Golf is not the only game in town, but it is impossible to overstate its impact on Scottsdale.  In fact, there is ample reason to call it the best golf city in the world.  When Winfield Scott left an Army chaplain's job in 1888 to plant barley, grapes and citrus on the sunrise side of Camelback Mountain, he could not have dreamed what he had started.  The $2.50-an-acre price was appealing, as was the sunshine nine days out of ten, the availability of water, and the ease of creating irrigation ditches.  Scottsdale quickly became his namesake.  Cotton growers, artists, artisans and an architect named Frank Lloyd Wright invaded and by 1951 the city had a population of 2,000.  There were men and women of vision in those early days.  But none of them could have imagined what was to happen almost a century to the day from when Scott's first oranges were peeled.  That's when the Phoenix Open moved onto the Tournament Players Club, almost immediately becoming the world's best-attended golf tournament.  It was merely an exclamation point on a statement that Scottsdale has been emphasizing for fifty years.  "This is a great place to come to play, and golf is the game of every day."
    Scottsdale is now a city of 215,000 inhabitants.  Almost every one of them living in the 180-plus square miles can hear the click of club on golf ball daily if they stand quiet for a moment.  From Cypress on the south to Desert Mountain on the north, there are about 50 courses available in the city, approximately half of them with public access.  Nothing matches this long, skinny stretch of sunny real estate when it comes to golf----and associated amenities.  Forty-five years ago, Life magazine called Scottsdale "most desirable."  Such accolades came often.  The  U.S. Conference of Mayors not all that long ago referred to it as the Most Livable City.  Major-league baseball players frolic in Scottsdale as well as the rest of the Valley of the Sun spring, summer and fall.  There's tennis galore as well as rock climbing, watersports, bicycling and, well, you name it.  With the addition of Mirabel, an 18-hole private facility on Cave Creek Road near Desert Mountain (designed by Tom Fazio) the challenge is out to find suitable pieces of property on which to start on the second 50 courses.  No wonder Scottsdale is home to an unusual number of traveling professionals from the men's, women's, senior, and Buy.com tours.  Then, too, the city is an excellent place to settle for golf psychologists, revered teachers such as Jim Flick and Peter Kostis, and those who design courses (and build them, too).  This golfing city is even the nesting place for one of the two dozen best golf holes in the universe---No. 14 on the Troon North Monument course, a par-5, 604-yards.  At the two Talking Stick layouts on  the Salt River-Pima Indian Community, the glorious past of this region is being celebrated by the reintroduction of plants that once grew wild on Native American lands.
    Yes, it is impossible to match what is done every minute in Scottsdale in the name of golf---they DO play at night under special lighting.  It is a community full of golfers' yoga lessons, vacation advisors, course management and advertising companies, practice facilities and golf schools, and exercise therapists.
Participants are advised that the mountain scenery is gorgeous, but that gorges can gobble up golf balls and prickly spines of vegetation can pierce the best of golf blouses and shirts.  So, there are apparel and equipment venues ranging from the quaint, to the huge, to the discount, to the modern, to the bizarre, all stretching out across the 31 mile South-to-North city.  All of this is not far from the Scottsdale airport where helicopters await to take the more adventurous golfers on a 100-mile ride to try golf amid the red rocks of Sedona.  Joining the PGA Tour event at TPC for spectating is the Tradition, a senior major at Desert Mountain; the Arizona Open at Troon; the National Club Championship for Women at Legend Trail; and the recently added "Scottsdale Swing" of the well-travelled Canadian Tour on March 28-31 at McCormick Ranch.  Almost a third of Scottsdale's seven million visitors annually include golf among the other diversions to be experienced in the city.  There are two million rounds played in the city each year.  In all the world, there is nothing like it.