# Bend Golf Club: A Course Profile

Source: https://thecourserankings.com/blog/bend-golf-club-profile/

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Course Profiles / Oregon


A golfer walking a fairway. Photo: PattayaPatrol, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons

The first golfers at Bend Golf Club played on dirt fairways and oiled sand greens. Inaugural rounds went off on May 3, 1925, on 250 acres donated by the Brooks-Scanlon Lumber Company, and turf did not arrive until 1927. That nine, the one built out of lumber company land and patience, is today's back nine. Every old club has an origin story. Few of them start with sand greens in the high desert and survive to argue about tree removal a century later.

Bend Golf Club, formally Bend Golf and Country Club, is the oldest private club in Central Oregon, par 72 at 7,010 yards from the black tees. H. Chandler Egan gets the design credit for 1925 in the Northwest Hickory Players listing, and here the record deserves its footnote, because the club's own history is honest about it. Contemporary newspaper reports attributed the original nine to Waverley pro Bill Henley rather than Egan, and GolfLink credits William Hanley alongside Egan. That kind of attribution fog is normal for 1920s regional golf, where a pro, a committee, and a traveling architect could all touch the same nine holes. The safe claim is the one the evidence supports: this is a 1925 course with Egan lineage and a contested byline, and the golf matters more than the argument.

## Two gifts of land, two nines

Brooks-Scanlon gave the club its start and then gave it room to finish. A second nine designed by Bob Baldock opened in 1973 on 309 additional acres the lumber company had donated in the 1940s. So the present 18 is really two eras stitched together: a 1920s nine that began as dirt and sand, and a 1970s nine built when the club finally had the land and the membership to complete the course. Stitched courses can feel disjointed. At Bend the setting holds it together, ponderosa country in Deschutes County, with the same desert light and the same firm ground running through both halves.

The tournament record says the course has always been taken seriously in the region. The club has hosted the Oregon Open, the Northwest Open, the Oregon Amateur, and the PNGA Mid-Amateur. Those are not courtesy invitations. State and regional bodies bring championships to courses that can identify the best player without embarrassing the field, and they have kept bringing them back to Bend across very different eras of the club.

## The renovation argument

Dan Hixson began a long range renovation plan in 2013, and in 2015 the plan included removing more than 200 trees. Tree removal is where old clubs fight. Members who joined a tree lined course do not always want the open, wind exposed course the architect drew a century ago. Two hundred trees is not trimming. It is a statement that the club would rather recover width, turf health, and original playing angles than preserve the enclosed look that grew up by neglect. We side with the saws, usually, and here too. A 1925 routing deserves to be seen, not smothered.

The concession: Bend Golf Club is private, in a town that now sells itself on public resort golf, and a visitor with no member connection will play the famous public names in the area and never set foot here. There is also the honest point that a course built in two pieces, fifty years apart, will never have the single vision purity of a one architect, one build routing. Purists who rank by design pedigree alone will place it below cleaner credits.

None of that moves it off its ground. In [the best golf courses in Bend](/blog/the-best-golf-courses-in-bend-or/) conversation and in [the 5 best golf courses in Oregon](/blog/the-5-best-golf-courses-in-oregon/) argument, Bend Golf Club is the historic private counterweight to the resort era, the club that was playing golf on sand greens while the rest of Central Oregon was still timber and sage. A hundred years in, still hosting championships, still arguing about trees. That is what a living club looks like.

**Reader responses are open.** Please cite a specific hole, a price, or a round you have played.