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The past 12 months had it all — crazy winning streaks, new major champs, a major-week arrest (!) and more. With 2025 on the horizon, our writers are looking back at the most memorable moments from 2024.

No. 15 — Charley Hull goes viral
No. 14 — LIV, LPGA CEOs say goodbye
No. 13 — Solheim Cup parking fiasco

How the WM Phoenix Open went off the rails in 2024

Nick Taylor won the 2024 WM Phoenix Open in thrilling fashion, besting Charley Hoffman in a playoff to claim his fourth Tour title. Most years in the desert, a journeyman’s win in extra time would be a heartwarming story that put a punctuation mark on a successful week. However, 2024 was anything but an ordinary year at TPC Scottsdale.

The 2024 WM Phoenix Open will go down in infamy — and almost entirely for what happened outside the ropes.

The annual early-season Tour stop in Scottsdale, Ariz. has long been known as the biggest party in golf. With plenty of boozed-up fans and monstrous stadium builds — headlined by the stands surrounding the 16th hole — the Phoenix Open is unlike any other tournament in golf.

This reputation — while rowdy — has largely not caused any major issues in the tournament’s nearly century-long history. Sure, there have been minor heckling incidents and the occasional over-served patron, but for the most part, the fun has been relatively harmless.

That all changed in 2024.

As the tournament has grown in popularity over the years, the identity of the event has shifted. What used to be a golf tournament played in a party-like atmosphere has turned into a rager with a golf tournament attached. If you arrived at TPC Scottsdale just to watch some golf this past February, you were in the minority.

The 2024 Wm Phoenix Open actually started somewhat tame. Thursday and Friday featured crummy weather (by Scottsdale standards) and it helped keep the crowds somewhat subdued. When play was suspended on Friday evening, there was optimism the weekend would go off without a hitch. The weekend, however, quickly turned into an unmitigated disaster.

The gates opened early on Saturday morning, and the fans quickly got to work pounding drinks. It didn’t take long before things got rowdy.

Social media exploded with videos of fans stumbling down the soggy hills. Grown men were photographed passed out under trees and the heckling of golfers from outside the ropes became more and more common.

GOLF’s Claire Rogers was on the ground and had this to say about what she saw:

“I observed more chaos in the last eight hours than I have cumulatively in the last decade of my life. I saw men bleeding from the face, people napping on muddy hills and adults knocking each other over because they couldn’t walk straight. Picture the first few minutes of trying to exit a sold-out concert and multiply it by 15. That’s where we were at.”

One viral clip showed two-time major winner Zach Johnson confronting a group of fans after the heckling became too much to bear. He later told a reporter he wasn’t sure he’d ever return to the event.

“At some point — I don’t know what the line is, but you have people falling out of the rafters, you have fights in the stands. It’s to the point where now, how do you reel it in? Because it’s taken on a life of its own,” Johnson said. “I think the Thunderbirds probably need to do something about it. I’m assuming they’re ashamed. Because at some point, somebody’s either gonna really, really get hurt or worse.”

The 16th hole, long known as the rowdiest hole on Tour, featured plenty of shenanigans as well, with one fan injured falling from the grandstands while another stormed the green and dove into a bunker. Severe crowding in various bottlenecks around the course prompted officials to cut through fences as crowd safety became a concern.

“I definitely started to feel like I was stuck in an overcrowded fraternity basement by mid-afternoon,” Rogers reported. “I spoke with a member of the security team, and there was real concern that people would get seriously injured, especially because so many spectators were getting stuck in the crowds.”

By mid-afternoon, tournament officials took two drastic measures to mitigate the chaos. First, they closed the gates to any fans trying to enter the event. And second, they temporarily suspended the sale of alcohol.

Tournament officials released a statement addressing the chaos the following day:

“As an organization, our fans and their safety is our top priority. Due to steady rainfall in Scottsdale this week that created deteriorating course conditions, we unfortunately had to close the gates at the tournament entrance and stop allowing fans to enter the golf course on Saturday afternoon. The stadium-style course layout at TPC Scottsdale which features large banks for crowds to stand and sit, were soggy and unusable. This pushed patrons who would normally congregate in those areas into high-foot-traffic areas causing severe congestion at key points on event grounds including the entrance and exit. After consulting with event partners and officials, we made the decision to temporarily close the tournament entrance to alleviate crowding in those areas in the interest of public safety. We know that fans with Saturday tickets were turned away. The Thunderbirds as an organization are gathering more details and discussing options on how to remedy their concerns. To the greatest fans in golf, we sincerely apologize for any inconvenience this may have caused as we always strive to create the best event possible.”

