Wai‘alae Country Club has hosted the PGA Tour every year since 1965. Next January it hosts something else. The Sony Open is now the Sony Championship Hawai‘i, a tournament for players 50 and over.
Ernie Els, Jim Furyk, and Vijay Singh have all won at Wai‘alae. Now they can return to play a course that suits men who no longer drive the ball as far as they once did. The tour looked at Hawaiʻi and assigned us to the seniors’ circuit. What stings is how well the assignment fits.
The Sentry was Maui’s tournament, played each January at Kapalua in West Maui since 1999. It is gone now — to California, as it happens — and it took about $50 million a year with it.
Drought came first, and then the lawsuits. Maui Land & Pineapple claims in a court filing that the Kapalua golf courses drank more than 11 million gallons in a single June while county drinking water got 80,000. It is easy to feel bitter about emerald fairways up the coast from a town still rebuilding from fire, and nobody weeps for the richest man in Japan.
But Tadashi Yanai, who owns those courses, has offered more than $40 million to fix West Maui’s water system and hand it to the public for free. The problem is that nothing can get built here, even by a billionaire.
The Champions Tour takes the game’s greatest players, now past their prime, and puts them on a shorter course.
Hawaiʻi runs the same format. Our past champions still tee off every year: Tourism, the military, construction. They are our Els, our Furyk, our Vijay. The difference is the gallery. Golf fans adore their legends. We line our fairways with protest signs. And no rookie industry appears anywhere on our leaderboard, despite decades of talk about farming and clean energy.
A place with no rising industry has no ladder. Young people who want to climb must leave, and they do. Who arrives in their place? People who are finished earning.
We provide for these new arrivals handsomely. Hawaiʻi has the lowest property tax rate of any state, and Maui County is among the lowest of any county in America. A traditional employer pension, a military pension, a government pension: none of it is taxed here.
Meanwhile the worker still earning faces an income tax that climbs to 11 percent, among the steepest in the country. He also pays a general excise tax that reaches his groceries, his rent, and his baby’s diapers.
It is a tax code that welcomes people to rest and charges people who work. So the islands fill with California’s tech money and America’s pensioners, and the local kid packs for Las Vegas.
Somebody will say that older and slower is what these Islands ought to be. There is something to that. Communities may choose their own character, and any single project can be opposed for honest reasons. Perhaps the seven telescopes proposed for one acre of Haleakalā deserve a no. But protesters were arrested blocking the summit road over the last big telescope, in 2015 and again in 2017. Hundreds testified against this new one, and the county council has voted unanimously against it twice in two years. Maui has banned new vacation-rental complexes and is phasing out thousands of existing rentals. And rebuilding Lahaina’s Front Street, nearly three years on, is slow going. At some point the pattern stops being about any single project.
A place may choose rest, but it must count the cost honestly, and the cost is the children. A short course is kind to a man of 55. A 25-year-old needs room to swing, and he will find it somewhere else.
Scripture says man was set in the garden to work it and to keep it. We have grown very good at keeping. But we’re allergic to working, and a society arranged to live off what was made before is out of order, however comfortable it feels. If that is true, our assignment has not changed: Settle West Maui’s water rights so that somebody can build something. Stop treating our three old champions with contempt while offering nothing to replace them. And rebalance a tax code that exempts the pension check while taxing a young family’s milk.
They are calling the two January tournaments the new Hawai‘i Swing, but nothing about them is new, and the seniors’ tour would be the first to admit it. It knows what it is: past winners, a shorter course, finished by Saturday. The players are past their prime. Are we?
Author Sterling Higa can be reached at hello@sterlinghiga.com.
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