Golf, biking, horseback riding, off-roading, tennis, hiking, and hot-air ballooning provide reason enough to visit a place where the sun shines almost every day of the year. What beckons others to the northern tip of the Sonoran Desert is the crystalline air, the scent of mesquite, and the promise of less strenuous pursuits like indulgent spa treatments and shopping at Stuart Weitzman, Dana Buchman, or Escada. World-class restaurants, great museums, and landmark buildings by Frank Lloyd Wright all have helped make the Valley of the Sun-as the Phoenix/Scottsdale area is known-a truly cosmopolitan place. But the real reason so many people admire this region most is that its many charms serve as an appealing backdrop for their shared obsession: the exhilaration and exquisite suffering of that game played on immaculately groomed grass with a little white ball. With more than 200 courses in the immediate vicinity, several of which are of professional-tournament caliber, Scottsdale may well be the capital of golf in a state where that title is not easily won.