On Wednesday morning, a dozen of Hawaiʻi’s premier golf resorts launched a new initiative, Play Hawaiʻi Golf.
It’s a global effort to elevate the sport in the islands following the loss of the PGA Tour Sentry on Maui and the Sony Open at Waiʻalae Country Club on Oʻahu.
It's an effort to highlight the resorts and the 70 golf courses across the state. The sport of golf is said to contribute close to $3.5 billion to Hawaiʻi’s economy.
Last week, the PGA Tour announced that the Sony Open, which happened annually in January at the Waiʻalae Country Club, would be replaced by the Sony Championship Hawaiʻi, a tournament for golfers 50 and older.
The loss of the televised events rocked golf fans earlier this year.
The Conversation caught up with golf pro Mark Rolfing in Montana on Tuesday afternoon. Honolulu Star-Advertiser reporter Dave Reardon also joined HPR in the studio.
“The PGA Tour has gone through a major change the last couple of years in that they are no longer a 501(c)(6) organization, which was an organization that was put together primarily for charitable purposes, that was a not-for-profit,” Rolfing said. “That changed about two years ago, and it became a for-profit enterprise."
The restructuring created an entirely new organization with a different leadership team, many of whom came from the National Football League.
“The NFL is a much different operating organization, and they view Hawaiʻi completely differently — as being too remote and too small a market to have an NFL team," Rolfing said.
“And I knew from the beginning that they were pretty much looking at Hawaiʻi and saying the same thing: ‘We need to go to major markets, particularly to begin our season.’ And once that became evident to me, that they were going to change their focus, I knew that we were in trouble with the PGA Tour as we knew it.”
Rolfing said he witnessed the financial pressure of the Maui tournament rise over the years, even before the Lahaina wildfires.
“When I first started, I was doing all the negotiating for Sentry over there for the last eight years, and we started at a total of $6 million for the purse for that event, and by the time we were done, it was $20 million and I knew that wasn't sustainable, no way was that a sustainable number, because there just isn't any money locally to be raised in that kind of a profit situation,” he said.
Reardon added that one of the PGA Tour’s new strategies is called scarcity marketing.
“They want to compress the schedule and have all the big names play in all the events as much as possible, and although that hurt us in Hawaiʻi, it also opened up some windows, because we talk a lot about our geographic disadvantages and things like that here, but we also have the advantage of weather hosting the tournament pretty much any time of the year or an event anytime of the year, but finding that window when the best, biggest names will be available, and also the money to get them here. … There's got to be buy-in from corporate and government agencies as well.”
Rolfing said that it is ultimately up to Hawaiʻi to attract major tournaments. Reardon said he believes that establishing a sports commission would help with competing for events.
“The average cost for a new PGA Tour event for a destination over the last five years has been $5 million,” Rolfing said. “There are tournaments now in Utah, Myrtle Beach, Bahamas, Puerto Rico, where the site fees paid by the governments of those places (are) $5 million for one tournament; that's how much is being spent, and that's what we're having to compete with.”
Read Dave Reardon's column in the Honolulu Star-Advertiser.
This story aired on The Conversation on July 8, 2026. The Conversation airs weekdays at 11 a.m. Hannah Kaʻiulani Coburn adapted this story for the web.
