Golfweek Pacific Northwest Amateur returns to Wine Valley GC, where owner Jim Pliska will tee it up
It's important to Jim Pliska that there are opportunities for the top seniors in the Pacific Northwest to showcase their talent locally, get World Amateur Golf Ranking points and play with the best talent in the world. Luckily Pliska, the owner of two top courses in Washington and Oregon, is in a position to do something about that.
Pliska runs Space Age Fuel, one of the largest independent fuel marketers in Oregon, and is also the owner of Wine Valley Golf Club in Walla Walla, Washington, and Emerald Valley Golf Club in Creswell, Oregon. The courses, roughly 350 miles apart, frequently host championships – and that was one of Pliska's motivations for getting involved in the golf industry as a course owner. Tournaments range from Oregon Golf Association events to Pacific Northwest Golf Association events to college events, considering Emerald Valley is home to the University of Oregon Golf teams.
Perhaps most notably, Wine Valley served as a U.S. Open Final Qualifying site on June 2.
Next month, Wine Valley will host the Golfweek Pacific Northwest Senior Amateur for the fourth time. The 54-hole event draws top amateurs from around the country. Last year, former U.S. Senior Amateur champion Doug Hanzel took home the trophy.
'I like to give back in that respect because I feel supporting the competition and competitive golf helps overall golf in general,' Pliska said. 'I think it's such a great game I want to keep it in existence.'
Pliska, at 66, is an accomplished player himself. He competes six or seven times a year and is constantly working on his game. Lately, that means working out daily and also working through swing issues with instructor Mike Mitchell in La Quinta, California.
'My game, I can feel it's getting better but getting it consistently better,' Pliska said, 'it's still got work to be done.'
Pliska, who will tee it up at the Golfweek Pacific Northwest Senior, played on the University of Oregon roster for a year in the late 1970s after transferring in from Mt. Hood Community College. He continued to stay sharp in the game and has won the OGA Tournament of Champions a handful of times.
Pliska, a veteran of several USGA championships, is still pursuing a U.S. Senior Amateur berth. As he works to get his game to the level that he can meet that goal, the majority of his time continues to go to Space Age. Meanwhile, the day-to-day of golf course operation largely falls to the general manager at each facility.
'I've got some good people that have worked for us for a long time,' Pliska said of his golf course staffs. And despite being hands-off in most respects, he's still involved in major decisions.
Pliska's history with Emerald Valley goes back to his days at Oregon but Wine Valley, site of the Golfweek event, is a relatively new course. Wine Valley opened in 2009 and was designed by Dan Hixson. It is ranked No. 3 in the state of Washington on the Golfweek's Best Public Courses list and also appears on the Golfweek's Best Top 200 Modern Courses list.
Pliska thinks golfers love playing Wine Valley because it's a challenging-but-fair layout. He calls it a second-shot golf course. Because many holes have multiple sight lines, a player can be out of position and still have a chance to recover. That there's no standard way to play the course is one thing that Pliska thinks makes it great.
'It gives you a lot of different opportunities out there,' he said. 'There's not a tree on the golf course so it's kind of open, big features, big greens, lot of movement on the greens. It's a fun course to play because you can play different shots, it's not standard shots – it's not a traditional golf course. It's more of the newer links type of golf course. I think the beauty of it, too, is great.'
The Golfweek Pacific Northwest Senior Amateur will be played July 1-3 at Wine Valley and registration remains open across all four divisions: Senior (age 55-64), Super Senior (Age 65-69), Legends (age 70-74) and Super Legends (age 75 and over).
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