What it means
Troon is north Scottsdale’s golf word. Out in the boulder fields around Pinnacle Peak, it names a private country club and its neighborhood; with “North” attached, it names two of the most celebrated public desert courses in the country and the homes and resort that grew up around them. “We live in Troon” and “we played Troon North” are two different sentences, and locals hear the difference.
The district is the high, rocky end of the city: saguaros, granite boulders stacked like abandoned building blocks, and fairways threaded between them. It is the far north’s luxury core, with the Four Seasons at Troon North tucked below the peak. The name also travels. Golfers elsewhere in the country and abroad may know “Troon” first as the company that runs their club, which began here.
The neighborhood, restaurants and drive times are in the Pinnacle Peak and Troon guide, and how to get a tee time without a membership is in golf without a membership. This page is about the name.
Where you’ll meet it
Real estate listings (“Troon Village,” “Troon North”), golf rankings, the Four Seasons’ address, the Pinnacle Peak Park trailhead neighborhood, and the logo on golf-cart barns worldwide.
Where the word came from
The name is borrowed from Royal Troon, the links on Scotland’s Ayrshire coast that hosts the Open Championship. In 1973 the American Tom Weiskopf won the Open there by three shots over Johnny Miller and Neil Coles. When Weiskopf partnered with architect Jay Morrish in the mid-1980s and took on his first design, a private club in the desert below Pinnacle Peak, he named it for the course that gave him his only major. Troon Country Club opened in 1986, the same year the pair’s Stadium Course at TPC Scottsdale was built.
The second Troon followed quickly. Troon North, a public golf club a few miles away, opened its Monument course in 1990, also by Weiskopf and Morrish. The course takes its own name from a giant boulder in the middle of the third fairway, which, the story goes, construction crews tried to move and then simply played around. A second course, Pinnacle, opened in the mid-1990s; sources give both 1995 and 1996.
The third Troon is a company. Dana Garmany, who helped build Troon North for developer Jerry Nelson and his Japanese partners, set up a payroll company to shield the partners from employer liability and trademarked the name Troon Golf for it in 1990. It turned into a business managing upscale courses for other owners and is now headquartered in Scottsdale with offices across the country and abroad.
What it is not
Troon is not Desert Mountain, the larger private golf community farther north near Carefree, and it is not Pinnacle Peak itself, the granite summit with a city park. And Troon North is not part of Troon Country Club; they are separate clubs that share a designer and a name.
The fine print
The land had residents long before the golfers. Archaeologists examined an extensive Upland Hohokam settlement, the Pinnacle Peak Village site, about two miles east of Pinnacle Peak and Pima roads, first in 1963 and again during the development of Troon Village in the 1980s; it held pit houses, pottery and food preparation areas, according to the Scottsdale historian Joan Fudala.
The courses helped define desert golf as a genre: turf only where the ball should land, native desert everywhere else, and holes routed around boulders rather than through them. Troon North’s Monument and Pinnacle courses regularly appear in rankings of Arizona’s best courses.
The company’s scale is the strangest part of the story. A payroll entity created for one Scottsdale golf club grew into one of the largest golf management companies in the world, so that the name of a Scottish seaside town, borrowed by an American Open champion for a desert course, now hangs on clubhouses on several continents.