Anthem Golf & Country Club: Persimmon Course

The more traditional of Anthem's two Greg Nash layouts, the Persimmon Course plays through the high Sonoran Desert north of Phoenix, featuring bent-grass greens, generous corridors and a signature 18,000-square-foot double green that serves as the finishing putting surface for both the ninth and eighteenth holes.

Persimmon is one of two championship golf courses at Anthem Golf & Country Club, a private club inside the Anthem master-planned community roughly thirty-five miles north of downtown Phoenix. The course was designed by Arizona-based architect Greg H. Nash, ASGCA, who also designed the club's companion Ironwood Course. Nash, a club member himself, conceived the two layouts as deliberately different golf experiences on the same property, with Persimmon taking on the more traditional parkland-meets-desert character and Ironwood leaning into harder desert-target shot values. Persimmon opened for play in 2000. From the championship tees the course plays 7,219 yards to a par of 72, carrying a USGA course rating of 74.5 and a slope of 139 according to the club's published scorecard. The layout threads through the rolling high Sonoran Desert at elevations that moderate summer temperatures relative to valley courses closer to Phoenix, and it is planted with bent-grass greens rather than the bermuda-based putting surfaces common in lower-desert designs. Persimmon's most distinctive design feature is a shared 18,000-square-foot double green that serves as the finishing putting surface for both the ninth and eighteenth holes, echoing the template green complexes most famously associated with the Old Course at St Andrews. Nash used the double green to create a pair of visually dramatic closing holes that meet in front of the clubhouse and, in combination with the course's broader corridors and fairway bunkering, gives Persimmon a more classical feel than its Ironwood sibling. The Persimmon Course is private and reserved for members of Anthem Golf & Country Club, which operates as the private club component within the larger Anthem community developed by Del Webb. Together with the Ironwood Course, Persimmon forms the 36-hole core of the club's golf operation under the Anthem Golf & Country Club name.