16th hole spectacle
Sports memories starting to catch up at raucous party
Let’s get this out of the way quickly for the uninitiated: Hole 16 at the Waste Management Phoenix Open has as much to do with traditional golf as a demolition derby has to do with a Sunday drive.
That’s as true today as ever, but will we look back one day soon and mark 2019 as the year it evolved into something beyond a party on the green? Could it be that over the last few days the sports memories started to catch up to spectacle?
“It’s just the excitement of it all,” Jenny Bockerstette said, standing near the 16th green a few days before the tournament. “I’m sorry, I’m just speechless.”
Her daughter, Amy, a collegiate golfer at Paradise Valley Community College who has Down syndrome, had just parred the hole, playing with Gary Woodland and Matt Kuchar during a practice round.
“That was a great shot,” Joe Bockerstette said after his daughter, representing the Special Olympics, hit out of a sand trap and onto the green, then dropped an 8-foot putt. “She trickled it right in. It was like, ‘Oh, my God!’ You couldn’t script it any better than this.”
By Sunday, a PGA Tour-produced video had gone viral with more 10 million views on social media.
“Gary was amazing,” Amy Bockerstette said. “He was talking to me. I hit the bunker shot. Then, I got the putter. Then, I made the (par).”
Her audience was a fraction of the size of Saturday’s crowd. Event organizers are declining to release attendance numbers any more, but the 22,000-seat temporary stadium that surrounds the signature hole was clearly at capacity.
‘You need to embrace it’
The atmosphere was more low-key than in years past, but it still felt more like spring break than a golf tournament.
Beer sales were strong, with vendors in and around Hole 16 going through nearly two cases an hour. At $9 for a can of Coors Light, a team of about two dozen sellers could anticipate doing about $100,000 worth of business over the course of the day.
Numbers like that are a huge part of the reason organizers, known as The Thunderbirds, were able to post a $12.2 million charitable donation from last year’s profits.
Fans lined up overnight for a chance to get into the stadium early Saturday. A few thousand of them about trampled one another in a mad dash to get in at 7 a.m.
Bleacher seats are first come, first served, and the nearly 4,000 chairs filled up quickly, leaving throngs of people outside, waiting for someone to leave.
By 10 a.m., when the first group of golfers came through the tunnel into the tee box, there was chanting and cheering that would put a soccer mob to shame.
The pros should learn to love it, Phil Mickelson said.
“I think you need to embrace it,” he said. “You need to embrace the environment, embrace the opportunity to do something in the game that you can’t do anywhere else, at any other time. Why would you want to try to defuse it? Or be calm? I think you just go with it and feel the energy of the crowd, feel the energy of the hole and the way the ground shakes a little bit. I think you have to embrace that and use it to your advantage.”
Lefty, playing in his 30th Phoenix Open, didn’t qualify for the final two rounds this year. But his legend helped create 16, so he should know.
“In the early ’90s,” tournament official Jock Holliman said, “Phil was playing at ASU. And on Friday afternoons, there was a tradition: About half the ASU student body came out and sat on this hillside and drank beer and waited for Phil to come through.”
‘All smiling and happy’
Of course, his top rival, Tiger Woods, played a role, too.
Wood’s name is on the newest addition at 16, a monument to the nine holesin-one that have been hit there in Phoenix Open history.
His came in 1997, when he was fresh out of college.
“He was all smiling and happy … he was a kid,” John Vasseur said.
Vasseur was there that day and gained 15 minutes of fame as the guy jumping for joy in the background of a photo that ran on the front page of The Arizona Republic.
“One bounce and hit it,” Vasseur said. “Just crazy. They just completely covered the whole tee box with Bud Light cozies and cans and stuff. Then he walks up and when he takes it out of the hole, same thing happens again. It was fun.”
There’s another memorial at 16. But this one is more temporary — and somber.
It’s a tribute to Jarrod Lyle, who aced 16 in 2011, and died of leukemia last year. He was 36.
“Sweetheart of a guy,” said Holliman, the longtime Thunderbird.
“I was on the hole when he hit his hole in one. He was just joyous. He was beloved by all the players. He hit an 8-iron in. About 10 feet short of the hole. It was drawing, and it ran out a little bit. Boom.”
It’s one of the countless memories that this year had more to do with the people playing the course, than those partying around it.