BANGOR – With the success of Tiger Woods, people are looking everywhere for a young, phenomenal golfer. Bangor may have one in Jesse Speirs.

In the New Seabury Junior Open, Oct. 25-27, in Mashpee, Mass., with the Future Collegians World Tour, Speirs finished tied for fifth.

This showing follows an eventful summer in which he helped lead the Maine junior golf team to its first New England Junior Championship title, earned his first Maine Junior Golf Championship, and an R.H. Foster-Mobil Paul Bunyan Amateur victory. He also garnered a second-place finish in the Greater Bangor Open, and placed 19th in the World Junior Championships held in San Diego.

Pretty good for a golfer who just turned 16 today.

Pretty good for many golfers.

Golfing began early for Speirs. When he was 9, he caddied for his dad and his brothers.

The next year, he said, “Dad took me out to play 18 holes, and I got kind of hooked on it.”

Soon it will be time for “the opportunity to go south, to keep working on the game. The extra three, four months of playing golf makes a big difference,” Speirs said.

And while last year he headed south in November, this season, it will be January 2003.

“We’re staying up here [in Bangor] so the family can all be together for the holidays,” Speirs said.

Once in Myrtle Beach, S.C., the home-schooled Speirs will participate in two tours, the Future Collegians World Tour and the Plantation Junior Golf Tour.

Both tours are “similar,” he said, and “the competition is just about the same.”

If the tours conflict with dates, Speirs said, “the longer the tour the better,” which often means the 54-hole Future Collegians World Tour.

One of the reasons Speirs likes the Myrtle Beach area is “you don’t have to drive too far to get to a tournament.”

Another reason is there are “a lot of golf courses in the area. It’s a great area for golf.”

Also, Legends Golf Club in Myrtle Beach, Speirs said, has a “huge practice facility. It’s awesome. It has lights for night, chipping greens, driving ranges, a huge – 100 yards long by 40 yards wide – putting green. You can work on so many different parts of your game there.”

Though he feels “the short game is the most important part of the game,” he takes about five hours a day to “practice all aspects of the game, to keep it all on the same level because the one part you don’t practice on can hurt you in a tournament.”

Speirs has worked hard to bring his game to a high level.

He gives credit to his family, who “support me a lot,” and helped him mature as a young man. He says his three older brothers “made sure I didn’t get spoiled.”

Motivation isn’t a problem for Speirs.

The driven young golfer already has achieved one of his goals by winning the Paul Bunyan last summer.

Another goal is winning the Maine Amateur Golf Championship before he turns 18.

“I’d like to make match play in that next year,” Speirs said, referring to the fact that in that tournament, the low 16 scores after two rounds advance to match play. Match play is when two golfers compete head-to- head, the winner of the hole scoring a point, and the golfer with the most points going on to the next round.

“Play a couple matches, see what happens,” Speirs said.

Other goals include winning the Junior World Championships, qualifying for the U.S. Junior Amateur, and getting into Golf Week’s top 100 national junior scoreboard in the country.

While “going to college would be good,” Speirs “definitely wants to play professional golf” and could start to “play minitours in Florida.”

A minitour would be a circuit like the buy.com tour in which Speirs could play quality opponents and the top 15 on the year-end money list earn their Professional Golfers Association Tour card.

The top 125 in the PGA retain their cards for the following year.

“That’s what I want to do – play golf. My focus is golf, to get better.”