Set in the Sonoran Desert and surrounded by the majestic McDowell Mountains, this Tournament Players Club features two 18-hole golf courses. The featured layout is the Stadium Course, and like the original Stadium Course at the TPC at Sawgrass, the Scottsdale edition was designed to host a PGA TOUR event and cater to resort clientele. It is straight forward and maintainable, which Morrish favors, yet it has in it the straightforward shot values that Weiskopf, a former British Open champion and 15-time winner on the PGA TOUR, insists upon.

An honest golf course replete with spectator mounding - a necessity when some half-million people visit for a week to watch the Phoenix Open - the Stadium Course at the TPC of Scottsdale possesses the natural flavor of the desert that lends to its beauty. Saguaro cacti and mesquite trees dot the landscape, and one of the largest Palo Verdes trees in the state, measuring 42 feet, a dozen feet higher than normal, resides at the pleasing 15th hole.

The Stadium Course, again like its predecessor, also radiates a contrived countenance (it began as a pancake-flat parcel) that lends to its challenge and six water hazards, which, of course, you just don't find in arid climates.

While the accompanying Desert Course, par-70, is a short, relatively flat, target-laden layout, the par-71 Stadium Course is spacious, with 28 acres of fairways, and long at 7,089 yards from the championship tees, though carries over the desert scrub are minimal. The greens are moderately large and most sit in an amphitheater setting, but their tiers and curves will not reward mediocre approach shots.
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