By Jim Moore
Let me tell you how much I enjoy playing in two annual tournaments in Central Oregon – this year I missed my twin boys’ sixth birthday to participate in the Central Oregon Shootout in April. And I won’t let anything get in the way of the Pacific Amateur either.
If that makes me a deadbeat dad, oh well. I’m already wondering how I’m going to pull it off next year when their seventh birthday falls on a Saturday, smack-dab in the middle of the Central Oregon Shootout again.
I’m thinking that both of my kids get it – they’re golfers too – and won’t need a therapist to undo the damage I’ve done. If you’ve ever played in the Central Oregon Shootout, you’d understand – even if your wife wouldn’t. Miraculously, mine did.
There’s just something about Central Oregon golf. I love the courses, the scenery, the mountains and, more than anything else, truly, the smell of junipers in the air. As far as I can tell, there is not a bad track to be found.
It’s easy to see why this area hosts so many tournaments. In addition to the Central Oregon Shootout and Pacific Amateur — both held at multiple courses throughout the region including Eagle Crest, Aspen Lakes, Black Butte Ranch and several other of the area’s top destination resorts — the Legends of Oregon (a pro-am before the PGA Champions Tour JELD-WEN Tradition at Sunriver) will be held this year at Tetherow, which last year also hosted the Oregon Mid-Amateur.
“The tournaments are great advertising not only for the area, but also for our course,” said Mark Crose, general manager at Juniper Golf Course in Redmond, one of the region’s busiest summer tournament tracks. Named Oregon’s best muni by Golf Digest in 2009-10, Juniper will host several events this year alone, including the Oregon Open, Central Oregon Scramble and PNGA Mid-Amateur.
“These events help other golfers discover Juniper and add it to their list of ‘must-play’ courses,” Crose said. “They bring many people to Central Oregon to discover the beauty and climate of our area.”
Brasada Ranch’s Zach Swoffer, whose course hosted the Oregon Open in 2009 and will host the Oregon Mid-Amateur in July, shared a similar sentiment.
“The Oregon Open has been a huge success,” Swoffer said. “We wanted a marquee event that would expose Brasada Ranch to the Pacific Northwest. Since hosting the 2009 Oregon Open, our golf packages have skyrocketed and our reciprocal rounds have tripled.
“Golf professionals are always looking for new venues to take their memberships. With the exposure the Oregon Open created, we have been able to welcome more and more groups from other Pacific Northwest clubs.”
The Central Oregon Shootout began in 2003. Tournament founders Jeff Fought of Black Butte and Wayne Clark of Aspen Lakes thought it was a good way to drum up interest and business during the shoulder season between late spring and early summer.
“It’s a great event for us to showcase the food and beverage at Black Butte Ranch,” said Charles Kingsbaker, the resort’s director of sales and marketing. “It also gives participants a great way to experience the Sisters area.“
The three-day, two-man event is played at Eagle Crest, Aspen Lakes and Black Butte Ranch, all high-end courses with diverse challenges. “This is more than a tournament for us, it is a chance to…put out the ‘welcome mat’ for Central Oregon,” says Aspen Lakes’ Pam Mitchell. “As a family business, the reward for us is to have participants come up to us at the end of each day to say, ‘See you next year! We wouldn’t miss it!’ That is a terrific tribute to the excellence of the three courses and the folks who make the tournament happen.”
Every year, no one in the field faces more challenges than Joe Slye. I say that because the Burien golfer is my partner, and when you’re my partner, you do a lot of heavy lifting carrying my 230 pounds of uselessness around the golf course.
This year, for some idiotic reason, we played in the Shootout’s gross division. It was idiotic because Slye’s a 7-handicapper and I’m a 14, so it made no sense at all. But a buddy of ours, Inside Golf editor Steve Turcotte, said the Shootout needed more players in the gross division, so we decided to offer our carcasses for the vastly superior players to feast upon.
And feast they did. It’s a fun format – the first day’s a two-man scramble; the second is a best ball; the third’s a Chapman – you both hit drives, then hit your partner’s drive, then you choose one ball and play alternate shot after that. At some point, usually early on for us, the Chapman format turns into a complete fiasco. For me, it’s frequently filled with a bunch of “Sorry, Joes” as my partner heads into the woods to hit our next shot.
This year, as an added bonus, on our first hole at Aspen Lakes (the par-5 18th) during the best-ball portion of the competition, I duck-hooked my first two balls out of bounds, producing the first two “Sorry, Joes” of the day before we’d even left the tee.
Of course, when you’re a 14, that’s not enough buffoonery for one tournament. I have this problem with chipping. I don’t know what it is — it’s not that difficult to chip, it really isn’t, but for me it is, and it bothers me that I’m such a mental midget that I can’t overcome this problem.
Last year in the Pacific Amateur at Sunriver’s Woodlands course, I hit what would be called an amazingly bad chip if anyone else had hit it but me. With me, you can take the “amazingly” out of it and replace it with “predictably,” because this is what always happens.
