GBO to end with 41st tourney

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The 41st annual Greater Bangor Open will also be the last.

An event that’s become synonymous with Bangor in July will tee off for the last time as a pro golf tournament July 25 due to scheduling conflicts with the North American Pro Golf Tour and declining sponsor dollars.

“We’ve toyed with this decision the last couple years and had great support to try and keep it going, but it’s like being on a sinking ship,” said assistant pro at host site Bangor Municipal Golf Course and first-year GBO president Rob Jarvis. “At some point, the pail you’re using to bail the water with just isn’t big enough.”

Scheduling conflicts are nothing new, but this year’s proved to be too much.

“This year was probably the straw that broke the camel’s back,” Jarvis explained. “The NAPGT scheduled one of their tournaments the same weekend as the GBO. When I checked the schedule this winter, we were free and clear, but in March, I looked again and they had scheduled tournaments on top of the GBO, the Maine Open, and the New Hampshire Open.”

This year’s GBO is July 25-28.

“We e-mailed our dates to them earlier in the year and I don’t know if they said they didn’t get it or what, but I got the feeling, truthfully, they figured if they put enough tournaments out there, they’d be the only game in town,” said Brian Enman, head pro at Bangor Municipal. “I don’t know if that’s the case or not, but the conflict really kind of put the nail in the coffin.

“It takes away close to half of our pro field. We had around 100 last year and I think close to 50 were from that tour.”

In an effort to reach some kind of resolution, Jarvis called the NAPGT’s tour director.

“I explained the history of this being a traditional event and 40 years old, and he said he couldn’t change dates of their tournaments once they were set,” Jarvis said. “I don’t know that it was deliberate, but their dates were set after ours had been announced.”

The NAPGT charges golfers a fee to play on the tour that covers all 10 tour events and employs a points system to rank golfers as the season progresses, making it illogical for member golfers to play in other tournaments conflicting with those on the tour.

The other big factor in the GBO board’s decision to end the tourney’s run after four decades was financial.

“The sponsorship dollars have been dwindling and really what it boils down to is there are so many charitable golf events now, on any given day there are charitable events scheduled,” Jarvis said. “There’s only so much money available, and that sponsorship money may not be decreasing, but it’s being spread around a lot more with so many more demands for it.”

Jarvis said in past years, the tournament would pay expenses for the tourney and part of the purse money with money from sponsors.

“Essentially the pros were paying for their purse money with the entry fees,” he said. “At one point, the entry fees were the majority of the purse money, but lately it’s become more like 50-50.”

Jarvis said the dwindling of the sponsorship pool was a major concern.

“Even with Hollywood Slots coming on board and making a major contribution, it’s getting a bit too thin and we don’t want to promise one thing and deliver another to guys who come up here to play,” Jarvis said.

Another complication is a reduction in the number of people available to help run the tourney. Jarvis said they used to have 20 board members, but are now down to four.

“It’s been tight the last couple of years, but we’d hoped to find a charity that would take over the solicitation for this tournament as far as the volunteers selling the pro-am sponsorships while we took care of the tourney itself and the pros coming to play in it.”

Hampden native John Hickson, who won the 1997 GBO title, says he’s sorry to see the tournament call it quits.

“I think that’s kind of sad. It brought a lot of good players to Bangor,” said Hickson, who had a junior membership to Bangor Muni and was also employed there as a youth. “It’s amazing the number of people I see or overhear talking about having played in the GBO. I won’t even say where I’m from and I’ll hear people mention it.

“That course has provided a lot, based on what I’ve heard from Enman and [former head pro] Austin Kelly], to the city of Bangor and the recreation department. There’s still a lot of revenue that comes into the area from that tournament.”

Hickson said he has played in 17 GBOs. He missed last year’s because he’d taken a new job as the golf professional for Dick’s Sporting Goods in Topsham, but has already put in for some vacation days to play in the GBO this year.

“It was always an annual event for me,” said the 43-year-old Hickson. “I don’t remember how old I was, but I remember going to a caddie clinic Brian ran up there. I think that was one of my first experiences with Bangor Muni.”

Veteran golfer Joe Clark Jr. of Holderness, N.H., estimates he has competed in more than 20 GBOs over the years.

“It was always a good event, one of the bigger events of the year,” said Clark. “I think a lot of it was that it was a three-day tournament in the middle of a lot of two-day tournaments, and that made it feel like more of a major tournament to us.”

Clark currently travels with the Champions Tour, attempting each week through qualifying events to make the main tournament field. He played in four Tour events last year, including the Senior British Open, and will be in Scotland when this year’s GBO is held, trying to qualify for the 2007 Senior British Open.

Clark cites the changing landscape of Northeast mini-tour golf as a growing challenge for the likes of the GBO.

“There are so many tournaments out there now for these guys to play,” said Clark, who last played in the GBO in 2005. “It didn’t use to be that way. Bangor in its heyday was one of the best places to go.”

Hickson says a change in the GBO purse structure a few years ago may have also caused some pros to bypass it.

“I think it started going downhill when they started overloading the first place money,” he said. “I think in an effort to make it more attractive, they might have made it less attractive to guys who were looking to see what the second- and third-place money was.”

“If first place is $10,000, second goes all the way down to $1,500, and only one guy’s getting first place, that leaves a bunch of other guys with significantly less prize winnings to play for,” he said.

“The higher the first place prize, the better talent you might get, and that was always our objective,” Enman said. “You always try to improve yourself and we certainly have had a great run.”

Does that mean it could still return as a pro tournament in future years?

“It’s possible, but I really don’t foresee that happening,” said Jarvis. “I mean, you never want to say never, but with this event leaving and us no longer hosting the Bunyan, we’re looking forward to starting something new, possibly a multiple-day amateur event.

“We’ll have to run it through in-house here and see what we can come up with, but we have an opportunity here to turn a negative into a positive. ”

Sportswriter Ernie CLark contributed to his report.