BUCKSPORT – At some golf courses, every player gets to feel like Tiger Woods, feeding at the trough of driver-and-a-wedge par 4’s. Birdies abound. Scores plummet. The pro tour awaits. Or not.

Bucksport Golf Club, owner Wayne Hand proudly admits, is not that kind of course.

Let’s put it this way: Bucksport is big. The holes? Long. The greens? Massive. The bunkers? There are 20 of them here. And if your sand wedge is unreliable, you might want to take your beach towel and sunscreen.

Think that’s an exaggeration? Not so fast. Hand has a trivia question for you.

“What’s the longest course to play in the state of Maine?” Hand asks.

The answer, he says, is his nine-hole Bucksport Golf Club, when played from the tips for two consecutive rounds. From there, the par-37 layout plays about 7,200 yards.

But don’t worry. Hand won’t make you play from way back there.

In its regular form, Bucksport stretches to 6,710 yards for men, 5,877 for women.

More about the course’s length in a bit. But first, it’s important you realize what you’re getting when you plan a day at Bucksport Golf Club.

Want more trivia? You’ll be golfing at a course where the pro shop carpet was installed (in part) by a former member named Sandy Koufax. You might have heard of the former Los Angeles Dodgers pitcher. He’s in the baseball Hall of Fame.

And you’ll also find a course where the owner thinks every round of golf is important.

Hand says he looks at the 18-hole courses that receive four- and five-star ratings, and tries to deliver a similar product in a nine-hole package.

“We don’t do anything different today than we do tomorrow,” he says. “So whenever you show up, the conditions are always the same.”

And that’s a good thing.

Bucksport hosts plenty of single-day outings, and Hand says he can send off 84 golfers at once at a shotgun start event. But golfers who show up on a weekday morning will find the same pristine conditions that those outing clients will.

“I don’t have big tournaments,” Hand says. “Every day, when somebody shows up, that’s a tournament.”

Now, back to the length.

Bucksport Golf Club sprawls across a rolling 110 acres (“And you can tell,” Hand says), and lies between Route 46 in the west and the Narramissic River in the east.

“This course is not easy,” Hand says, offering up some firsthand proof.

“I go out here a lot, play 36, 45 holes before I get a birdie,” he says. “But I go to a strange course and have three [in a round].”

While Bucksport’s length is noticeable – especially on its three par 5’s, which include a ninth that can stretch to more than 600 yards if the tees are pushed as far back as they can – Hand’s intent isn’t to make his course unfriendly.

In fact, he makes a considerable effort to make Bucksport as player-friendly as he can: Over a three-year span he has completed his fairway irrigation system, but he’s careful to make sure the fairways aren’t softened up too much.

That, he points out, would effectively lengthen the course even more.

“I want to maintain some speed on the fairways, and I don’t want to make them soft and mushy,” he says. “I want them to be green and lush, but I want some speed on them.”

Originally designed by Phil Wogan and opened in the late 1960s, Bucksport has undergone some changes since Hand bought the course 22 years ago. Many of those changes, he says, had Wogan’s blessing.

Among those: Changing the first hole to make golfers hit their tee shot over a pond, lengthening the second to make it a par 5, and adding mounds on several holes.

He has also put false sides and backs on several greens, in the style of designer Donald Ross, that can cause some problems.

“Any one of ’em, you roll, you’re gone,” he says.

Hand is hard-pressed to single out any hole (“Out here, I’ve got nine little babies and I take pride in all of ’em”) but admits that he does enjoy the picturesque eighth.

That hole, a 354-yard uphill par-4, is a dogleg left that forces a precise approach shot.

“I love that shot, coming into the green,” Hand says of the approach, which demands a shot that avoids the massive bunker that wraps around the front-left side of the green.

Hand also enjoys the seventh, which he calls his favorite driving hole.

“It’s the aesthetics of it,” Hand says. “You’re coming out of that chute to a wide-open fairway, and the wind [often] changes on you.”

Vital statistics

BUCKSPORT GOLF CLUB

Holes: Nine

Yards: 3,348 yards (men), 2,876 (women)

Par: 37

Slope: 136 (men), 128 (women); rating: 72.5 (men), 75 (women)

Greens fees: 9 holes: $15; 18 holes: $20

Memberships:$263 juniors, $368 college student, $525 single, $775 couple, $900 family

Tee times: Not necessary

Directions: Take Route 46 from either Route 1 in Bucksport or Route 1A in Holden

Footwear: No metal spikes

Phone: 469-7612