The Thunderbirds were true to their word in the weeks to come as they outlined a variety of changes to their operating procedures for the years ahead. However, the damage to the tournament’s reputation is sure to be long-lasting.

“From the videos that I’ve seen, those instances are unfortunate, but I don’t think it’s a standalone, it’s been like that for a bit,” Taylor said. “But I think the cat’s probably out of the bag.”

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Rickie Fowler enjoyed a career resurgence last season that culminated with a win at the Rocket Mortgage Classic — his first Tour title since 2019 — and spot on the U.S. Ryder Cup team. While Fowler’s career has experienced some ups and downs, one constant has been his relationship with Cobra-Puma which dates to 2009 when he turned pro.

Earlier this week at the WM Phoenix Open, GOLF.com caught up with Fowler to discuss his recent work with Cobra reps on the Darkspeed driver, adding lines to the face, popular putters and brand loyalty.

***

GOLF: I heard you moved into Cobra’s Darkspeed LS driver in the last week. What pushed it over the top during testing?

Rickie Fowler: I had a couple other heads that I tried in tournament play. First one I tried at Tiger’s event after a couple rounds of testing. It was close but would see some drives come out that didn’t really feel like that.

So then you start making some questionable swings. So went back to the drawing board. Did some more testing. Had another on in at American Express. Was close, same thing. So did another round of testing and that’s where we’re at now. And feel like we’re in a pretty solid spot. I feel like we’re in a better spot now than I was with Aerojet.

To go back through our drivers — F9, Aerojet were probably my two favorite. So now being where we’re at with Darkspeed, it took a little more work than I wanted to, but ultimately I feel like we’re in a better spot than before. [That’s] saying a lot.

What does it take to tell you the driver is good to?

Fowler: Between this week and next week, some good tests with it. You’re not gonna get real testing done until you put it under the gun. And that’s part of it. I have a lot of belief in this one. I still feel like we can tweak and mess with it a little bit to see how much better we can make it from here too.

I saw you added some lines to the face of the driver. What’s the reasoning there?

Fowler: It’s for alignment, but it also helps me see the face angle, too. Before going up to 9.5 degrees, I was in 8.5 because that’s where I was with Aerojet and a lot of my past drivers. But with the matte and similar color to the face, it looked like there was less loft than there was.

Visuals play a big part as well for players. You start to react to how something looks. If it looks closed or open you’ll react to that. So one, going up in loft and maintaining the same speed and spin characteristics. At first, I was using a Sharpie, now I have laser-etched lines. Just it helps me see face, face angle and ultimately, you know, they’re primarily for alignment.

I saw you have new 3D-printed Cobra King lob wedge in the bag. What’s the process been like bringing that club to life?

Fowler: That wedge and grind started about a year ago. We’d been working on stuff and trying to dial in all aspects from leading edge to full shots to having the wedge open and not bouncing but sliding properly. Got into a really good spot last year at Riv.

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Tried to hand make some other ones after that by grinding soles and getting them close. And we were able to get them close but none of them ever felt exactly the same. And so then after the playoffs, [Cobra Tour rep Ben Schomin] took my wedge back and scanned it and created a CAD file. And then they were able to 3D print heads from there.

That made it a lot easier to get a lot closer, leaving some area to, you know, touch up the leading edge or a few areas if we wanted to. But that just made it a lot easier to duplicate the wedge. And here we are. I think Gary [Woodland’s] got one in play too.

One year after trading in blades for a set of Cobra King Tour irons, what’s the biggest benefit you’ve seen in competition?

Fowler: The biggest thing is forgiveness. When I had them first available to me — it was September — I went out, hit the blades and CBs and the King Tours.

They really had a lot of the same characteristics. Flight and spin is what we look at. You know, having consistent spin and it being in the right window, I felt like I was able to flight these a little bit better when I wanted to, partly with the sole and how they react through the turf.

But with that, they were just more forgiving. I felt like hitting it a groove low or a touch heavy the ball still was carrying a lot closer to my number versus, on blades, it’s a bit more of a fine line. So same characteristics and there’s a bigger sweet spot. So why make it harder on yourself?

You started using Odyssey’s Versa Jailbird putter last year and it felt like everybody and their mother started using this putter. Not only that, they were using your identical build. Were you surprised by how many players started adopting the putter that you were using? And do you feel like you should get some royalties for all the guys that are using this putter?

