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The late Evelyn Grant loved the game of golf. She also loved helping others develop that same passion she had for the game.
Bangor native Grant, a member of the Maine Sports Hall of Fame and Maine Golf Hall of Fame, died on Saturday. She was 83.
“She was a very special person,” said Thea Davis, the golf pro at Hermon Meadows Golf Course. “She was one of my first mentors in the game. She did everything she could to encourage me. She played a very important part in me getting excited about playing golf.
“She would take me to tournaments and show me the ropes. I caddied for her at Palmyra,” said Davis.
Davis recalled one particular time when Grant transformed her into a confident and efficient putter.
“I told her I was a really terrible putter,” said Davis. “I wanted some sympathy. But Evelyn looked at me and told me ‘Of course you are.’ I said ‘Well thanks a lot.’
“She told me with my attitude, I would always be a terrible putter. She gave me a mantra. She told me to say ‘I’m a great putter’ 100 times a day. And I became a great putter.”
Davis also said any time she was having trouble with her game, Grant would say, “OK, let’s go to the range” and they would iron the problem out.
Auburn native Martha White, a longtime golf rival of Grant’s who became friends with her when she moved to Hermon, said Grant was “a fine person and was very much interested in others, especially junior golfers.
“She brought along a lot of young golfers,” added White.
Ann Lang, a longtime friend of Grant’s, said Grant was “wonderful to any new person who was getting involved in the game of golf. ”
Grant began playing golf at age 6 and developed into one of the state’s best woman golfers.
Highlighting her career were back-to-back Women’s Maine State Golf Association championships in 1952 and ’53 at the Bath Country Club and Portland’s Riverside Country Club, respectively.
Grant won the WMSGA seniors championship in 1985.
She captured several other tournaments all over the United States and Canada.
“She was a fantastic competitor,” said White, who has won 13 WMSGA titles. “I can’t tell you how many times we met and we always seemed to have quite a match. A lot of time it went down to the 18th hole.
“Playing against Evelyn was something I always looked forward to. Then when I moved to the Bangor area, we played together as friends rather than rivals although there was always an undercurrent [of friendly rivalry] there,” added White.
White said that Grant “followed the rules of golf to the letter and had a great deal of integrity and honesty.”
Bangor Municipal golf pro Brian Enman called Grant a “good ball striker.
“She hit a lot of good shots. She never hit it far off line,” said Enman.
Grant had several other interests.
She enjoyed the outdoors. She fished and hunted and she also groomed her dogs and entered them in dog trials.
She was an athlete at Bangor High School from where she graduated in 1940.
She had two sons, Curtis and David Brown, and she was “very interested in them” according to Enman.
Dave Brown went on to have an outstanding athletic career at Bangor High as he led the Rams to state championships in swimming and golf.
He also won the 1980 Paul Bunyan Amateur Golf Tournament by one stroke over defending champ Mark Plummer of Augusta.
He went on to have a pro career in golf and he has a daughter with a “promising golf career” according to Lang.
Grant and her passion for the game will be sorely missed, according to her friends.
“She was a wonderful golfer and a wonderful person,” said Lang. “She was an advocate of golf. She was involved with the WMSGA and on the junior national scene. She will be greatly missed in the golf world.”
Enman said even in recent years when her declining health prevented her from playing the game, “she would always talk about golf. She really enjoyed the game an awful lot.”
A Mass of Christian Burial will be celebrated 11 a.m. Thursday, July 13, at St. Mary’s Catholic Church Bangor.
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