Aloha means goodbye Hawaii, hello new era
PGA Tour's expected departure from islands heralds new era; Stray Shots from Heritage
The PGA Tour will no longer offer Hawaiian views in January (Tracy Wilcox/PGA Tour vis Getty Images)
If you have been following along at all, the news that the PGA Tour is leaving the state of Hawaii should not come as a shock. And yet, there’s been a good bit of hand-wringing over the announcement this week, and a misguided interpretation that the PGA Tour is in tough shape and cutting back to save money.
That is not why this divorce went down.
The tour announced Monday that it would not be returning to the Kapalua Resort on Maui for the season-opening Sentry tournament, formerly known as the Tournament of Champions. It also said it would not be playing the Sony Open at Waialae Country Club in Honolulu.
The reasons have more to do with CEO Brian Rolapp’s desire to contract the schedule and produce a more meaningful year-long competition.
Yes, the cost of staging events in Hawaii is partly to blame. So is making the Sentry into a $20 million signature event when the title sponsor did not originally sign up for that commitment. And the local water dispute in Maui that caused the cancellation of the 2026 event made for another excuse to move on from the tournament at Kapalua’s Plantation course.
In Honolulu, the former Hawaiian Open had been played since 1965. It’s a blow to the history buffs and all who love those great winter views of the islands. There is no denying that.
But Rolapp made clear last month at the Players Championship that the schedule is going to look different, with some changes occurring in 2027 and a bigger transformation a year later. Part of his reasoning is to not compete directly with the NFL playoffs that fill the weekends in early January and dampen golf ratings.
Where and when the tour will begin remains undecided. Rolapp said that he wants to “open big with a marquee event at an iconic venue in the west, among other things, allowing us to finish on network television in primetime on the East Coast.” With a late January start, as he suggested, that could mean venues such as Torrey Pines or PGA West in the Palm Springs area, among several possibilities.
“We are proud to have sponsored The Sentry in Kapalua for eight years,” said Stephanie Smith, Sentry’s chief marketing and brand officer. “We have said from the beginning, we love Maui and Maui is a Sentry community not unlike our hometown of Stevens Point, Wisconsin. We cherish the friends and partnerships we have formed over the past several years. Our commitment to the island runs deep, and we remain committed to being active in the community.”
Sentry has a sponsorship deal in place with the PGA Tour through 2035 and Sports Business Journal reported it could be in line to take over the title sponsorship of the event at Torrey Pines, where Farmers Insurance bowed out as sponsor after this year’s tournament.
Other issues will likely be addressed as well. It’s not a great situation to have the Masters followed by three signature events in four weeks preceding another major championship, the PGA. It makes for a brutal scheduling month and is particularly hard on this week’s Zurich Classic of New Orleans, which will have one of the weakest fields of the year.
That can possibly change next year even if there is not a big overhaul to the schedule, which Rolapp laid out.
Rolapp said the tour is looking at roughly 21 to 26 tournaments on a “first track of elevated events” with the best players competing for higher purses. That would include the Players and the major championships as well as any postseason events, which he said he expected to remain at three tournaments.
“To be clear, we will have a second track of PGA Tour tournaments which will ladder up to those elevated events,” Rolapp said.
The 21-26 events would not be in order — there are approximately 32 weeks from late January to early September — meaning the second-tier events could find their way in between the bigger tournaments.
All of that is still to be determined.
But we know now that Hawaii won’t be part of it.
