When Eric Conrad set out to write a book about some of Maine’s most unique golf courses, he knew Aroostook Valley Country Club would be one of them.
Its parking lot is in the United States, a few miles north of downtown Fort Fairfield. Its clubhouse and the 18 holes that expand around it are in Canada. Hook a drive left on holes one or two and your ball might cross the border. There’s no getting it back.
Founded in 1929 by Americans looking to skirt Prohibition, the course’s story has been told relentlessly. But recent history has added another chapter to it.
The COVID-19 pandemic-era closure of the Canadian border shut out American golfers for two years. Last year, border crossing difficulties still made Americans hesitant to play there. And this year’s political tensions have added a complex layer to U.S.-Canada relations.
Conrad, a retired journalist and former executive editor of the Kennebec Journal and executive director of the Maine Monitor, wondered if those events had an impact on day-to-day life at AVCC.
So he went and played 18.
“What I found, of course, is at Aroostook Valley that’s not the case,” Conrad said. “It doesn’t really matter whether you live on that side of the street or this side of the street. We’re all here to play golf.”
That’s the level of nuance Conrad said he tried to capture in his new book: “Maine Golf Tales: 18 Special Courses and the Stories Behind Them.”
Aroostook Valley is the northernmost of the 18 courses featured in the book, which was published on Dec. 1 through Innocent Bystander Press. It was also one of the few shoo-ins.
Bar Harbor’s Kebo Valley Golf and its infamous 17th hole — where sitting President William Taft once recorded a 27 — was another. Hearing those stories while golfing himself, Conrad wondered if there was enough to fill a book.
Three years of research, interviews and many rounds of self-described “average” golf later, Conrad put together a 186-page collection of stories from courses around the state.
Some of Maine’s most well-regarded courses, like Kebo Valley or Belgrade Lakes Golf Club, made the cut. But so did others that fly under the radar in the state’s golf scene.
The first chapter is dedicated to Millinocket’s Hillcrest Golf Club and the local effort to save it in the early 2000’s amid the fall of Great Northern Paper Co., the company that defined the town’s economic identity and owned its golf course.
“Every one of my chapters, including the Aroostook Valley one, has some substance like that in them,” Conrad said. “I think it makes the book different from a lot of golf books people will have seen.”
Some chapters, like one rooted in Portland’s Riverside Golf Course, which happens to be Conrad’s home course, are more about the people than the course itself. Conrad profiles Abby Spector, a PGA member, Maine Golf Hall of Famer and the Director of Instruction at Riverside who had her LPGA dreams cut short by complications from a heart surgery.
“It’s not about the history of it or the founding of [the course],” Conrad said. “It’s a current day story about this woman and some of the really neat stuff that she and her staff do.”
Conrad played each of the courses he details in the book, using the exploits of his rounds as a part of the storytelling. Just don’t ask him what he shot at Aroostook Valley.
“Oh God, I don’t even want to talk about it,” Conrad joked. “I’ll say this, out of the 18 rounds I shot, it was my worst one. It’s a difficult course.”