A golf course superintendent in the Arizona desert keeps the only fully enclosed hole on the PGA Tour alive: the 16th at TPC Scottsdale, where a twenty-thousand-seat stadium is built around one green every year, then torn down again.
It starts with a lie the crew tells the desert. The base grass out there is bermuda, and bermuda goes dormant and brown in the winter, exactly when the Phoenix Open is played in February. So every fall the crew overseeds the whole course — creeping bentgrass, Poa trivialis and perennial ryegrass on the greens — right on top of the sleeping bermuda, so the sixteenth is emerald and rolling fast while the real desert around it is the color of a paper bag.