figure borrowed from Native American iconography, and the committee took it as its name and its look: silver bird pendants, strings of beads for years served, a president titled the Big Chief. Each of the five recruited ten more men, which is how the club arrived at 55, the number it still keeps. Their first product was the Fiesta del Sol, a 1937 and 1938 rodeo week.
Golf came through one member. Bob Goldwater, brother of the merchant and senator Barry Goldwater, wanted the club to revive the Phoenix Open, a tournament that had run from 1932 to 1935 and died. By the club’s account his fellow Thunderbirds were nearly unanimous against it. He won anyway, sold the tickets and set up Phoenix Country Club himself for the 1939 revival, and the club has run the tournament every year since.
The Scottsdale chapter began in 1985. The PGA Tour under Deane Beman wanted a stadium course with mounded fairways for galleries, and Scottsdale had the ground: federal Bureau of Reclamation land at the CAP canal, in desert the city had annexed a few years earlier. On December 10, 1985 the city, under Mayor Herb Drinkwater, leased it to the Tour; the Thunderbirds helped pay to finish the course; and on January 22, 1987 the Phoenix Open teed off at TPC Scottsdale. The tournament kept its city’s name and took Scottsdale’s address, and the Thunderbirds, a Phoenix club, became the people who run Scottsdale’s biggest week.
What it is not
The Thunderbirds are not the Charros, the Scottsdale club founded in 1961 on their model to host spring training; the two are friendly and distinct. They are not Thunderbird Field, the wartime airfield that became the Airpark, or Thunderbird Road; those took the name from the same regional fondness for the motif. And they are not a golf club. Most members are executives who took up the tournament, not the game.
The fine print
The club’s own history is the main source for its founding, and it has holes. The five original 1937 committee members are unnamed in every account this site could find; only Goldwater is named, as an early inductee rather than a founder. The club publishes no bylaws and no member list. Membership rules, two nominators and a closed vote, come from press reporting. Active members retire to life status at 45, which keeps the working club in its thirties and forties and has built a bench of roughly 300 life members.
The money is better documented. The Thunderbirds are a 501(c)(6) business league with revenue of about $123 million in fiscal 2025; Thunderbirds Charities, the 501(c)(3) formed in 1986 to give away tournament proceeds, reported $18.1 million from the 2025 tournament and $20.1 million from 2026, with all-time giving past $226 million. Underneath that sits a taxpayer subsidy: a 2012 city report put Scottsdale’s net loss on TPC Scottsdale since 1986 near $26 million.
Two silences are worth noting. The club took its name, its titles and its regalia from a Chamber emblem described as derived from Native symbols, and no source records any consultation with the Salt River Pima-Maricopa Indian Community, whose land borders the city, or any reconsideration of the costume. And the Arizona Republic reported in June 2024 that the club had never had a woman member in nearly 90 years. For the party the club throws after dark, see the Birds Nest; for the tournament itself, the Phoenix Open.