It may be scorching outside now, but let’s go back a few months to February, when rain poured down on the annual Waste Management Phoenix Open. The tournament, often called the “People’s Open,” has long been known as a raucous party of a golf tournament. But this year’s event went much farther.
Drunken fans, unruly spectators, arrests and overwhelming crowds marred the annual event. Now, internal emails obtained by The Arizona Republic show things were even worse than previously known – and fans were in more danger.
Sam Kmack is covering the story for The Republic and joined The Show.
Full conversation
LAUREN GILGER: Good morning Sam.
SAM KMACK: Good morning.
GILGER: Alright, so, take us back to this tournament and just what went wrong. I remember the headlines. I remember talking about it on The Show. It was a big deal, sort of in and out of the sports world, right?
KMACK: Yeah, definitely, and it made national headlines. So, the tournament runs pretty much all week from Monday to Sunday. Things kind of started to get a little bit out of control earlier on in the week, not too bad, some arrests, but around Friday and Saturday, the weather was horrible. It was rainy, cold and, things just got really kind of, you used the word raucous, I think that's a good word.
It was it was chaotic. … The crowds were massive. People were, you know, super drunk yelling and screaming at the golfers. And eventually on Saturday, the tournament had to stop admitting people. So there were a lot of fans who were upset, longtime fans who couldn't get in, and then also some golfers who were pretty open about, you know, their annoyance and saying … they weren't sure whether they were going to come back.
GILGER: Yeah, yeah. Okay, so … it was not good at the time, but you got internal emails and police reports from the Scottsdale Police Department about this incident — a lot of them — and they show that things were, it sounds like, even worse than we knew. Tell us what you found here.
KMACK: Yeah, so, absolutely. So, the, I mean, the initial impression was that it was kind of just, out of control, sort of party atmosphere, which ultimately that was what it ended up being. But behind the scenes, things were - the police chief had written in an email - things were close to disaster, just absolute collapse, because of the size of the crowds and kind of the crowd density in certain areas.
So, what the record showed was a lot of stuff. It kind of fleshed out what exactly happened behind the scenes and how concerned police were.
They had to take a lot of these, they, they described it as unprecedented steps, like cutting holes in fences to try and alleviate, like, congestion in certain areas of the course, so people could get out.
They had these, I forget the exact word, but sort of like flood gates, these big, you know, emergency gates that they can open up if things get too crowded. They had to open up all of those, shut down roads.
So, if they hadn't done that, what they said is that it could have been a crowd crush event, which is I mean, that's kind of what it sounds like. People kind of getting trampled and getting seriously hurt.
GILGER: Wow, wow. Okay, so big consequences could have been. You wrote there were also were a record number of arrests at the tournament this year. How many did it add up to?
KMACK: Yeah. So, the nightly reports from Monday to Saturday show 85 people arrested, and then there were, at least 54 of those that, you know, they ended up actually getting charged. We're still trying to get a little bit of clarity on those numbers. The PD just got back to us with some of the nuances of those yesterday.
But, overall, the figures that we have, they suggest that the total number of arrests had surpassed the 2023 event, the entire 2023 event, this year on Thursday had already gone past that. And, you know, by Tuesday already passed what had, the number of arrests in 2022. So things really had started to get bad earlier on in the week, even before the crazy weekend.
GILGER: Yeah. There was also a woman who fell two stories, right? At the 16th hole. Some arrests made, some officers attacked, like some, some notable incidents here.
KMACK: Yeah, absolutely. So the woman, the the 16th hole where she was sat has kind of a guardrail in the back and after that, it's just a two story drop straight down. And what I could glean from the records is she was sitting up on that railing, with her feet on the bleachers rather than sitting on the bleachers, and fell backwards and literally broke her face.
She ended up, it wasn't life threatening, but she had to go to the hospital with shattered face bones. And then that that happened on Friday, and, there was also an aggravated assault on a police officer that took place on Friday.
GILGER: Yeah, talk more, Sam, about the crowd management strategies that officers had to use to avert this kind of disaster they're talking about. You mentioned sort of cutting holes in fences so people could get out, cutting off alcohol sales, what else happened here?
KMACK: Yeah. Well, they, at one point there was a bottleneck of people kind of jammed up at the front gate. So, they stopped scanning tickets for a period of time. Later on, they ended up just completely cutting off entrance to the course, and, like you said, they cut off alcohol around 2 p.m., but they also … they shut down roads around the the event, they prevented buses, a lot of times people use shuttles or buses to get in and out of the event, they they stopped allowing buses to bring people in. It was really they kind of had to think on their feet. And that's, again, what the chief said in that internal email, that without those steps hadn't been taken as quickly as they were, things could have gotten far worse than just a drunken, kind of obnoxious party atmosphere that it was.
GILGER: How much did the rain have to do with this, and why did that affect things? It closed down certain parts of the course. … There was less space for fans to be in, essentially?
KMACK: Yeah. So, I mean, it didn't make sense initially, I mean it didn't make too much sense when some of the event runners were blaming the weather, it was, you know, there were big questions like, why does that have to do with with what ended up happening? But the PD kind of cleared that up, and essentially what happened is, the golf course is huge and so normally there's a lot of space for people to spread out. But a lot of it's grass too, and so, because it had been raining all week, it was just muddy and slippery and people were avoiding those, you know, avoiding the grass, pretty much. So, they congregated on the sidewalks and paved areas, and there just wasn't enough space to hold as many people that were there.
So, things just got super dense and crammed up into narrow parts of the, of the course. And, it just kind of prevented police from being able to get around as well as they could have. And basically when you squish a bunch of, you know, drunken, frustrated fans who are waiting in, in four hour long lines together, things can spiral out of control, and that's what happened.
GILGER: Sam, what did the Thunderbirds have to say about this? They run this event every year. It's a long running event, right? What was their response?
KMACK: Well, so they haven't given us anything specific about what they're changing yet … They did tell us early on that there was, this was going to be a turning point, and that there was nothing off the table in terms of changes that they were going to make. So, again, we don't know specifics on that yet.
My understanding is that they're going to put together an event plan for next year by sometime this fall. So we'll probably have a better idea then.
And then the PD, they also will kind of take part in that and do their own process. They said it's a year long process for them. So, we could see what what changes they suggest at some point. If I had to guess, I'd say early next year, right before the next tournament.
GILGER: Yeah, alright. We will leave it there for now. More to watch for that is Sam Kmack, covering the story for the Arizona Republic. Sam, thanks for coming on, I appreciate it.
KMACK: Thank you.
KJZZ's The Show transcripts are created on deadline. This text may not be in its final form. The authoritative record of KJZZ's programming is the audio record.
