The 51st annual Paul Bunyan Amateur Golf Tournament will switch to a new venue, and a new tournament will go head-to-head with it June 13 and 14.
The Penobscot Valley Country Club in Orono’s new partner for the two-day, 36-hole Bunyan will be the Falmouth Country Club. The course it will replace, the Kebo Valley Golf Club in Bar Harbor, will co-host the inaugural Downeast-Metro Amateur with Bangor Municipal Golf Course.
Kebo Valley GC golf pro Peiter DeVos said he and the Kebo Valley board of directors decided in November to break ties from Harris Golf Co., which owns or manages 10 courses in Maine, including the Falmouth CC and the Penobscot Valley CC.
He said the reason was financial.
He explained that, for the second time in three years, Harris Golf was late in its payments to Kebo Valley GC to pay for the prize pool.
It was approximately $3,000 this time.
“It was nine months late this time and four months late the previous time,” said DeVos, who had sent monthly invoices to Harris Golf owner Jeff Harris beginning in July but didn’t receive the check until February.
“It was an oversight, and it was corrected immediately when it was discovered,” Matt Barnard, director of public relations and marketing for the Bath-based Harris Golf Co., said via an email response to the BDN.
Barnard said they discovered the mistake in February from an accountant when they were pulling together materials and information for their announcement on the new Bunyan format.
Harris Golf Co. was late on its property tax payments to the town of Orono last year before making a payment in November. Harris said last September he makes a conscious choice not to pay property taxes on time in protest of the high tax bill the town charges.
Harris wrote in a February email to DeVos that the Harris Golf board of directors decided to include Falmouth as a venue for the first time “because it makes sense for us to keep the tournament completely in-house [among Harris courses] and we believe that having a southern venue will make the Bunyan accessible to a whole new player group.”
Kebo Valley had been a co-host for over a decade.
Barnard said they had been mulling a venue change for a long time, as well as a change of dates for the tournament.
It was held on the first weekend of June last season.
“We wanted to run it a little later because we had run into a lot of conflicts with graduation schedules,” he explained.
Barnard said the response to the revamped Bunyan has been exceptional.
“I haven’t seen many fill up as quickly as this one is,” he said. “The sign-up has been double to what it was at this time last year. A pile of the old guard [longtime Bunyan players] is back in place and, at the same time, having a venue in the south of Maine has given us a noticeable bump. We’re getting a lot of players from southern Maine, the Portsmouth [New Hampshire] area and Massachusetts.”
DeVos and his board had long since approached Bangor Municipal golf pro Brian Enman and assistant pro Rob Jarvis about co-hosting a tournament.
And the Downeast-Metro Amateur became a reality.
“I was super excited about it,” Jarvis said. “Pieter and I had cut our teeth helping run tournaments together and this presents an opportunity to work with him again.
“There is such a good working relationship between the two clubs. You’re going to have two golf courses running the best event they can,” Jarvis continued. “At the end of the day, this is about servicing the golfers and connecting two golf courses. They have the eighth oldest golf course in the country, and we’re the only golf course in Maine to host a major [United States Golf Association] event: the 1978 Public Links Tournament. Both courses are very different, but both have pretty cool attributes and historical significance.”
Both sides said they have resolved their issues and are looking forward to the weekend of June 13 and 14.
Barnard said he feels there are plenty of golfers to go around to make both tournaments successful.
“When spring does eventually come, there are going to be a lot of people excited about playing golf,” DeVos said.