SUNRIVER —

Evan Byers looked out the large windows at the rear of Sunriver’s main lodge, saw snow-covered Mount Bachelor as it was washed in early-morning sunshine, and said: “This place is beautiful.”

It’s a sentiment that the new tournament director for The Jeld-Wen Tradition repeated often during a two-hour breakfast meeting Tuesday.

Byers’ initial reaction to the aesthetic charm of Central Oregon is typical of newcomers to the area.

But Byers has more staked in this region than most first-time visitors.

He wants to make The Tradition, the Champions Tour major tournament that teed off at Sunriver’s Crosswater Golf Club in 2007, a fixture in Central Oregon.

Portland-based Peter Jacobsen Sports, which manages the event, hired Byers last month after he spent the last seven years reviving and fostering a Nationwide Tour stop near Salt Lake City.

This week, in his first trip to Central Oregon, Byers has been meeting with local business and political leaders to help build more support for the tournament.

It’s the beauty of Central Oregon, combined with the quality of Crosswater, that makes Byers believe that The Tradition has plenty of room to grow.

“This is a great event, this is a great golf course,” Byers said. “That’s what’s exciting, that’s what attracted me to this opportunity. We just have to grow it now.”

The Tradition will return to Crosswater Aug. 11-17.

After a four-year run in the Portland area, The Tradition moved to Central Oregon in 2007, the first of four consecutive years the tournament is contracted to be played at Crosswater.

Last year, the golf course and the region were heralded by the pros on the Champions Tour, a circuit for players age 50 and older. And NBC Sports’ national coverage of the event acted as a de facto infomercial for Central Oregon.

Where else can one watch some of the legends of golf finish on No. 18 while floating down a pristine mountain river on an inner tube?

But the 2007 tournament wasn’t without its problems.

Cost overruns — including the cost of shuttling spectators by bus to and from the golf course from a parking area two miles south of Crosswater — took a chunk out of the event’s donation to charity, which is often the barometer for the success of a professional golf tournament.

And rain on the final day of The Tradition likely kept some spectators away, though the tournament hit its first-year attendance goal of 30,000, organizers reported.

In the end, the tournament donated much less than the $500,000 that organizers had hoped to give to Central Oregon charities last year, Byers said.

But Byers said that one of his first goals is to rein in costs and grow attendance to more like 40,000 or 50,000, though for now he declined to set a specific attendance goal.

“As we go into our second year, we have to start thinking about (whether Crosswater could become the permanent host of the tournament),” Byers said. “We have to start planting seeds that it could happen. That’s where it takes the support of the community to get behind it and say, ‘We want this. This is our event. We want this to stay.’”

Byers believes that The Tradition can draw as many as 25,000 spectators from the local area, with the rest coming from other parts of Oregon and beyond.

It’s a lofty ambition, considering Central Oregon has 150,000 residents.

“I think we have, geographically, enough people in the region that we can get our numbers up,” Byers said. “We have to get creative with our promotions.”

Byers’ optimism is warranted.

In fact, as reclamation projects go, The Tradition has nothing on the Utah EnergySolutions Championship in Sandy, Utah.

Byers said that when he took over as director of the Nationwide event in 2000, the tournament had amassed nearly $1 million in unpaid bills.

In addition, the title sponsor and tournament organizers had washed their hands of the event altogether.

In other words, the event was a skipped heartbeat away from dying.

But Byers, who was hired away from Callaway Golf by the PGA Tour to fix the Utah tournament, helped turn the event around to the point that it is now considered a solid tournament with a loyal fan base on the PGA Tour’s developmental circuit.

“This is a long ways away from when I got to Salt Lake,” Byers said of The Tradition at Crosswater. “It was tough. There were many nights I would go home and go, ‘What am I doing?’

“There’s not a negative (to Central Oregon). And that’s a positive for us.”

Byers — a Steamboat Springs, Colo., native and the father of three — believes that the key to the success of The Tradition will be to lure the top players on the Champions Tour.

Though the field for the 2007 Tradition included most of the best golfers on the Champions Tour, popular players such as three-time PGA major winner Nick Price opted to skip the tournament.

Byers, who was once a caddie on the Champions Tour and has spent most of his adult life working in golf, believes he can use his connections to persuade the marquee players from skipping the Central Oregon stop.

“I know from just the little bit that I’ve heard inside the offices that the players here had a great time,” Byers said. “They were very well received by the community, which is always a plus.

“That’s one thing a tournament director always wants is having a star leading on the last day. Because that brings people out.” A luxury the 2007 Tradition, which was dominated by lesser-known Mark McNulty, did not enjoy.

Since moving The Tradition from Arizona to Oregon in 2003, the tournament has donated nearly $1.5 million to charity, Byers said.

But he knows that for Central Oregon to become the permanent home of The Tradition, 2008 will have to do better than 2007 and that trend would have to continue through 2010.

“Last year was the first year of introducing it. Now we just have to spend this year building on it,” Byers said. “Hopefully after this year, we go into ’09 and get some momentum going. So by the time contract negotiations are rolling around and we start looking at what we do after 2010, we can make a decision saying, ‘This has a home. The community has embraced it and it’s working. So why change where we are at?’”