Fowler: I did all right on course to take care of my royalties with some good play. [Laughs] Ultimately we’re all trying to get better and, when it comes to putting, make more putts.

Doesn’t matter what it looks like. And for me it was something that I felt like I just started it on line. And that’s one of the three key elements to putting. You’ve got the read and then speed. And then obviously you have to be able to start it where you’re looking. So I felt like that simplified it a little bit. I was just starting it on line a lot more consistently. I did it for me and then everybody else joined in.

It was pretty crazy to see how many people tried it, put it in play. Everyone’s always trying to get better. If it’s something like that helps you or frees you up, whether it’s on the green or, you know, trying someone’s wedge, you don’t want to tinker too much. But it’s worth trying things to see if something might be better out there.

You’ve been with Cobra-Puma for over a decade. What was it that initially drew you to them when you first signed? And is it the same thing that’s kept you loyal to them over the years? Or has that changed?

Fowler: It’s pretty much been the same. It was originally just Puma. I signed with them in 2009 when I turned pro. I liked that there wasn’t a bunch of guys wearing it. It was gonna be my own thing — as far as being a part of a small group, not a bunch of guys or anything like that.

And then Cobra came on I think it was 2012 when I started playing their equipment. It’s like being a part of a small family. They’re a big company, they have a decent market share in the space.

But it has a small family feel. We’re all super-close. And then with having a smaller group of guys that are on the professional level we get to give our feedback and input on new stuff. Ben Schomin is amazing on the tour side of things, as well as [Cobra Tour rep James Posey].

We’re able to see our input come in the new stuff and then whether it be prototypes or trying stuff, you know, they care about us. We see it and appreciate it. We’re all in it together, and it’s like being a part of a small family.

Want to overhaul your bag for 2024? Find a fitting location near you at GOLF’s affiliate company True Spec Golf.

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Eight o’clock. And no Lucas Glover. 

Eight-fifteen. And no Lucas Glover. 

Eight-twenty-five. 

Where’s Lucas Glover?

That was approximately the scene Thursday at TPC Scottsdale. Lucas Glover, your 2009 U.S. Open winner, was to start play at the Waste Management Phoenix Open at 8:26 a.m. local time off tee No. 1, only that was apparently news to Glover. But he had a story. 

According to Golf Channel’s Rex Hoggard, Glover said he got a call from an official around 8:25 letting him know of his plight. He had never missed a Tour tee time before, according to Hoggard. But Glover then came clean. 

“I just mis-read my text messages [that listed my tee time],” Glover told Hoggard. “I’m kicking myself but laughing at myself at the same time.”

There’s some good news, though. 

Glover withdrew. He didn’t have to. He also could have not answered the phone. But he did. So Ryo Hisatsune was in in his place.

It’s here where you may have some questions, like: 

— Is there a rule that covers missed tee times?

Yes. For your friends foursome, you get some words. For an event such as the Phoenix Open, you may get one — disqualification. Rule 5.3 reads this way:

“You must start at (and not before or after) your starting time. Penalty for Breach of Rule 5.3a: Disqualification.”

Instruction

Notably, there are exceptions. They read this way:

“Exception 1 – You Arrive at Starting Point, Ready to Play, No More Than Five Minutes Late: The general penalty is applied to your first hole. Exception 2 – You Start No More Than Five Minutes Early: The general penalty is applied to your first hole. Exception 3 – Committee Decides that Exceptional Circumstances Prevented You from Starting on Time: There is no breach of this Rule and no penalty.”

— Has it happened before?

Yes, mistakes happen. 

On a quick scan, a similar occurrence happened at the 2021 U.S. Senior Open, where Marcus Meloan didn’t return after a three-hour storm delay, and Rule 5.3 was applied. On the Golf Channel broadcast at the time, USGA rules official Ben Schade said this:

“Following that restart, we did have a player that was late to resume,” Schade said on the Golf Channel broadcast. “So resumption times, they work very much the same as a starting time that we would have at the beginning of our round where we need to be ready to play within five minutes of that time, no later than five minutes of that time, to avoid disqualification. 

“If we’re within that five-minute time, we would get a two-stroke penalty, and he can play on. So in Marcus’ case, he was not ready to play within that five-minute window of his resumption time, so he was disqualified from the competition.”

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The post How do Scottsdale golf courses stay green? It’s complex but also really clever appeared first on Golf.

