Desert Storm

Once a year the PGA Tour lets its hair down and goes a little crazy at the Phoenix Open

By John Garrity

Woods aced the 16th hole in '97, the gallery at the TPC of Scottsdale showed how responsive it can be. Robert Beck

Did you ever wonder what would happen if all the people who yell "Fore!" from passing cars gathered in one place and focused all their noisy energy on one group of golfers? It would probably resemble a typical beer-drenched afternoon at the Phoenix Open, Arizona's contribution to cultural cross talk. Next week, as predictably as monarch butterflies and Capistrano swallows, hundreds of thousands of Arizonans will migrate from their air-conditioned family rooms to the desert floor of north Scottsdale to watch the likes of Vijay Singh and Phil Mickelson duel in the sun.

But Arizona golf fans are a tad more boisterous than butterflies and swallows. "The Phoenix Open," a writer for the Phoenix New Times once explained, "is half a million people spending a week acting like they just hit the Schlitz tent at a monster truck rally."

Call it a demographic anomaly, call it a mirage, but the Phoenix Open has become the most attended golf event in the world. It can outdraw the venerable British Open by as many as 100,000 spectators a day. It makes the Ryder Cup, which limits daily ticket sales to as few as 40,000, look like a garden party. And unlike most golf tournaments, which are played before galleries trained at the Academy of Hush and the School of Smattered Applause, the Phoenix Open traffics in uproar. At the par-3 16th hole, where bleacher babes and grandstand goofs rub sunburns with Sun City retirees, the flight of every shot is met with a roar. Balls that land near the hole are cheered. Balls that miss the green are booed.

"Golf here is less traditional," says Ed Gowan, executive director of the Arizona Golf Association.

Tiger Woods would have to agree. In 1997, when he aced the 16th during the third round, delirious fans hurled programs, visors and beer cans over the ropes, leaving a landscape that resembled a debris field. Four years later Woods was hunched over a putt on the 9th green when an orange sailed past him. (A teenager, acting on a dare, had hurled it blindly.) One year, police arrested a man following Woods and found a gun in his backpack.

Fortunately security has been beefed up in recent years. Besides, the vast majority of Phoenix Open fans aren't looking for trouble. They go to the Tournament Players Club of Scottsdale to mingle, to schmooze, to party. The biggest of the hospitality tents is the Bird's Nest, a 44,000-square-foot tent with its own food court and a stage big enough for national acts. From 1987 through 2000 the Nest operated not far from the 18th green, but complaints of drunkenness and excessive noise forced a move to the current site, more than a mile from the golf course. The Nest still resembles a frat party at nearby Arizona State, only with more than 8,000 guests.

The Sun Devils have contributed greatly to the tournament, and not just with spirited elbow benders. Mickelson and fellow PGA Tour regulars Billy Mayfair, Jim Carter, Dan Forsman and Pat Perez all played their college golf at Arizona State, winner of six individual and two team NCAA men's titles since 1983. Mickelson, in particular, fed the Arizona golf obsession when, as an amateur and a Sun Devils junior in 1991, he went to Tucson and won the state's other PGA Tour event, the Northern Telecom Open.

But golf wasn't always big in the Grand Canyon State. "When I was growing up, there were only two or three of us who played," says Bob Goldwater, the retired head of the Goldwater's department store chain and the man credited with starting the Phoenix Open. The 1939 Open, held at the Phoenix Country Club, had a purse of only $3,000, but that was enough to attract a decent field of barnstorming pros -- including winner Byron Nelson, who beat runner-up Ben Hogan by 12 strokes. "The idea was to advertise the Valley of the Sun," Goldwater recalls, "and it worked."

The sponsoring organization was a fledgling, all-male business club called the Thunderbirds, whose members set a gaudy tone by wearing silver-buckled Navajo concho belts and tunic shirts. (The nonprofit Thunderbirds donate to charity the tournament's proceeds, which have averaged about $2 million a year over the last seven years.) In 1987 the Open moved to the TPC of Scottsdale, a course designed by Tom Weiskopf and Jay Morrish. "The tournament exploded on the new property," says Joe Passov, a Scottsdale-based p.r. consultant. "The Bird's Nest was behind the 18th green, and that translated into, Come out to the Open, because the best party of the year is right off the 18th hole."

But it was Arizona's perfect climate for year-round golf that began a surge in the sport in the mid-1970s, as Phoenix became an increasingly attractive retirement city. The growth gained momentum in '80, when developer Lyle Anderson hired Jack Nicklaus to design Desert Highlands, a golf oasis in the Sonoran desert north of Scottsdale. Dozens of daily-fee, resort and residential courses followed, and now Arizona golf rings up $1.1 billion a year in direct revenue.

The state's golf boom is actually a housing boom; roughly 37,000 homes a year have gone up over the past decade. Every year 140,000 people move to Arizona, a net increase of 100,000 per annum. The newcomers are not all retirees either -- the average age in Arizona is less than the national average -- and some in the golf industry have seen that as an opportunity to target a different demographic.

"Whenever the cool people are involved in something, it tends to grow," says Del Cochran, developer of Scottsdale's trendy Grayhawk Golf Club. Cochran signed Mickelson to represent the club, made it easy for young Tour players like Geoff Ogilvy and Aaron Baddeley to use the practice facilities, and livened up the clubhouse by piping real rock music through faux rocks. "Our goal was to create an attitudinal kind of relationship with the market," says Cochran. He could just as well be describing the Phoenix Open, which promotes the alien notion that a day in the sun with Mark Calcavecchia can be as much fun as a night in a tent with Huey Lewis and the News.

On second thought maybe it's not such an alien notion. In 1999, when Woods sought and received a ruling that a boulder blocking his way on the 13th hole was a "loose impediment" under the rules of golf, course marshals and spectators put their shoulders to the stone and rolled it away. Two years later Andrew Magee made history on the 17th hole when his tee shot bounced onto the green; ricocheted off the putter of Tom Byrum, who was lining up a putt; and went in the cup. It is believed to be the only hole in one on a par-4 in Tour history. (Magee, a blithe spirit, said, "I know all of you are going to say it was a lucky shot.") The thrills were more prolonged in 1996 when Mickelson and Justin Leonard wowed the Sunday throng with a duel that Mickelson won on the third hole of a playoff.

In fact, the only dull thing about the tournament is its new name, the FBR Open. FBR stands for Friedman, Billings, Ramsey Group, Inc., an investment bank headquartered in Arlington, Va. As title sponsor, FBR will have its initials attached to the Phoenix Open for the next five years -- raising speculation that the Thunderbirds will soon put up a big screen near 18 to show a new video: Investment Bankers Gone Wild!

Anything to draw a crowd.

Issue date: January 26, 2004