Field of greens.

Byline: Mike Stahlberg The Register-Guard

REDMOND - Life revolves around golf. Pronghorn proves that.

Without golf courses designed by such luminaries as Jack Nicklaus and Tom Fazio, only a few head of range cattle grazing on bunchgrass scattered among the sagebrush and juniper trees would call Pronghorn's mile-square chunk of high desert scrubland home.

But lush green fairways have taken shape among the desert vegetation and lava outcroppings, and the Pronghorn - "Central Oregon's premier golf community" - will soon be home to more millionaires than you can shake a wedge at.

The first nine holes of the Jack Nicklaus Signature Golf Course opened to members' play this week - just days after Nicklaus made a final inspection tour and ordered a few minor changes. The back nine is scheduled to open next spring, at which time Nicklaus will return to play a ceremonial "first round."

"This course is going to get very good marks," Nicklaus proclaimed to a gathering of Pronghorn owners and employees following his tour of the course in an eight-passenger "stretch" golf cart that he drove himself. "I'm a little prejudiced, but I think it's really neat, and I think it's going to be fun to play."

The Fazio course is slated to open in the summer of 2004.

By then, the first of what will eventually be 300 homes overlooking the two golf courses will be completed. and work will be under way on the first-ever Jack Nicklaus Lodge.

People are paying princely sums for the privilege to build at Pronghorn and, of course, play golf there. Homesites (which come with a membership in The Club at Pronghorn) start at $350,000 and average just under $500,000. Other amenities include a full-service spa, swimming and tennis facilities, and a private clubhouse for members and guests.

When the first 85 lots/memberships went on the market Oct. 19, contracts on 78 of them were signed that very day - for a total of $36.4 million in sales, according to a report published on the Bend.com Web site.

All this on land that sold five years ago for about $500 an acre.

Located midway between Bend and Redmond, and well east of Highway 97, Pronghorn is surrounded by 20,000 acres of Bureau of Land Management rangeland. Bone dry, the land offers good - but not spectacular - views of the Oregon Cascades. It's most interesting natural features are scattered outcroppings of exposed lava and one of the country's largest stands of gnarly Western Juniper trees.

A setting, in other words, even less likely to become a major destination than the Iowa cornfield out of which Kevin Costner carved a baseball diamond in the movie "Field of Dreams."

But that was fiction, and Nicklaus and Fazio are real-life superstars in golf course design. Together, they account for 13 of the top 100 courses in the country, according to Golf Digest magazine's ratings. Neither man had an Oregon course on his resume, and nowhere else can a golfer play both Nicklaus and Fazio courses with one membership.

Pronghorn developers Tom Hix and Steve Denney were willing to bet millions of dollars that, if Jack and Tom designed the courses, golfers would come to Oregon's first "five-star golf community and resort."

And they appear to have been right. Several high-profile buyers have been publicly identified - among them NFL quarterbacks Drew Bledsoe and Cade McNown, Green Bay Packers kicker Ryan Longwell (who once kicked for Bend High School) and Rick Neuheisel, who at the time he invested was head football coach at the University of Washington.

The first hurdle to creating a luxurious links oasis in the middle of nowhere was the lack of water. High Desert Golf Development LLC solved that by contracting to purchase 2 million gallons a day of treated sewage effluent from the City of Bend for irrigation water. Drinking water, purchased from a private water district, is piped in seven miles.

A four-mile paved access road through BLM land was constructed.

And, of course, Nicklaus and Fazio were retained.

The Nicklaus course will be a "resort" course, meaning that the general public will have an opportunity to play it while staying in the five-star hotel planned for "The Village at Pronghorn," or at one of the 100 condominium villas also planned.

The Fazio course, already under construction, will be for members only. (For those who want to golf Pronghorns courses, but who don't care to build there, a limited number of "lodging club memberships" are available for $125,000.)

The championship course that the Golden Bear designed for Lava Bear country is a 7,460-yard, par 72 with bentgrass fairways, two man-made lakes and plenty of white sand bunkers. The course plays about 6,800 yards from the "members' tees" which - because Pronghorn is at about 3,000 feet elevation - Nicklaus said is equivalent to about 6,400 yards at sea level.

"It's not going to be a particularly difficult golf course," Nicklaus said at the conclusion of his final inspection tour, his eighth or ninth visit to the site. "I didn't do it to be a difficult golf course. It's going to be very user-friendly, it's going to be very aesthetically attractive, it's going to define itself real well with the natural elements and there are no two holes that are even remotely close to alike.'

Pronghorn presented a difficult design challenge, Nicklaus said, because the hard lava rock covering the site made it prohibitively expensive to `cut' a golf course into the landscape, as is his standard practice.

`The most difficult part of this project was to try to figure out how to do a golf course without spending an absolute fortune,' he said. `So we decided to build it on top of the lava as much as we could and really do a good job of routing so we could build a course without moving much dirt, which was kind of fun because that's the way they used to do it.'

In fact, instead of removing material, the contractors `sand capped' the fairways (placing 12 inches of sandy soil between the natural dirt and the turf) to improve drainage.

One of the more picturesque holes is No. 13, a 398-yard par 4 that doglegs around a lake on the right to a green cut into a lava cliff area. A small waterfall spills over the cliff and into the lake.

A white sand bunker separates the green from the rock wall behind it (a technique Nicklaus used more than once to help prevent golf balls from coming to rest against rock). A small pot bunker in the fairway makes the tee shot even more interesting.

One of the toughest holes is likely to be No. 8, a par 5 that plays 637 yards from the championship tees.

`And the prevailing wind is in your face,' Nicklaus said with a bit of a chuckle, adding that `you could name this hole `Forever.' '

The hole has five bunkers around a wide, split-level landing area for tee shots (including a small pot bunker in the middle of the fairway). Water on the right of the narrow fairway will challenge the second and third shots.

Offering a vista from the tee box that includes Smith Rock, `it's a very, very pretty hole,' Nicklaus said. `It does go forever - but at least it's downhill.'

No. 8 was involved in the one major change the designer ordered last week. Built originally with five tee boxes, Nicklaus directed his staff to remove the second one - 608 yards from the green.

`If you put that extra set of tees there, all of a sudden the member feels like a second-class citizen. ... He has to drive by two sets of tees to find one he can play from,' Nicklaus said. `If I was a 15-handicapper and had to go to three tees to find one I could play, I would cuss me.'

No matter what their handicap, golfers `are going to have a lot of fun doing different things on this golf course,' Nicklaus said, because he took pains to `give you alternate ways to play every hole.'

Nicklaus' Central Oregon visit came on the eve of The Tradition senior tournament in Portland, where he finished tied for 11th.

"I don't even remember what it's like to win a golf tournament," Nicklaus said, "and I'm not going to get any better at golf - whereas, hopefully, I can get better at this (designing golf courses).'

With "something like 235 golf courses in 40 different countries" that he's designed, Nicklaus said "to leave that as a legacy is kind of fun."

After all, he pointed out, "You're all here, not because there's a dusty brown piece of ground out here, but because there's a golf course here ... and you're going to want to play the golf course. That's my job, doing that. I get a big kick out of being able to produce something that will bring people in."

CAPTION(S):

Jack Nicklaus watches a test putt from the driver's seat of a stretch golf cart while looking over the new Pronghorn course. The front nine opened to members' play this week at Pronghorn, located between Bend and Redmond and touted as "Central Oregon's premier golf community."