Bill Coore once scored the ground at Talking Stick, on its golfing virtues alone, at half a point out of ten. Just a couple of years before, he and Ben Crenshaw had worked at Sand Hills in Nebraska, a site so generous that it yielded too many great holes. Here, on a flat swath of Sonoran desert outside Scottsdale owned by the Salt River Pima-Maricopa Indian Community, the problem ran the other way. The land offered almost nothing. Coore has a few ways of describing how flat it was. The topographic map of the property, he has said, carried no lines at all. "It was just a blank map. It was just white." On an early visit, he set a Coke can at one end of the 400-acre parcel, walked to the far end, raised a pair of binoculars, and found the can still in view. That was the starting point for what came next, and it explains why the finished golf feels like a quiet act of persuasion. The work began in 1997, soon after Sand Hills was finished, and the timing mattered. Much of the crew that had built Sand Hills was still together and came south to the desert. Dave Axland served as lead associate and Dan Proctor directed the earthworks, two men who would soon design Wild Horse in Nebraska on their own. Jimbo Wright and Jeff Bradley were the primary feature shapers. All four were masters of the golf-construction craft. The charge was to build two courses for public play, each decidedly different in how it played. The Piipaash, first called the South, took on a parkland character. The O'odham, first called the North, is the longer of the pair and the one closer to a links spirit. Coore described it as a course of "broad, angular holes" that "rewards thoughtful play through the rise of its many options according to one's level of skill." Its greens sit low and slightly crowned, fronted by close-cropped approaches that, in his words, "encourage running as well as aerial assaults." On ground this level, the small rise of a putting surface and the firm apron before it carry much of the drama. A ball can be bounced in or flown in. The green complexes are the course's great pleasure, a set of puzzles worked out in inches on land that offered no feet. What lingers about the O'odham is how closely it seems connected to the desert, even though nature supplied so little. The holes stay in the memory one by one, each distinct and memorable, which is a remarkable thing to say about a routing laid across a blank sheet. Considering the weaknesses of the property, it stands among the most impressive achievements of Coore and Crenshaw, and among the best public golf in Scottsdale. It is not without a wrinkle. After the par-3 sixth, the obvious move is to walk straight off the back of the green onto the tee waiting there. That tee belongs to the 10th. The seventh lies roughly 100 yards off in another direction, and a similarly unwieldy walk separates the 10th green from the 11th tee. Swapping the seventh and 10th would seem the natural cure, leaving only the long transition from the ninth green to the 10th tee, where many players might detour to the clubhouse anyway. Coore, one of the finest routers in the game, had not missed this. The seventh and 10th were switched early in the course's life, and the walk that remains is a small trace of that change. The 36-hole complex was unveiled in 1997, with the land managed by Troon Golf, and both courses remain well built and fun to play. But the O'odham is the one that best answers that half-point score: a flat, white map that became a place.