TPC Scottsdale Stadium Course

Tom Weiskopf and Jay Morrish designed the Stadium Course at TPC Scottsdale in 1986 on a piece of Sonoran Desert land north of the Scottsdale resort corridor. The PGA Tour built the course as part of the same stadium-golf initiative that produced TPC Sawgrass — spectator-friendly mounding, wide walking corridors, and routing decisions that favored television presentation. The WM Phoenix Open has been played at TPC Scottsdale every February since 1987, and the tournament's combination of mid-winter sunshine, suburban Phoenix demographic, and the famous sixteenth-hole stadium atmosphere has produced the highest single-tournament attendance figures on the PGA Tour calendar — typically over 700,000 fans across the week.

The Stadium Course plays around 7,261 yards par 71 from the championship markers, with bermuda fairways and a slope in the upper 130s. The sixteenth hole — a 162-yard par-3 with stadium grandstands wrapping the entire perimeter of the green — is the most-televised single hole on the PGA Tour and the loudest. Tour pros walk the hole in a wall of sound that no other tournament approaches, and aces on sixteen have produced the most-replayed reaction shots in modern Tour broadcasting. The seventeenth, a 332-yard par-4 that plays drivable for the right player, and the eighteenth, a 442-yard par-4 across a desert wash, are the routing's tournament-defining closing stretch.

TPC Scottsdale is open to public daily-fee play at premium rates. The property includes a second course — the Champions Course — that plays as a more forgiving resort routing. Caddies are available but most resort rounds use carts. The Tour-rotation hosting keeps the Stadium Course in continuous tournament-readiness.

Sonoran Desert climate gives TPC Scottsdale a playing season of October through May, with the firmest conditions in February and March — the WM Phoenix Open window. Summer afternoons routinely exceed 105°F and the course operates on shortened seasonal hours through June, July, August, and September. The desert sunset light through the closing holes is part of the visual identity every Phoenix Open broadcast captures.