Why do so many PGA Tour pros call Scottsdale's Whisper Rock their home course? Great golf is just part of the explanation
Saturday morning: eggs chorizo and a heaping side order of Gary McCord, who definitely comes scrambled. All eight chairs at the table are occupied, meaning the CBS golf analyst has a live audience as he talks about meetings with Gregg Tryhus in the formative days of Whisper Rock GC.
"He calls me in and says, 'I need you to get out there and beat the bushes, get us some members,' and of course, I still haven't asked him how much it will cost to join this club," McCord recalls. "So we're finishing up and he says, 'By the way, I'm gonna need your check immediately.' I stopped and I'm like, 'For what?' And Gregg says, 'For your membership.' He tells me he needs my check more than anyone else's."
There are nine TVs in the grill room at Whisper Rock. McCord isn't competing with any of them. "First of all, this is the land of the freebie," Chief Bush Beater quips. "You've got an area of the United States that is inundated with golf courses, and every golf pro walks up with his hand out. You've got a hundred courses that would give a guy like Kevin Streelman a free membership, and I'm talking to a guy who needs a check for $100,000 in 10 days. A hundred thousand! Are you [bleeping] nuts?"
Tryhus, a Scottsdale land developer who five years earlier had founded Grayhawk GC, a 36-hole public complex nine miles south, calmly explained his vision of the ultimate private club. Everybody pays the initiation fee, he told McCord, because everybody who walks through the door will do so with the same rights and privileges. There will be absolutely no preferential treatment. In fact, the guys who mow the grass and shine the shoes will be treated with the same high level of respect as the gym teacher with a 16-handicap or the tour pro who won $5 million last year.
It is a club. Fairness rules. Otherwise, you might as well impose a caste system and strictly prohibit camaraderie and good manners. "By that point I could tell there wasn't going to be any discussion or an argument," McCord says. "He really does want my money. I'm like, 'Come on! Help me out here!' The most I ever made on the tour was $68,000. You want members? I'll take the banner and run into town naked with it!"
Drastic times call for drastic measures—thank goodness this wasn't one of them. McCord wrote his check, as have more than two dozen others who play the game for a living, a group that includes Phil Mickelson, Geoff Ogilvy, Paul Casey, Aaron Baddeley, Tim Herron and Billy Mayfair. Bob Ford, the longtime head pro at Oakmont and Seminole, has called Whisper Rock the best golf club in America west of the Mississippi. They might need to move that river a little further east.
Since a fully clothed McCord and the rest of the original recruits committed to what began as an 18-hole club eight years ago, Tryhus' ideals have prospered in ways the owner himself probably couldn't have imagined. "The minute you start holding a beauty contest, you're done," he says. "Everyone is equal, not just the members, but the staff. It is crucial to our foundation."
Equality and quality. Neither functions as well without the other, and if some find it hard to believe that so many of the world's best golfers embrace the premise, it actually makes a ton of sense. Yes, tour pros like to be pampered, but not at someone else's expense. In the game at which they excel, you are what you shoot—no exceptions on the scorecard, either.
Besides, for all the hero worship that exists at every PGA Tour event, Whisper Rock is where humility prevails, where business becomes a game again. "It's a place that makes you feel like golfing," is how Herron puts it.
"There is an amazingly minimal amount of ego at the club," says Jim Mackay, Mickelson's longtime caddie and a member since 2003. Mackay grew up in Florida, where he played every day, then earned a scholarship to Columbus (Ga.) College, where he was a third-team Division II All-American, but he basically had lost all interest in his own bag before moving to Arizona.
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- Golf World,
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