The annual Maine Open starts today.
In Auburn.
This is the 88th year of the Charlie’s Maine Open championship. Of those years, golfers have teed off at Portland’s Riverside Municipal Golf Course 42 times. The event has been played at Poland Spring seven times; eight times at Augusta Country Club; three times at Springbrook Golf Club in Leeds; and twice at Bar Harbor’s Kebo Valley Club.
The Maine Open has only been played in Auburn once before, in 1973, when Ralph Johnston won the event with play split between Poland’s Fairlawn Golf & Country Club and Auburn’s Martindale Country Club.
This year, the Open is being played at the Twin Cities’ newest golf course, the challenging 6,814-yard Fox Ridge Club.
It is not, as Androscoggin County Chamber of Commerce President Chip Morrison said, the Balloon Festival. It will not draw a crowd of thousands. It is, however, a terrific boost to an area that is embracing an economic and recreational resurgence and it is a terrific way to showcase a local course.
It is not a stretch to suggest that Fox Ridge, once this week’s media coverage reveals the beauty and the challenge of the course, will draw weekend warriors to its long-distance fairways and greens that require practiced aim.
Golf courses – if they’re good, and Fox Ridge is good – are being used as tools of economic development.
According to American City & County, the Retirement System of Alabama contracted with Robert Trent Jones to design an eight-course golf trail across the state specifically to boost tourism. It has worked.
In Prattville, one of the towns along the golf trail, city councilors approved $6.5 million in spending to buy the property on which three courses are now situated. Neighboring towns are also pitching to help fund the project.
The project’s accompanying hotel and conference center construction was supported by the Economic Development Partnership of Alabama.
John Cannon, director of golf operations at Prattville’s trio of courses, told American City & County magazine that “the whole concept of the (golf) trail is to get people to come to Alabama and stay for a few days instead of driving through to Florida or New Orleans.”
Fox Ridge, which offers membership and is also open to the public, is a splendid course. While not designed specifically to draw golfers to Auburn instead of driving through to Augusta or Portland, it is a course worthy of hosting the Charlie’s Maine Open championship and it is a course that can and should draw golfers who love the game to make the drive and tee up a ball.
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