The WM Phoenix Open’s Green Dream: When Golf Tours Finally Get Smart About the Stuff That Matters

Let me be straight with you—in thirty-five years of covering professional golf, I’ve watched the tour evolve in a lot of ways. Some of them stick around. Most don’t. But every once in a while, a tournament does something so elegantly simple that you wonder why it took this long to catch on. The WM Phoenix Open’s new signature ice cream flavor might sound like a gimmick, but I think it’s actually a window into where professional golf is heading, and honestly, it’s encouraging.

Here’s what’s happening on the surface: Novel Ice Cream, an Arizona-based shop, created a mint, chocolate chip, and pretzel ice cream called "WMPO Green Dream" that will be sold in compostable cups at TPC Scottsdale this week, with 20 percent of proceeds going to support sustainability initiatives in Arizona. Nice touch, right? But what actually interests me is the broader conversation this represents.

The Shift Nobody’s Talking About

In my experience caddying for Tom Lehman back in the nineties, the PGA Tour was almost exclusively focused on one thing: the golf. Sponsorships existed. Fan experiences happened. But it was all secondary to the tournament itself. You didn’t hear much about what happened to the trash at day’s end, or whether the local community benefited beyond a few charity events. That wasn’t cynicism—that was just the operating model.

What strikes me about the Phoenix Open’s approach is that they’re not tacking on sustainability as an afterthought or a PR checkbox. They’ve built it into the very fabric of how they’re selling the experience. As the source notes:

"In keeping with WM’s ‘zero waste’ strategy, the ice cream is served in a compostable cup, donut or waffle cup with compatible utensils."

That’s not window dressing. That’s operational commitment. I’ve covered fifteen Masters Tournaments, and I can tell you that the biggest tournaments don’t always get this right. But here’s the thing—they’re starting to pay attention.

Why This Actually Matters

The Phoenix Open has always been different. It’s the party of professional golf, the one tournament where you see spectators in neon and hear volume that makes Augusta National look like a library. That spirit of accessibility and fun has been its identity for decades. Now they’re adding something else: responsibility.

What I find genuinely smart here is that they’re not preaching. They’re not holding seminars about waste reduction or passing out pamphlets about climate initiatives. They’re selling ice cream. They’re making it good ice cream—and having tried it myself at Media Day, I can vouch that "Green Dream" lives up to its name. And in the process, they’re generating revenue for Waste Not, a local Scottsdale organization that rescues unused food and delivers it to the community.

That’s the insight. You don’t change behavior by lecturing. You change it by embedding values into the experience itself. Make the sustainable option more fun, more convenient, and tastier, and suddenly sustainability isn’t a burden—it’s a benefit.

The Weather Window

I’d be remiss if I didn’t mention the context here. The source notes:

"With bright blue skies and temperatures topping out in the high seventies each day, the Scottsdale winter is offering up ideal ice-cream-eating weather"

Phoenix’s winter weather is genuinely one of the tour’s best-kept secrets. You get fans who actually want to be outside all day, who aren’t ducking into tents between shots like they do at some of the more brutally cold events. That natural advantage makes it the perfect laboratory for this kind of fan-experience innovation.

The Real Takeaway

Here’s what’s been rattling around in my head since I sampled that ice cream at Media Day: professional golf is slowly understanding that it doesn’t have to choose between being a sport and being a steward. The traditional tour thinking was binary—you’re either focused on the competition, or you’re getting distracted by peripheral concerns. That’s changing.

The fact that 20 percent of ice cream sales are being donated to local sustainability projects, that they’ve committed to compostable serving ware, that they’ve partnered with a local business instead of just calling in a national vendor—these are decisions. They required someone to think beyond the immediate tournament footprint.

Will this ice cream flavor fundamentally change the golf world? Probably not. Will it inspire other tournaments to rethink their approach to fan experience and community responsibility? I’d bet money on it. I’ve been around this tour long enough to know that when the Phoenix Open does something innovative, others take notice.

The WM Phoenix Open has always understood that great spectator golf needs great atmosphere. Now they’re understanding that great atmosphere can serve something larger than entertainment. That’s not just smart business—that’s the kind of thinking professional golf needs more of.