Phoenix: This Desert Rose

5 Golfers, 5 Destinations. The Goal: To collect as many Best Places To Play stars as possible in 4 days

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By Ron Whitten

May 2008

I still can't believe there's not a single 5-star course in all of greater Phoenix.

There are plenty of 4½-star courses, though, and during three days in golf's winter paradise, I made my way around five of them. Collecting even more stars would have been easy if I hadn't run out of gas (figuratively), a result of my decision to insist on playing every course on foot.

At Troon North in Scottsdale, officials recently took their 18-year-old Monument Course, a Tom Weiskopf and Jay Morrish design that once ranked among America's 100 Greatest, and swapped one of its nines with that of the 12-year-old Pinnacle Course, a Weiskopf-without-Morrish design. The result: a couple of hybrid "Old Tom Morrish" layouts, each with an older nine that's more concave and forgiving and a newer nine routed on far more severe topography.

Teeing off at 8 a.m., I played the Pinnacle 18 with a threesome in carts. Even with me on foot, we finished in less than four hours. After lunch, I played the Monument, paired with a jolly trio -- a Brit, an Aussie and a Kiwi -- who knew computers but not golf, hitting a house off one tee and searching for golf balls in the brush like a rugby scrum. It was amusing at first but soon became tedious. I never saw a marshal and was forced to move things along myself by letting three groups play through us. We barely finished the 18 at dusk, 5� hours after we started.

1. Raven G.C. at Verrado ★ ★ ★ ★ ½
$134, ravenatverrado.com, 623-388-3000
2. G.C. of Estrella ★ ★ ★ ★ ½ $42 (twilight rate), estrellagolf.com, 623-386-2600
3. TPC Scottsdale (Stadium) ★ ★ ★ ★ ½ $291, tpc.com/Scottsdale, 480-585-4334
4. Troon North G.C. (Pinnacle) ★ ★ ★ ★ ½ (Monument) ★ ★ ★ ★ ½
$264, troonnorthgolf.com, 480-585-7700
Daylight hours on trip: 31.5
Miles traveled: 264
Best Places to Play stars accumulated: 22½
Green fees per star: $44.22

Troon North remains in my mind the first golf destination for any Phoenix tourist. But I'd dock the club half a star because, when it comes to pace of play, it didn't walk the walk.

The next day I hit the Raven Golf Club at Verrado, perched on mountain slopes above the smog line in the far-west suburb of Buckeye. One of the last collaborations of John Fought and Tom Lehman, it's a lovely, playable design with generous fairways and flawless greens. I particularly liked the par-4 second, with an approach over a deep desert hole. I had the earliest possible tee time, and my companions were a threesome of locals, perfect tour guides on the virtues of Mike Huckabee and the abolition of the IRS.