Sports and Recreation
The city is the spring training home of the San Francisco Giants, who practice at Scottsdale Stadium in Downtown Scottsdale. Scottsdale Stadium also hosts the Scottsdale Scorpions, a minor league baseball team in the Arizona Fall League. In February 2011 the Colorado Rockies and Arizona Diamondbacks began sharing a new spring training facility, Salt River Fields at Talking Stick, located on the city's eastern border with the Salt River Pima-Maricopa Indian Community.
Though none play specifically in the city of Scottsdale, all of the "Big Four" North American major league sports organizations have franchises and play within the Phoenix Metropolitan Area - NBA's Phoenix Suns, NFL's Arizona Cardinals, MLB's Arizona Diamondbacks and NHL's Phoenix Coyotes, as well as a WNBA franchise, the Phoenix Mercury.
The city is widely known as a premier destination in the United States for golf. In all, the city is home to more than 200 area courses offering layouts that range from the rolling green fairways of traditional courses, to desert golf designs. In 2006, the Robb Report cited Scottsdale as, "America's Best Place to Live for Golf." The Boulders Resort & Golden Spa and Four Seasons Hotel|Four Seasons Resort Scottsdale at Troon North were selected in 2005 as the second and fourth best golf resorts in the nation by Travel + Leisure Golf magazine. Other notable golf courses in the area include FireRock, Troon North, The Phoenician, and Silverleaf.
Since 2010, the historic WM Waste Management Phoenix Open Golf Tournament – formerly the FBR Open and Phoenix Open, which originally began in 1932 - is now held annually each January at the Tournament Players Club (or "TPC") in North Scottsdale. The TPC is adjacent to the large Fairmont Scottsdale Resort. It is the largest-attended stop of the annual PGA Tour, attracting well over 500,000 people to the 4-day event alone.
Hiking, rock climbing and other similar outdoor activities are enormously popular throughout the Phoenix-area, in large part to the immediate accessibility of mountain areas within or very near the city limits. Citizens flock ritually to local favorite Camelback Mountain, located in the eastern section of Phoenix, just adjacent to Scottsdale, as well as the McDowell Mountains in the more recently developed McDowell-Sonoran Preserve, at the city's northeastern fringes.
Read more about this topic: Sweetwater Ranch, Arizona, Arts and Culture
Famous quotes containing the words sports and/or recreation:
“It was so hard to pry this door open, and if I mess up I know the people behind me are going to have it that much harder. Because then there’s living proof. They can sit around and say, “See? It doesn’t work.” I don’t want to be their living proof.”
—Gayle Gardner, U.S. sports reporter. As quoted in Sports Illustrated, p. 87 (June 17, 1991)
“Playing snooker gives you firm hands and helps to build up character. It is the ideal recreation for dedicated nuns.”
—Archbishop Luigi Barito (b. 1922)