The post How do Scottsdale golf courses stay green? It’s complex but also really clever appeared first on Golf.

Over the next four days, tens of thousands of golf fans, some of them sober and fully clothed, will flood the grounds of TPC Scottsdale for a tournament known as “the greatest show on turf.”

The Waste Management Open is a spectacle, all right.

To watch it come together — the grandstands and pavilions, the dizzying logistics of seating and safety, foot traffic, food and beverage — is to marvel at the time and money involved. 

What’s easy to forget is the event’s most vital input.

The greatest show on turf takes place on, well, turf, which depends on many things but on one thing more than any other.

None of this happens without water.

“It’s our most precious resource,” says Brandon Reese, director of golf course operations for TPC Scottsdale.

Where that resource comes from and how it is managed — in an arid region, in a time of drought — is itself a story of sophisticated planning that touches on many of the tangled issues surrounding golf and water use in the West. In debates over those issues, golf’s critics and defenders tend to cast the industry in one of two ways: as an environmental blight that’s particularly egregious in the desert, or a robust economic engine that doesn’t get due credit for the sustainable strides that it has made. 

“The reality is that the issues are far more nuanced,” says Taylor Weiss, an assistant professor in the Environmental and Resource Management Program at Arizona State University. “You can’t just talk about golf and water use in a monolithic way.”

POLICIES AND PRACTICES VARY from state to state, city to city, course to course. In Scottsdale, though, any understanding of golf and water starts at a low-slung, earth-toned complex, tucked into the desert-scape, three miles up the road from where the pros will tee it up this week.

This is the City of Scottsdale Water Campus, a hygienic name for what is, at heart, a state-of-the-art sewage treatment plant. On any given day, the plant takes in reclaimed water from sinks, showers, sprinklers, tubs and other sources around Scottsdale, and puts it through a purification process that few other municipal water-treatment facilities in the country are equipped to carry out. The plant draws from homes and city buildings. It pulls from restaurants and luxury resorts like the Fairmont Scottsdale Princess, which backs up onto TPC Scottsdale. 

Not all the influx is effluent. The plant also treats water from the Colorado River (also known as CAP water), but the river is overtaxed, and the city says it wants to wean itself entirely from it. As it stands, the CAP water Scottsdale uses goes primarily toward drinking. There’s a pecking order, and golf understands its place.

“We know that if you’re thirsty, we’re not going to get water for our courses,” says Gregg Tryhus, president of the Arizona Alliance for Golf, an industry advocacy group. 

Which is where the plant comes in. Fed by a network of pipelines and pump stations, it is part of a redistribution system that is capable of delivering 20 million gallons of non-potable water a day to 20 courses in North Scottsdale, TPC Scottsdale included. In cool or rainy periods, when the courses don’t need their full allotment, the system pumps the extra water back into the city’s aquifers. It’s a kind of closed loop, and it has been in place since the construction of the plant in 1998, though the impetus for it started well before.

“What Scottsdale has achieved is unusual in the country,” says Kelly Kopp, a turf-grass scientist and professor in the Plants, Soils and Climate department at Utah State University, who works with municipalities around the West on water-use efficiency. “One of the remarkable things about it is the amount of foresight and cooperation that went into it.”

AS IN CHINATOWN, the politics of water in Arizona (who gets how much and at what cost) are endlessly complex. But a clarifying moment came in 1980 with the passage of the Arizona Groundwater Management Act, which set forth protections for groundwater supplies that the state was sucking up faster than nature could replenish them. 

Around the same time, Scottsdale was on the cusp of its own transformation from Western hitching-post town to high-end, second-home golf destination. Those courses-in-the-making, and the real estate around them, were going to need water, which could not be pumped exclusively from the ground or pulled from the Colorado River.

Recognizing the need for a more sustainable (and affordable) source, golf course owners and developers, led by Lyle Anderson, the driving force behind such prominent Scottsdale projects Desert Highlands and Desert Mountain, struck a deal with the city to create a reclaimed water distribution system. As part of this public-private partnership, a constellation of courses purchased shares in the system, paying $1 million each for the rights to reclaimed water, and another $1 million to construct a pipeline that would carry it. One of the early buyers was TPC Scottsdale, which opened in 1986 and hosted its first Phoenix Open the following year. Another was Desert Mountain, which cut the ribbon on the first of its six courses in 1988. Troon North came along three years later, and Grayhawk three years after that. The North Scottsdale golfers know today was taking shape.

