Much has been made of this year’s Sony Open potentially being the PGA Tour’s last venture in Hawaii. (For awhile at least.) The financials don’t exactly add up for the shrewd schedule makers, no matter how you hold them up to that lovely Hawaiian sunlight. But if there was a quintessential way of summarizing the Tour’s Hawaiian experience, well, this tournament is doing its best.
Everything about Saturday explains what is great and lackluster about Pacific island pro golf on this particular weekend in mid-January. Ultimately, we have a second-rate field — with all due respect to everyone involved — with a smattering of top pros, most of which have played well at this tournament before. And despite top 10 players like Russell Henley and J.J. Spaun and Bob MacIntyre all showing face, the likes of Collin Morikawa and Keegan Bradley and Tony Finau all departed before the weekend began.
What’s to blame there? Not Hawaii, necessarily. We’ll call it what it is: their first event of the year. Their first real competitive shots in months. Much like the Dubai Invitational, played 8,500 miles away, the Sony feels like preseason golf, certainly not far from the fall’s offseason golf. Only Ryan Gerard — the man who raced across the Atlantic in December in pursuit of a Masters invite — could claim that his 2025 season continued without a break here in Hawaii. Everyone else has been grooving back into form.
And yet, that doesn’t mean the golf wasn’t compelling, so long as you turned away from the NFL’s divisional round playoff games.
Even if players carved now-sweat rounds in the mid-60s out of Wai’alae Country Club early in the week, Friday evening and Saturday afternoon brought some ripping winds through Honolulu, making the classic Tour course a proper test. Temps were in the upper 70s, sure, but the wind was gusting between 30 and 35 mph, with plenty of cross-wind approaches into Wai’alae greens.
“Honestly I feel like I played better yesterday, but I scored better today,” Chris Gotterup said, some confusion on his face. His 2-under 68 has him two back of Davis Riley’s 12-under lead. Gotterup was just one of a bunch of players who mentioned how the wind can play funny tricks on your mind, even when you’re just putting.
Saturday’s average score notched just above par, something we’re not accustomed to seeing at a course pros normally dismantle. If Sunday’s winner finishes at 15-under or worse, it’ll be the highest winning score since 2020. Perhaps it’s the islands way of saying one of two things: Good riddance! Or maybe y’all should stick around a bit longer.
And yet, no Tour event will battle the same headwinds that the Sony will find Sunday. As we have learned for decades, the NFL reigns supreme over every televised entity in America, sports division or otherwise, and it has another pair of divisional round games that will crush any ounce of fascinating golf that the Sony could provide. If the tournament is lucky, the snowy game in Chicago will end in a blowout so the golfiest golf fans will flip over for the final few holes in sun-kissed O’ahu.
Not even next week’s Tour event — which will be up against the NFL’s conference championship games — will hurt quite as bad. Thanks partly to the cancellation of last week’s The Sentry, next week’s The AmEx will have its strongest field in many years with World No. 1 Scottie Scheffler making his season debut.
In that sense, Hawaii’s loss will be California’s gain. We might find ourselves repeating that phrase for many Januarys to come.
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