The Waste Management Phoenix Open is golf’s most democratic and obscene event

“We’re just here to try and get weird.”

He is from Sacramento and the earth wants him to fall. The earth wants him to fall because he is drunk in the middle of the desert with 200,000 of his friends in an American flag blazer, hammered. He is a crime against the concept of equilibrium teetering in his American flag shoes at one in the afternoon, bumping into me ever so slightly like an antenna in the wind.

He looks like Macklemore’s younger brother, Chad. Chad Macklemore is mostly winning the fight against the earth and gravity trying to pull him down. His buddies all wore the jackets, too, though he had to freelance for the blue pants checked with white stars. The sunglasses are wraparounds, his hair is gelled back, and he wants nothing more than a Rickie Fowler autograph.

“It would make my day, dude. It would just make this whole day if I got a Rickie Fowler autograph.”

He staggers in a little, then back out, and checks his phone blankly.

“It would just make my whole day.”

Three men standing next to us wearing identical blue T-shirts with white gothic lettering reading “DILLY DILLY” nod. I ask Chad Macklemore how he plans to get Fowler’s autograph. He answers by telling me how he woke up this morning. This has nothing to do with Rickie Fowler or an autograph.

“The first thing I did this morning was shotgun a beer and jump into the pool. I already got interviewed for it by a TV crew, it’s crazy. My dad saw it.”

What did your dad think?

“He said he was jealous and he should be. Hey, who’s that?”

“That’s Tony Finau.”

“Oh, I don’t know him.”

Finau steps onto the tee box and lines up his drive. The 10th hole stretches out in front of him. The TPC Scottsdale course does not hide the desert: It winds green belts of grass around it, laying down neat paths of turf between patches of native cactus, cottonwood trees, the odd bunker or two, and beige-y barren earth. It’s a genuinely thoughtful thing that thousands of drunk people in American flag blazers, dri-fit golf outfits, and at least five Big Dog T-shirts will trample over without a thought.

Course stewards hold up QUIET signs for comedy’s sake. The crowd dims to a mumble. A stately man in a blue velvet robe wearing an eagle medallion stands watch opposite the tee box. Chad Macklemore — who says he does something with hospitals and the insurance industry during the week — pauses for a second. Finau cracks a passable drive into the green part of the course, and Chad bellows out:

“HEY LET’S GET IT TONAAAYYYYY!”

The man in the jacket is an unarrested free crime against nature. He should not be upright after drinking this much, and certainly not in the desert, where there should not be a golf course, or a giant series of water hazards, or a stadium set up around those water hazards, or bars? There are three bars, and over 200,000 people drunk as hell out in the blasting sunlight of the desert where maybe there shouldn’t be people at all, and especially not Chad Macklemore, who should not be standing or have gotten into the stands at 16 yesterday, but who waltzed in with his friends after he bribed a security guard.

“Eighty bucks and we were in. He was chill.”

The first thing to know about the Waste Management Phoenix Open is that the sponsorship and name is a hard troll from the start. Waste Management — the kind of dark, billion-dollar corporate megalith that should absolutely sponsor a golf tournament advertising itself as “green” in the middle of the desert on a golf course — is headquartered in Houston. Its chief competitor, Republic Industries, is a six-minute, 2.9-mile drive away from the tournament’s home at TPC Scottsdale.

That pissing contest between two giant corporations mutated what was already a rowdy tournament into ... this thing, this beast, which is either the PGA Tour’s biggest event by attendance, a carbuncle on golf’s ass, the only real capital-P People’s Tourney on the tour, or the apogee of all Caucasian American leisure aspiration crammed into the space of what is mostly just three holes of golf in the sun-scorched Phoenix suburbs.

Only one of these is non-debatable. In a sport where attendance is a plebeian concern, the Waste Management Phoenix Open is a giddily nouveau-riche exception to the rule. In 2006, 365,000 people showed up for the entire length of the tournament. This year, a tipsy 216,818 showed up on Saturday alone, with 719,000 showing up for the week. If we use Minneapolis’s own accounting, the Waste Management Phoenix Open turned out more people than the Super Bowl did.

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Most of those people never get much farther than a hundred yards past the gates. Some don’t even get that far. The buses driving in from Arizona State and beyond spill out slam-drunk undergrads onto the pavement at 9 a.m. The police give fair warning to underage kids that they’ll be ticketed if they leave the vehicle. The firefighters wait with IVs at the ready. If someone is too drunk for the Waste Management Phoenix Open — and dear god, would that be a level of intoxication indiscernible from actual damnation — the drunk tank next to the jail nearby has snacks, a TV, and some chairs waiting. They don’t want anyone to go to jail, but this is Arizona. Jail, if you’re not a pleasant drunk, is always an option.

