Why it matters
The biggest week on Scottsdale’s calendar is run by 55 Phoenix businessmen who chose each other. The Thunderbirds have put on the Phoenix Open since 1939, and when they moved it in 1987 from Phoenix Country Club to a stadium course in the empty desert north of Bell Road, they anchored the whole Princess and WestWorld corridor of the Drinkwater years. The Fairmont Scottsdale Princess opened beside the course within the year; the 16th hole became the loudest in golf; about 700,000 people now come through the gates each February.
The club’s charitable arm, Thunderbirds Charities, gave away $20.1 million after the 2026 tournament and has passed $226 million all time, which makes a volunteer civic club one of the largest private funders of children’s and family causes in Arizona. You meet the Thunderbirds without knowing it: the men in purple velvet tops and silver bird pendants at the gates, the name on the charity checks, the “Birds Nest” on the concert tent.
Where to find it today
TPC Scottsdale, 17020 North Hayden Road, during tournament week in early February; the survival guide covers getting in and out. The rest of the year the Stadium Course is a public resort course, and the club’s offices are in Phoenix. Its history is at wmphoenixopen.com, its giving at thunderbirdscharities.org.
How it started
In 1937 the Phoenix Chamber of Commerce decided to act as a convention and tourism bureau, and it needed something to sell. It picked five young executives and called them a special events committee. The name came from the Chamber’s emblem, a thunderbird borrowed from American Indian symbolism, and the first product was the Fiesta del Sol, a week of rodeo, bands and dancing run in 1937 and 1938. It went well enough that the Chamber asked the committee to become an “official” group. Each of the five picked ten more men, and the Thunderbirds have been 55 active members ever since.
The club’s shape was fixed in those two years. It was closed: you were chosen, not enrolled. It was young: active members retire to life status at 45, which keeps the working club in its thirties and forties and builds a bench of about 300 alumni. And it was, in the manner of its time, entirely male. All three features survive.
Golf arrived through one man. Bob Goldwater, an early inductee and brother of the merchant and senator Barry Goldwater, wanted the club to take over the Phoenix Open, a tournament that had run from 1932 to 1935 and lapsed. One history says his fellow Thunderbirds were nearly unanimous against it. He won anyway, and by the club’s account he sold the tickets, recruited the volunteers and set up Phoenix Country Club himself for the 1939 revival.
The decisions that locked it in
The 55 cap, 1937 to 1939. The alternative was obvious and the Chamber was already doing it: an open booster organization anyone could join. A cap of 55, filled by nomination of two members and a closed-door vote, gave the club a volunteer workforce it trusted, and let it stay exactly as homogeneous as its members chose. That is traceable to the 2024 reporting that it had never admitted a woman.
The tournament, 1939. Had Goldwater lost his vote, the Thunderbirds would have kept producing a fiesta. Instead they became a club defined by one event, with the memory of 85 tournaments and no second product that mattered; a tennis invitational and a balloon race came and went.
The move north, 1985 to 1987. By the 1980s the Open had outgrown a members’ club in the middle of Phoenix. The PGA Tour, under commissioner Deane Beman, was building Tournament Players Clubs, stadium courses with mounded fairways made for galleries, and wanted one for the Phoenix Open. Scottsdale had the ground: federal Bureau of Reclamation land and city parcels at the Central Arizona Project canal, in desert the city had annexed only a few years before. On December 10, 1985, the City of Scottsdale signed a lease and management agreement with the Tournament Players Club of Scottsdale, Inc. and the PGA Tour, a contract still in force through 2035 with a 25-year option. The city’s Municipal Property Corporation, which Bill Schrader had helped found, carried part of the cost; the Thunderbirds helped pay to finish the course; Tom Weiskopf and Jay Morrish designed it. On January 22, 1987 the first round went off in what the players called the middle of nowhere, and Mayor Herb Drinkwater had his third landmark of the year.
The charity, 1986. The year before the move, the club created Thunderbirds Charities, a separate 501(c)(3) with its own board, to give away tournament proceeds. Before that the money had gone to a handful of causes, Special Olympics among them, with no grantmaking body. The charity got its IRS ruling in 1990 and became the club’s public face.
