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There is something to be said for preparing to do something when you know you most certainly that you will fail. To know there is no chance you will succeed. To have all the odds against you. But this is not a story strictly about failure. Not exactly.
On Saturday, 67 golfers will roll through the famed 16th hole at the Waste Management Phoenix Open, and each time one prepares to tee off or putt, course marshals will raise their arms to the sky, stretched out to the heavens, in the international golf symbol of “Oh, would you please just be quiet?” They will hold signs that ask directly, albeit politely: Quiet, please.
The crowd never, ever will. The small ask of the signs will fail. Again and again and again. And the marshals know that.
“It’s just a suggestion,” Bob Julien said, smiling, on the low success rate of the signs. “It’s something to wave, probably to keep the bugs off.”
It seems at first like a doomed mission from the start, to try to insert too much semblance of decorum into The People’s Open. But here’s the thing: It’s only failure when you do not achieve your goal. And the goal on 16 is never, ever silence.
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“I’ll borrow a cliché,” says Jock Holliman, who will whisper “Quiet, please,” into the mic ahead of each golfer. “‘Perfect is the enemy of good.’ We don’t want it perfectly quiet. We like a little white noise buzz.”
The measuring stick for success on 16 is not silence. They don’t want to stop the crowd, the heartbeat of the tournament. They just … want to guide them.
The golfers who come through know that this tournament is unique. And that the job here of course marshals varies slightly from anywhere else.
“It’s a pointless job,” Billy Horschel joked. “I mean, there is no reason to make your shoulder tired by holding up a sign all day. Just go ahead and keep it down because no one’s going to listen. But, I mean, they have got a great spot to watch some really exciting shots be hit in and also see some unique things in the crowd throughout the week.”
Rickie Fowler uses the word pointless too. Wyndham Clark calls it “a formality.” Tony Finau says he would spend his time dancing instead of worrying about holding the sign. And Bubba Watson, a father of two, has some idea of what it’s like to attempt to tame 16.
“It’s probably like a parent, where the kids don’t listen,” he said.
Holliman opts to use the analogy of a coach instead of a parent. But successful coaching and parenting overlap in many ways. It’s about building a relationship. There is some trust and some leeway. There is still some noise.
“I think we come out here with the whole idea that they’re not gonna listen,” said Julien, a co-captain of the hole. “But they’re gonna look at (the signs). They’re gonna look at it, and, at least, they’re gonna think about it. But not necessarily do anything about it.”
The musicians on the Titanic knew that their mission was doomed. No amount of orchestral tunes could reverse course. They knew what was about to happen. They played anyway. Sometimes you can do your job perfectly with chaos all around.
And that chaos has grown every year. With it, the job of the marshals has shifted too. No one can speak to that change like Mary Anderson. An optometrist outside this weekend, Anderson has been volunteering for 28 years, the longest-tenured marshal on 16. She was there for Tiger’s hole-in-one. She relishes the chance to watch everything up close.
In her early days on the hole, the head marshal would come by and watch them. He would make sure they were more regimented. They could only face the crowd, and they were expected to monitor them. It did not particularly work.
When Holliman took on the 16th hole 23 years ago, he had a new approach. He wanted to educate the crowd, to empower them.
“He dealt with them in a civil way,” Anderson said. “He didn’t belittle them. He didn’t scream or yell at them. He was just respectful. He’d go over and talk to them.”
And that is what the thousands of fans at TPC Scottsdale now see. Marshals who chat with them between rounds. Marshals who want to know where they came from and who they’re rooting for. Marshals who know that you can’t stop the cheers and the jeers, but you can.
“I think you have to be a people person because you really get involved with people,” Julien said. “I mean, you start becoming – you’re a marshal, but you start becoming part of the crowd. If you try to get involved in them, let them know you’re not against them.”
And sometime they feed into the crowd. A lot of players welcome the noise. They want to pump the crowd up, and the marshals follow suit. Then, the signs become more like the lighted wands of air traffic control – Fans, you have been cleared for takeoff!
The Greek king Sisyphus was sentenced to spend eternity pushing a boulder up a hill, only to get close to the top and to have it roll back down. Again and again and again. Each time he would square up for the task. Each time he would fall short.
But sign holders at 16 are not there out of punishment. They love what they do. They come back year after year. They are volunteers, doing already thankless work for free. And they have fun with it.
The most memorable moments to the marshals are often still golf-centered. Anderson and Ben Maglio, a co-captain, both recall witnessing multiple holes-in-one over the years. But they all have spectator stories that they love to share, too. On Friday, they watched a fan chug a beer from a shoe. They’ve all been offered money for their highly coveted “Quiet, please” signs, but those are not for sale. (TPC Scottsdale does now sell shirts with the slogan in the shop outside 16, as a separate option.) The fans will come up with all sorts of offers for the signs, only to be routinely rejected.
So they get creative. Anderson’s been offered hundreds of dollars for her poncho on rainy days. One time, on a Sunday, a fan offer Julien $20 for his socks, just for the sake of a scavenger hunt.
“So I made 20 bucks,” he said.
Even with a few drinks in them, the fans on 16 are observant. One of them sees Anderson’s Penn State lanyard – she is a proud alumnae – and he starts yelling at her about it. She gives a “We Are!” in return, and the section goes nuts.
“See!!” he shouts, eager to prove a point. “We’re polite!”
As Friday winds down, Julien tosses water bottles to the crowd. Everyone is just here to have fun and to hydrate, after all.
And the marshals are observant, too. They know what to watch for. They know signs for when someone is about to cross the line. The main thing they want to avoid is getting security or police involved. That is their standard of success.
Holliman also applies his eagle eye to the golfers. For this whole symbiotic relationship of fans and golfers and marshals to work, he has to time his ask just right.
“The key is calling the ‘Quiet,’ at the right moment,” he explains. “If you call it too early, the crowd starts to buzz again, and you lose their attention. If you call it too late, the player has an address sequence and each player is a little bit different.
“So I actually study the address sequences, so I’ll know when to call the quiet. If I call it too late. I interrupt them and they start again. So there’s a little bit of art form to it.”
He finds his job is actually easier on Saturdays, as compared to Thursday and Friday. Sure, the crowd is the biggest, the loudest, and, more than likely, the drunkest. But the shorter day after cuts on Friday balances that out.
Still, his job, and the intriguing dynamic of taming or containing the crowd, will be most clearly on display Saturday. No matter what happens around him, the marshals will raise their signs as he leans into the mic.
“Quiet, please! Quiet on the tee.”
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