The crowd that does make it inside barely moves past the gates. The 18th hole is right there on entry, with at least three bars along one side, stands and suites set up along the other, and access to the 17th and the giant white arena built up around the 16th hole beyond it. People sort of bleed over and past the final turn, mostly onto the 10th, where I see Phil Mickelson walking up the fairway on Friday in a pair of shiny pants. A woman yells from the crowd.

“LUV YA PHIL! LOOKIN’ GOOD IN THEM PANTS!”

Phil tips his hat and gives a nervous smile. Mickelson is an Arizona State graduate but even he’s not completely comfortable with the humanity creeping in on all sides. At other events golfers get at least an attempt at silence in between camera flashes, the overhead hum of planes toting banners, and whatever hiccups the crowd generates. They do not get the full-spectrum abuse most other athletes get — except here, where at the 16th a full crowd is waiting for them. People who’ve been waiting in the sun for two, sometimes three hours to get in the grandstand, or worse: those who have corporate tickets and spent an entire day drinking on someone else’s tab. People who might not watch golf, or understand the RESPECT signs posted in green and white and yellow all over the course.

There are people who will — gasp! — boo. In 2016, Bubba Watson made the mistake of saying he only attended the Phoenix Open “because of his sponsors.” Watson met a landslide of boos on 16. When Watson bogeyed it on his way through on Friday of that week, an audible “YOU FUCKING LOSER” came through on the broadcast. Watson, for lack of a better word, was shook, and with reason. Other athletes might get booed, but at this golf tournament not only are the athletes used to pleasant white noise in the background — they’re now incredibly close to the Coors Light-soaked dude in a “FORK ‘EM” hat who, yes, might be yelling hockey-grade profanities at them.

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Not that all the fans are like this. Bubba Watson practically begs for abuse just standing there. Rickie Fowler, though, gets the other end of the spectrum. The Waste Management crowd swarms around him in part because he is at the top of the leaderboard this week, and in part because he, like a lot of them, is from the West Coast and has worn a flat-bill baseball cap into adulthood without shame or discomfort. He tees off and gets a booming response from the crowd no matter where the ball — lost in the blazing sunlight to everyone not wearing blast-grade sunglasses — lands.

Fowler tips his hat and walks up the fairway to the soundtrack of the highest praise possible from the Waste Management crowd: Someone, at the top of their lungs, yelling out, “BIG DICK RIIIIICK.” He gives no response.

The second thing to know about the Waste Management Phoenix Open is that there is real balance in this ecosystem. I’m talking to two locals and standing behind the stands on 17, just past the hillside dotted with passed-out or merely napping drunk people either waiting for a spontaneous reboot, or to be hit by an oncoming drive. That is a real possibility. Mickelson put a shot directly in the middle of a gaggle of prone margarita-stunned ladies earlier in the week on the hill. They mostly moved out of the way so he could play through, but whether they can be considered part of the course after a certain BAC is reached is a question golf officials need to address.

“Lot of Midwesterners here,” one of the locals tells me.

Her friend is here thanks to a ticket she got because she donated blood.

“Yeah that’s cause it sucks where they’re from,” she adds, re: the visitors.

Where they’re from if they’re not from Phoenix are for the most part cold places — Chicago, Kansas City, Philadelphia, Boston, Toronto. They wear chicken suits, Dilly Dilly shirts, matching dri-fit golf shirts with things like THE MURPHY TREK 2018 stenciled on the chest. They are, by a shocking percentage, here for bachelor parties. The Waste Management Phoenix Open is the broheim antipode to the entire Nashville bachelorette phenomenon and its screaming horde of drunk ladies partying by a river while sipping cocktails out of obscene straws.

Bros come to the Waste Management Phoenix Open for bachelor parties. They come in numbers, and usually in matching shirts. They drink beer in a dry place starting at inappropriate hours. They yell out commonly employed phrases from television shows or commercials as social signals. They hold IRL conference calls where they huddle up, and agree or disagree on the attractiveness of passing women. At night they purchase reasonably priced steaks, share creamed spinach at local steakhouses, and drink in Old Town Scottsdale. They all go to bed earlier than they thought they might because golf starts early, and because they are all a bit older than they thought they were when they started the trip.

The Glowinski party from Toronto — all thirteen of them — wear matching orange shirts. The hashtag #GLOWJOB 2018 stretches across the back. “Glowjob” is a reference to an obscure, possibly original sexual maneuver the inventor can no longer perform due to the torque it placed on his neck. Mr. Glowjob walks the course with a three-foot-tall cardboard cutout of his own head. He is getting married; the rest of his crew, which fluctuates in size depending on who’s teetering around lost at the moment, is here to meet women.

