What it means
TPC Scottsdale is two golf courses at 17020 North Hayden Road, and locals use the name three ways. “TPC” is the address and the complex. “The Stadium Course” is the famous one, the 7,266-yard, par-71 layout that Tom Weiskopf and Jay Morrish built for crowds and that hosts the WM Phoenix Open every February. “Champions” is the course next door, a 2007 Randy Heckenkemper redesign of the original Desert Course, 7,115 yards at par 71, which costs a fraction of its sibling and is where most residents actually play. All of it is public. That is the surprising part for visitors who assume a Tour venue is a members’ club.
The letters stand for Tournament Players Club, the PGA Tour’s network of stadium courses, and the name tells you who runs the place: the Tour, under a lease from the City of Scottsdale and the federal government. The 16th hole has its own page; the tournament and the Thunderbirds who run it have theirs. This one is about the course and the ground under it.
Where you’ll meet it
On the brown exit signs off the Loop 101 at Hayden and Bell, in the Princess and WestWorld corridor the course anchored, on television every February, and on the tee sheet the other 51 weeks, when the no-membership guide says to book the Champions and splurge once on the Stadium at twilight.
Where the word came from
The name came from the PGA Tour and the ground came from Scottsdale. In the early 1980s the Tour, under commissioner Deane Beman, was building Tournament Players Clubs: courses shaped with mounds and amphitheaters so that galleries could see, and run by the Tour itself. The Phoenix Open had outgrown Phoenix Country Club, and the Thunderbirds wanted a stadium course. Scottsdale had something rarer than money. North of the Central Arizona Project canal, in desert the city had annexed only a few years before, lay land belonging to the United States through the Bureau of Reclamation, plus city parcels, that could be leased for recreation. Mayor Herb Drinkwater wanted the resort economy that would come with it.
On December 10, 1985 the city signed a lease and management agreement, Contract 1985-060-COS, with Tournament Players Club of Scottsdale, Inc. and the PGA Tour, covering the Reclamation land and city parcels north of the canal and east of what is now Hayden Road. The Thunderbirds helped pay to finish the course; the city’s Municipal Property Corporation carried part of the cost. Construction began in January 1986 and the Stadium Course opened that year. On January 22, 1987 the Phoenix Open teed off there for the first time, in what players called the middle of nowhere, and the Scottsdale Princess opened next door that December.
The second course had a slower life. The original Desert Course was the budget sibling for twenty years until Heckenkemper rebuilt it, finishing in 2007, as the Champions Course, routed through the natural ravines and foothills. The Stadium Course itself was renovated in 2014. Through all of it the name never changed, though the city’s own paperwork has sometimes called it “TPC of Scottsdale,” and the Tour’s branding dropped the “of.”
What it is not
TPC Scottsdale is not private, not city-operated and not owned by the Thunderbirds. It is also not in Phoenix, despite the tournament’s name, which has confused television viewers since 1987. And it is not the Princess’s golf course, though the hotel’s guests get first call on its tee times.
The fine print
The lease is the document that explains everything. Its term runs through 2035 with a 25-year option, and it is subject to a federal land-use requirement, since the ground under the courses belongs to the United States acting through the Bureau of Reclamation. The agreement has been amended repeatedly. The seventh amendment, approved by the council in June 2021 as Contract 1985-060-COS-A7, allowed a sports book at the Stadium Course clubhouse, with the city taking a percentage of gaming income starting at 2 percent and escalating. The same resolution’s recitals give the original lease date as December 10, 1984, against the staff report’s 1985, a one-year slip nobody has explained; this site uses 1985, which matches construction and every other account.
The money is the argument locals have about the place. The city’s own 2012 report, cited in a 2013 lawsuit by two residents and summarized in the Thunderbirds guide, put Scottsdale’s net loss on TPC since 1986 at nearly $26 million, counting land, construction, improvements and bond debt, against Tour lease payments of about $981,000 that year and tournament sales tax the city estimated at $4.5 million a year. Supporters answer with the Princess, the WestWorld corridor and the $226 million the tournament has sent to charity. Both ledgers are real.
What the record lacks is the lease itself, which is not online, and any public figure for the Thunderbirds’ share of the construction cost beyond “helped pay.” The course you can see: a public desert layout on federal land, run by a sports league, built for a crowd, and sold by its tee time at whatever the season will bear.