I looked at the guy I was playing with and said: “I can’t believe that I’ve been playing for 35 years and just hit that shot. Anyone who’s been playing for 35 years should never hit a shot like that.”
The guy didn’t know what to say – “Yeah, you really stink,” would have been the appropriate comeback, but he was too nice to slam me with a shot like that.
He just looked at me, and while I looked at him it dawned on me that this guy was maybe 30 years old and I’ve been hitting these bad chips for five more years than he’s been alive.
Anyway, back to this year’s Central Oregon Shootout … we’re surprisingly even par through eight holes of the Chapman format, and we get to a par-3 at the Big Meadow course at Black Butte – I forget which one because I don’t want to remember too much about it. Joe puts his tee shot a little left of the green. I have a 20-yard chip to the hole. It’s a straightforward shot for golfers with brain cells. There’s a small patch of rough to negotiate, then the fringe, then plenty of green to work with after that.
I tried to envision the ball going over the rough, onto the fringe and rolling nicely toward the hole, maybe even in, but if not, somewhere close enough so that Joe could knock it in for par. But when you’re a bad chipper, it’s hard to envision magnificence. Instead, you think to yourself, Whatever you do, don’t chunk it. Or don’t blade it across the green. Don’t embarrass yourself in front of guys who are low single-digits, OK?
That’s bad enough, but then I came up with the absolute worst thing you could possibly think of as a pre-shot swing thought: DON’T DOUBLE-HIT THIS CHIP!!!!! I have done that many times before, pulling a complete T.C. Chen, the man who is forever known as the guy who double-hit a shot in the U.S. Open.
Sure enough, that’s what happened. I proceeded to double-hit my chip. It put me into a sheepish stupor that I never came out of the rest of the round.
I’ve found that the only thing that helps in these situations is booze. It’s pathetic, I know. But oftentimes it helps. And it never hurts … until the next morning anyway.
I blame this on a flight that I took from Phoenix to Seattle many years ago. I happened to be seated next to a female pro who gave lessons to many amateur male golfers. She said the best advice she ever gives to men is this: “Because you have this urge to kill the ball, you need to relax, and it might help if you had a drink or two before you tee off.”
On occasion I’ve taken this advice to extremes, but what the heck — you’re on vacation, so why not? At Aspen Lakes during the Central Oregon Shootout, we reached the par-3 12th and spotted the beverage cart. I decided to buy shots of Jack Daniels for our foursome, and we all played better after that. There must be some kind of correlation there, but I’ve yet to see Hank Haney or Butch Harmon give a tip that mentions Jack Daniels — though they should.
Speaking of beverage carts, true story … in the 2008 Central Oregon Shootout, Joe and I were playing with a guy named Ken and his partner. We get to the par-5 fifth, and Ken eagles the hole. Then, when we’re on the sixth tee, Ken tells us that he met his wife when she was a beverage-cart girl. This ruined my day. Not only did Ken eagle a hole that we parred, but the guy married a beverage-cart girl — stealing my fantasy.
In my mind, a life that is lived happily ever after is one that involves a beverage-cart girl. Ken is not only living that life, but he also just went two strokes ahead of me. I really hated Ken.
The Pacific Amateur is an event that features nearly 700 golfers who tee it up on some of the top tracks in the area, including Eagle Crest, Aspen Lakes and many others. Entering its 14th year, It began as another way to attract people to the Sunriver/Bend area during a second shoulder season, between summer and fall. In the past, the event was held during the first few days of October, but tournament organizers moved the Pac-Am to Aug. 30 to Sept. 4 this year in hopes of getting warmer weather.
In the Pac-Am, if you finish in the top two of your flight, you qualify to play a fourth round at Sunriver’s Crosswater course — still in prime form after having hosted Greg Norman, Tom Watson and Co. at the PGA Champions Tour’s JELD-WEN Tradition just two weeks before. It is one of the coolest things ever for amateur hackers. I’ve played in every Pac-Am and made the final round twice. Two years ago there was a two-hour snow delay, but none of that mattered. It was cold, but I wore seven layers of clothes and got through it just fine.
In the final round, you feel like you’re playing in a PGA Tour event or something. Scorers follow you around, and there’s even a guy with a little leaderboard placard that shows your current score to anyone who might be watching.
The last time I made the final round, I got an added bonus of watching the two guys in the other cart almost get into a fight. They just didn’t like each other for some reason – I didn’t care what the reason was, I found their immaturity amusing and wasn’t sure what I was going to do if they started brawling. I didn’t know if I should act as peacemaker and try to break it up or sit back and watch them throw one roundhouse after another. I was leaning toward the latter, but unfortunately, cooler heads prevailed.
These are the kinds of things that can happen when a bunch of guys get together for rounds of golf in a tournament setting in Central Oregon. Care to join in on the fun?
Jim Moore is a freelancer who writes sports columns for seattlepi.com and for his website, jimmoorethego2guy.com. He can also be heard weekdays from 3-6 p.m. on “The Kevin Calabro Show” on 710 ESPN Seattle. You can reach him at jimmoore@seattlepi.com.