Bill Coore has said that if he were to rate the property at Talking Stick Resort for its golfing virtues, he would give it a 0.5 out of 10. This was the opposite of the problem he and the Coore & Crenshaw team had faced just a couple of years prior at Sand Hills Golf Club, where the site, a 10 out of 10 if there has ever been one, yielded too many great holes. At Talking Stick, the land offered almost nothing. It was just a flat swath of the Sonoran desert owned by the Salt River Pima-Maricopa Indian Community and managed by Troon Golf. Coore & Crenshaw set to work in 1997 and produced two distinct 18-hole designs: the links-like O’odham Course (initially called the North) and the parkland-style Piipaash Course (originally the South). Both are well built and fun to play, but O’odham stands out for its connection with the natural landscape and its array of unique, memorable holes. It is one of the best public golf courses in Scottsdale and, considering the weaknesses of the property, one of Coore & Crenshaw’s most impressive architectural achievements.
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Take Note…
How flat was it? Bill Coore has a number of colorful responses to this question. One is that the topographical map for the Talking Stick property had literally no lines on it. “It was just a blank map,” Coore told us during a recent interview. “It was just white.” The other is that one time, on an early site visit, he put a Coke can at one end of the 400-acre property, walked to the other end, took out a pair of binoculars, and was able to see the can.
Getting the gang back together. Because the Talking Stick project started soon after Coore & Crenshaw finished their work at Sand Hills, much of the now-legendary crew that built Sand Hills was intact and on hand in Scottsdale. Dave Axland and Dan Proctor, who would soon design a Nebraska masterpiece of their own in Wild Horse, were the lead associate and the earthworks director, respectively. Jimbo Wright and Jeff Bradley were the primary feature shapers. All four were and are masters of the golf-construction craft.
Loop-de-loop. It’s rare for a Coore & Crenshaw course to have an awkward sequence in its routing, but there’s one at the O’odham Course. After finishing the par-3 sixth hole, it’s intuitive to walk straight off the back of the green and onto the next tee—but that’s actually the 10th tee. To get to No. 7, you need to walk about 100 yards in a different direction. There’s a similarly unwieldy walk between the 10th green and the 11th tee. When Cameron Hurdus and I played the O’odham Course in February, we wondered why Coore & Crenshaw didn’t simply swap the seventh and 10th holes. That way, the only long transition would be between the ninth green and the 10th tee, where a lot of players might take a detour to the clubhouse anyway. “How strange,” we thought, “that Bill Coore, one of the best routers ever, didn’t think of this!” Well, he did. We discovered later that the seventh and 10th holes had been switched early in the course’s life.
