TPC Scottsdale Stadium Course Review

The PGA Tour commissioned this in the mid 1980s and asked for spectator mounding, which is why the fairways sit in shallow bowls and why the biggest crowds in golf can watch a tournament here without anyone standing on tiptoe. Weiskopf and Morrish delivered that, and a perfectly reasonable golf course underneath it. The land is flat Sonoran scrub with the McDowell Mountains behind, the fairways are wide, water shows up on a handful of holes, and the greens are large and gently contoured.

Two holes are genuinely good. The seventeenth is a short par four reachable with a well judged drive, and it gives most of those drives straight back to the water on the left. The fifteenth is a reachable par five with a real decision in it. The sixteenth is barely a hole at all for fifty one weeks of the year: about 160 yards, flat and uncomplicated, and remarkable only because it is enclosed by twenty thousand seats and a crowd that boos a missed green.

Playing it on a quiet Tuesday in October, stands gone, is a strange experience. Conditioning is very good in season and worn through by August. Peak rates in the weeks after the tournament run from roughly 436 to 550 dollars, a lot of money to pay for the story.