In 1998, when the treatment plant was completed, those courses, which up until then had been relying on treated CAP water, started drawing reclaimed water through the pipeline they’d helped fund.

“It was a total game-changer,” Tryhus says. “Course owners went from complaining to have to pay to build the pipeline to fighting to get a place in line so they could be a part of it.”

RECLAIMED WATER IS WIDELY used in golf-course irrigation. But it has limits: It is high in salts, for instance, which are bad for grass. By the mid-aughts, course operators around Scottsdale noticed that those salts were doing a number on their turf. They needed cleaner reclaimed water, which meant ponying up in another partnership with a city that had growing water-treatment needs of its own. The result, completed in 2012, was a $70 million upgrade and expansion of the water campus, of which the courses paid $22.5 million. The deal also called for the courses to cover 100-percent of the system’s maintenance and operating costs — an arrangement that continues today.

From a construction standpoint, the project was pursued with three aesthetic goals. “We didn’t want you to be able see it or hear it,” says Brian Biesemeyer, executive director of Scottsdale Water, the city’s water department. “And we definitely didn’t want you do be able to smell it.”

The facility isn’t easy to spot when you drive past it on N. Pima Road. And there’s no sound or whiff of it when you pull close. Only when you join one of the guided tours (these are open to the public on a limited basis), which lead down glassed-in corridors and metal stairwells through a Willy Wonka-worthy labyrinth of pipes and pumps and tanks, do you get an inkling of what’s going on.

The cleaning of wastewater unfolds in phases, starting with a conventional biological treatment, followed by a series of purification steps — membrane filtration, which removes tiny particles; reverse osmosis, which eliminates chemical contaminants; and ultra-violet disinfection to deal with viruses, bacteria and other microorganisms — that bring the water to drinking-level standards exceeding that of bottled water. 

You can chug a glass of it at the end of the tour, but you can’t sip it from taps in Scottsdale. For now, that water doesn’t go into the city’s drinking system (state permitting for that is still in the works). It is either stored in wells, which replenish groundwater supplies, or pumped to the courses in a roughly equal blend of CAP water and conventionally treated effluent. 

Not all courses are entitled to the same amount of water (this depends in part on how much they invested in the system, but also on their irrigation needs). TPC Scottsdale, which has two courses, is allotted 2 million gallons a day (slightly over the 1.11 gallons-per-day average for courses fed by the treatment plant), but for long stretches of the year, it uses less.

“There is absolutely no upside for us to use any more than we need,” director of grounds Brandon Reese says. For starters, along with labor, water is the biggest line item on the facility’s budget. What’s more, over-watering is bad for turf. The incentives are economic and agronomic. 

Over the years, TPC Scottsdale, like many courses, has taken extensive steps to reduce its water-dependency, implementing everything from turf-reduction programs and drought-tolerant grasses to more targeted irrigation technology. But outside of the golf industry, efforts of that kind go widely overlooked, golf advocates say. The game has what many call a “visibility problem.” According to the Arizona Department of Water Resources, golf courses account for only three percent of water use in the state’s five Active Management Areas, or AMAs (areas where water use is subject to regulation under Arizona groundwater codes). But many of those courses lie in plain view, in densely populated areas. Agriculture, by contrast, which accounts for 44-percent of water use within the AMAs (and roughly 70 percent of total water use in the state), is often out of sight, and out of mind. Golf courses, on the other hand, are hard not to notice. And same green fairways that draw golfers to places like Scottsdale make easy targets for critics of the game.

“It has become something of a war for public opinion,” Kopp says. “And in that battle, golf often gets perceived unfairly as an environmental bogeyman.”

As many in the industry see it, golf isn’t just fighting for its image. The struggle is existential. The USGA is treating it that way. Having spent decades investing in sustainable practices, the governing body recently pledged $30 million over the next 15 years to help courses cut their water use by 45 percent. Nowhere is that campaign more urgent than in the Southwest, where the shriveling of the Colorado River, drawn down by population growth and climate change, has forced a spate of mandatory cutbacks, with expectations of more to come. The challenges that experts envision for the future extend to matters far more important than golf. But it is in the game’s interest to be part of the solution.

That’s something to consider as a tournament unlike any other plays out this week on turf that’s been given less to drink than some of the fans.

“We’re extremely careful with our water for a reason,” Reese says. “It’s not something we can afford to waste.”

This is the first in a series of reports that GOLF.com is publishing on sustainability in golf.

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