“What’s with the head?”

“The girls like it. The girls like the head.”

“Has it helped your guys meet anyone?” I ask.

“No. But girls have come up to me and kissed and licked it.”

“Do you think that’s going to get your guys a date here?”

He pauses. “No. But it’s a cool head, isn’t it?”

They’re following fellow Canadian Ben Silverman. Others follow golfers they simply like, or whoever’s hot that week. Justin Thomas attracts a sizable bro-bolus (Brolus?) when he goes on a tear on Friday; Fowler, Mickelson, and Bryson DeChambeau all pick up trailing crowds through the weekend, too. A coalition of Commonwealth fans in Union Jack-patterned suits and yellow and green Aussie outfits has an impromptu summit on a hillock by the tenth hole. They sing “God Save the Queen” slowly and loudly.

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I hear variations on the phrase “That was the best steak dinner I’ve ever had” at least three times. I see pictures of “the Vomit Dollar,” a pile of money someone laced over a substantial spread of vomit on a hillside just to see if someone would touch it. I see one guy with his boys, sitting on the burnt brown trampled grass, slowly pulling the lace of a Converse all star while his friend talks to a girl. I watch a guy fail — and fail spectacularly — to answer the question “Which one of us do you think is the prettiest?” properly. (For the record: There is no right answer other than “Don’t make me choose!”)

It’s all very problematic and also sort of chaste at the same time, or at least as chaste as an event with 200,000 drunk people at once can be. The bachelor parties are here for the dirtiest version of a safe-ish good time you can get: A drunk golf tournament where men show out for men, the women show out for women, and they leave for mostly separate quarters.

Even most of the fights happen by some kind of rule. The guys who got into a brawl during one of the early rounds were wearing different football jerseys: An Eagles fan and a Patriots fan, tussling behind the Bottled Blonde behind 18. It’s a logical, expected fracas, one that belongs.

Belongs is a mood here, for a certain kind of belong. There is so much straight, white male belonging to be had at any golf tournament, but at the Waste Management Phoenix Open — where there’s room to move, to mingle, to clearly be seen — it tips past any reasonable standard of focus on the game, and out towards each other. There are so many dudes in sports jerseys from any league, and golf gear and smoking cigars and spitting in this really theatrical dude sort of way, and basketball jerseys reading “BEER” with the number 30, all desperately wanting something that looks like an affiliation, a tribe, a commonality, a crowd, a friend, dare I say it — a bro. There are no fireflies in the desert but I kept imagining the loneliest bunch of mostly caucasian men in the wastes, lighting up their asses in the bright daylight of the Valley of the Sun, flickering out the same message while buzzing aloft with a beer bottle-can in hand.

Hey. Bro. Bro. BRO. Hey. Bro.

The third thing to know about the Waste Management Phoenix Open: Time exists in the space between the observer and the next two margaritas. There is no time before it. There is no time past it, at least not time worth considering. It is not five o’clock forever here because time isn’t even that specific. That would require looking at a clock, anywhere, ever.

It is a formula and the math checks out. The Waste Management Phoenix Open is its proof:

The question “Why is this golf’s biggest event by attendance” has an answer, and that answer relies in part on that formula. There is a future here, but one that is always two margaritas away; it can get no further, and no closer, for anyone at any time.

That math doesn’t happen in a vacuum — there are some awfully big givens in that equation. People from Phoenix have been coming here for decades now — steadily, reliably — to get hammered and sunburned and see who they see and maybe, just maybe watch a little golf. It is a local thing. Rather, it is a very Phoenix-type local thing in that it has all the expected desert mutant excess: Crayola green golf courses strapped onto the surface of Mars, boozy Arizona State people either living hard on the cusp of graduation or well, well past it, sun-stained middle-aged men living the HGH/TRT lifestyle swole off God knows what else.

That, more than anything, explains why the Waste Management Phoenix Open works in the first place. Los Angeles would never be as devoid of self-awareness. New York would never even consider it — the level of sun exposure alone ruins the formula, much less how even more of the crowd at 16 would be reserved for corporate seats. Atlanta lives in the shadow of Augusta, the exact opposite of everything happening here, save the golf. Seattle would shut it down for being an environmental disaster; Orlando simply lacks the required levels of H2-Bro in their water supply.

Everyone else, though? Why they’re coming is so much less clear for me. It’s fun, sure. But fun alone doesn’t explain a staggering behemoth of a sporting event growing larger each year out in the rocky desert like an irradiated freak of nature, coming closer to festival status and moving further and further away from being a mere Golf Tournament.