The title sponsor, 2003 to 2010. Friedman Billings Ramsey bought the name in October 2003 and Waste Management took it over in 2010. The Phoenix Open became the WM Phoenix Open, a sponsor-branded festival with a zero-waste pitch and a parent club whose revenue reached $123 million in fiscal 2025.
The years it nearly ended
The Thunderbirds themselves have never been near death. The near-death events belong to the tournament. The first came before the club touched it: the Phoenix Open ran from 1932 through 1935 and stopped for three years, and the 1939 revival was a rescue most members did not want to attempt.
The second was a Saturday in February 2024. Rain had turned the walkways to mud, the course was oversold, and the crowd between the 10th and 16th holes stopped moving. Around 2 p.m. public safety officials closed the main entrance and alcohol sales were suspended in general-admission areas. Executive director Chance Cozby called it a turning point, and for the first time in a generation the club chose smaller over bigger: digital-only, date-specific tickets, an end to “good any day” passes and third-party resale, a second entrance off the Greenway-Hayden Loop, all paid for by the Thunderbirds. The 2025 chairman, Matt Mooney, put the goal in three words, “better, not bigger,” and the charity totals went up anyway.
What it set out to do, and what it does now
The founding purpose was promotion: the Chamber wanted Phoenix sold to winter visitors, and Cozby’s own summary of the 1937 brief is “a group to promote the Valley of the Sun through sport.” Charity was not in it. The purpose today, as the club states it, is the charity. “Our only driving force is Thunderbird Charity,” Cozby told Golf.com in 2023, and the numbers back him: $70 million given through 2010, $147 million by 2020, $226 million by 2025.
The shift happened in two stages. Thunderbirds Charities, in 1986, gave the money a destination and a board. The move to TPC Scottsdale a year later and the title sponsorships after 2003 gave it a scale nobody planned: $123 million in parent-club revenue in fiscal 2025, $11.4 million through the charity, an executive director paid $665,605. The PGA Tour wanted a bigger show, the City of Scottsdale wanted the resort economy, the sponsors wanted a national brand, and Phoenix’s business class came along and did well by it. The Thunderbirds grew into a $120-million-a-year event business and a major foundation because the money arrived, and wrote the mission statement to fit.
Who the record leaves out
Women. The Arizona Republic reported in June 2024 that in nearly 90 years the Thunderbirds had never had a single woman member, that the club was seemingly the only all-male host of a PGA Tour event in the country, and that leaders had considered admitting women more than two decades earlier. Women run the volunteer corps, the hospitality and much of the staff; they do not get the pendant, the vote or the business network that comes with it. No internal debate is documented, because the club publishes none.
The city’s ledger. A May 2012 city report, cited in a 2013 lawsuit by two Scottsdale residents, put the city’s net loss on TPC Scottsdale since 1986 at nearly $26 million, counting land, construction, improvements and bond debt, against PGA Tour lease payments of about $981,000 in 2012 and tournament sales tax the city estimated at $4.5 million a year. The Thunderbirds’ $226 million in charity is real, and so is the taxpayer subsidy underneath the course.
The Salt River Pima-Maricopa Indian Community and the thunderbird. The club took its name, its “Big Chief” and “medicine man” titles, its pendants and its silver beads from a Chamber emblem “derived from American Indian symbols.” No source we found records any consultation with the Community whose land borders the tournament’s own city, or any reconsideration of the costume. The silence is the finding.
What it didn’t have to become
The Thunderbirds did not have to become a golf club. They were created to put on a rodeo week, and for two years that is what they did. If the 1939 vote had gone the way most members apparently wanted, the Phoenix Open would have stayed dead or been revived by the country club as a modest tour stop, and the Thunderbirds would be remembered, if at all, for the Fiesta del Sol.
And the tournament did not have to come to Scottsdale. The Tour could have built its stadium course anywhere in the Valley with land and a willing city. Scottsdale won because it had just annexed the empty desert at the CAP canal, because the federal land could be leased for recreation, and because, by one golf writer’s account, a mayor who owned a liquor store was willing to pick up the Tour commissioner at the Airpark and drive him out to look at creosote. The Princess, the WestWorld corridor and the 700,000-person week all follow from that lease. Without it, Scottsdale’s biggest week would be the Arabian horse show.