By Tom Ferrell
Bandon Crossings and Wine Valley architect Dan Hixson on what it takes to turn a hole in the ground into a hole-in-one
The sky over Walla Walla — eastern Washington’s wine country — is big, stretching over the rolling farmlands and the Blue Mountains and coming alive with color at the end of another glorious October day.
Dan Hixson is walking a piece of familiar ground. He has spent hundreds of days here over the past four years. He knows how the wind blows, how the land rises and falls, how the water drains. Right now, though, he is more concerned with his second shot at the par-5 seventh. Wine Valley Golf Club — his newest and most ambitious design — is coming to life, and Hixson is finally sampling his work.
He points to a gargantuan bunker cut into a dune on the right side of the fairway.
“The green is beyond that,” he says. “You can get there, but you have to get past that guy first.”
He grips his fairway metal and lets it fly with the smooth swing of the professional golfer he is.
“Dang!” he says when it catches the vertical lip of the bunker in a splash of sand. “I thought that had enough.”
Hixson doesn’t dwell on the shot. He is surveying the work. Wine Valley won’t open until April, but he is not waiting to see how the course plays. He wants to know the bounces that golfers will experience. The challenges. The thrills.
We walk toward the bunker, and he gestures to his playing companions — John Thorsnes, who wears the multiple hats of owner, operator, head professional and Director of Golf, owner Jim Pliska and Russ Byerley, from whose family’s land, and whose dream, Wine Valley emerged. All have taken different routes to try to set up a birdie. Hixson nods as Byerley lofts a wedge shot past the pin. The ball catches a slope and rolls back toward the hole.
“That’s a good sign,” Hixson says, wading into the bunker to play his third. “The design shouldn’t tell golfers how to play the hole. It should reward any well-executed strategy.”
Students of golf course architecture know that such a goal is much easier said than done.
Indeed, Hixson has leveraged a lifetime of observation and exploration into his work and his career. The son of a PGA professional, Hixson grew up around the game. He helped run the shop. He shagged balls. He caddied. He worked on the grounds crew. He became a standout player in his own right.
Deep down, though, he always harbored an ambition to build golf courses, a dream quickened at the age of seven, when his father hauled him out on a site visit to Eugene Country Club. The club had hired Robert Trent Jones, Jr., to oversee a revamp of the venerable layout. Hixson tagged along, watched the dozers at work, listened as the men discussed the project and the game — and was hooked.
“From that point on, I knew what it was I wanted to do. Granted, I didn’t know exactly how to get started doing it, but the seed was planted.”
There would be a few stops along the way. After attending Oregon State University, Hixson turned professional. In 1984, he won a spot on the Australian Tour, where he competed on several courses designed by the legendary Alister MacKenzie. While he cashed a few checks as a player Down Under, it was his outlook on architecture that won riches.