The bachelor parties from out-of-town on long beer marches through the cart paths, the Canadians on holiday, the Californians on a long weekend east, the Texans from Dallas and Houston, they’re all mostly white, and mostly young, and mostly looking for some kind of shared oblivion for the weekend that feels wholly like theirs. They can blurt out zero-shelf-life cultural catchphrases on tee shots and approvingly note a themed t-shirt. If they’re a little older, they can follow Phil Mickelson around with their older friends and treat him like a living case study in excellence they can take back to staff at the office, muttering about how he plays the right way while a drunk lady yells about how good his shiny pants look.

It is a place where someone could go to a Nelly concert stinking drunk in a Tommy Bahama shirt in 2018 and pretend that it’s 2003, all without shame or judgment. The Nelly is verified: he did, in fact, close out the concert series at the Coors Light Birds Nest—a tent-based nightclub in the Open’s parking lot— on Saturday night this year. The presence of Tommy Bahama is only assumed, but still highly likely.

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And if the goal really is to get weird, then all the non-natives flocking to the Waste Management Phoenix Open can get the exact type of weird they want: The least threatening, most conventional type of weird imaginable. A Waste Management Phoenix Open visitor will get drunk — maybe just from the fumes — in a strange outfit on a golf course, mostly around people who look like them, maybe wearing a chicken suit, maybe jumping into the water if your buddy dared you a grand you wouldn’t do it. (For the record, the guy took the dare and jumped in — one of three who went in the water on the week.)

They might even watch some of the golf, or wonder how the hell any of this feels in July when it’s 122 and the sun is trying to strip the grass from the earth like a heat gun peeling back the paint on a wall.

That kind of thinking probably asks too much of the math here, the math that says time only exists two margaritas ahead. Just as importantly for anyone who flies across a continent for the complete amnesia of a weekend at the Open, there’s another secret ingredient to its appeal. Looking backwards through time in the Waste Management Phoenix Open’s unique math is undefined, and therefore impossible.

On Saturday I followed Rickie Fowler’s trio, the largest crowd of the day. Fowler teed off at 17 to one or two more calls of BIG DICK RICK!, and then walked up the fairway with his caddie. A phalanx of bike cops trailed the golfers, quietly working a rear-guard action against the crowd.

The Fowler pod trudged towards their tee shots — way, way farther than one would even expect, because somehow in the midst of all this there are still professional golfers, golfers hitting shots at artillery distances with sniper-like precision in live competition. The golf itself is so distal to everything else happening, the crowds so much less predictable than the usual mannered golf crowd, that it’s hard to notice PGA Tour pros doing the ludicrous things PGA Tour pros do with shocking regularity.

That unpredictability was a lot worse in the past. In 1999, a heckler following Tiger Woods was taken down by security. The heckler had a gun on him. In 2001, someone heaved an orange onto the green while Woods was putting — a weird, off-putting moment for anyone, but a legitimately scary one for someone two years removed from the heckler incident. Woods stayed away from the tournament for fourteen years before returning in 2015.

The crowd’s worst excesses have been tampered down over the years with security, but the concerns over the Waste Management Phoenix Open extend past player safety. It’s a cautionary tale for what golf could be when other tournaments see the receipts from bumper crowds and beer sales that would make a hockey vendor blush, and then decide to cash in by following suit. It will grow too big for its own good, becoming completely unmanageable to the point where the actual golf can barely happen. It is, yes, too vulgar for the sport, too big for the city of Scottsdale to handle, and too chaotic for golfers to show up to in the first place. The 16th hole “degrades the game.” The crowd. The loud, drunk, crowd, there for itself first, and maybe second for the golf.

At the day’s end, the chief issue for the Waste Management Phoenix Open is more mundane: fatigue. At five o’clock, the crowd has gone into full bleary child mode. As Rickie Fowler’s group whacks its way over the water hazard and up to the green on 18, the large, collective toddler of a horde closing out the course with Fowler has not had a nap. It is showing. Drunk off fatigue and too much sun, it collapses on the green slopes of the course with greater frequency and with less shame. It wants food, any food, at this point. It wants another bottle or two to tide it over until dinner.

A man in sunglasses, croakies, and jorts yells to a woman atop the hill headed to the concession stand. He waves his hands over one another, palms down, the universal sign for getting cut off.

”I’m not drinking anymore.”

She nods, and starts up the hill again. He stops her, points, and pauses before correcting himself.

“Hey, hey, I’m not drinking any less, either. Two Miller Lites and a shot of Red Bull.”