To Make Golf Fun, Just Add a Nightclub

It’s a Friday night in late September, when tourism begins to pick up after the heat of summer in Scottsdale, Ariz. A group of eight twentysomething guys are enjoying the warm evening on an open-air deck, reclining on low couches arranged around a table loaded with aluminum bottles of Coors Light. This Is How We Do It throbs from speakers above. A few hundred yards away, the light display at the Talking Stick Resort shimmers in pastel hues of blue, green, pink, and purple. One of the guys grabs a club, approaches the patch of artificial turf where a ball sits waiting for him, and swings, launching it on a low parabola toward Talking Stick’s casino.

He and his friends are at Topgolf, the driving-range-meets-sports-bar-meets-nightclub that’s one of the fastest-growing recreational entertainment chains in the U.S. Scenes like this are playing out at 25 other locations across the country tonight—people eating, watching sports, nodding along to pop songs, and hitting golf balls, all without moving more than a few paces from their beers. The three-level Scottsdale location is packed by 8 p.m.; the wait for one of its 102 hitting bays, each of which seats eight, is half an hour. This, a hostess tells me, is relatively short—the night before, she says, the wait was as long as three hours. There are kids with parents, couples on dates, and at least one bachelorette party. Those waiting bide their time in a full-service sports bar, drinking margaritas and eating flatbread pizza.