WHO will be the last-ever winner of the United Airlines Hawaiian Open? That will soon become a golf trivia question when the PGA golf tournament ends a 33-year run next February. Hawaii will still have
a PGA tournamentThe news that the Hawaiian Open, as we know it at the Waialae Country Club, will cease to exist starting with the 1999 golf season came as a shocking revelation last week.
Fortunately, there won't be a void in professional golf here.
An official $2 million PGA Tour event called the Lincoln-Mercury Kapalua Open will be held on Maui in mid-January to replace the Hawaiian Open. But that's not all, the PGA Tour will move the Mercedes Championships - an elite tournament for the previous year's tour winners - here to start the 1999 season. The site has not been determined.
But you can bet your last dollar Nassau that the Mercedes Championships - formerly known as the Tournament of Champions - will be held at the Waialae Country Club. Especially now that the Hawaiian Open won't be held there. It's too great a venue to pass up.
"There's a lot of sentiment to have that event on Oahu, especially at Waialae where there's a history," said Mark Rolfing, who helped to bring the new Kapalua event to fruition. He said that Gov. Ben Cayetano has talked to PGA Commissioner Tim Finchem about holding the Mercedes event on Oahu.
THERE'S a sense of irony for Rolfing in how everything has played out.
He was at the PGA Tour meeting in Ponte Vedra Beach, Fla., on April 15 when United declined the offer to sponsor the Hawaiian Open with a steeper $2 million price tag. It had been $1.2 mil.
"We would have been in position to take the Mercedes Championships (for Kapalua)," Rolfing said. "I thought United would say yes. When they didn't, we shifted our offer."
So the site's different, but Hawaii still has a PGA Tour event, which it almost didn't have, says Rolfing.
The back-to-back PGA events scheduled for prime time back East will make it a win-win situation for Hawaii. Having the Mercedes virtually insures that Tiger Woods will be here for one and maybe both tournaments.
That prospect wasn't a given with the Hawaiian Open in recent years as many leading golfers habitually skipped the event.
"I'm hoping we can continue to do all the things that went with the Hawaiian Open," says Rolfing. "For example, I would like to do the Johnny Bellinger Shoot-Out."
At any rate, you have to give the enterprising Finchem credit for coming up with a TV package now before the NFL and NBA take most of the money. Finchem's bold move to shuffle the golf calendar made dollars and sense, even if such events as the Hawaiian Open and the Tucson Open will be history after 1998.
IF you think the Hawaiian Open has had a lot of history, consider that the Tucson Open, which will be no more in 1999, was first played in 1945 - 20 years before the Waialae event. Both will be around for one final fling.
Here are two Hawaiian Open trivia questions: 1) Who was the first champion and 2) is Waialae the longest continuous single site of any PGA Tour event other than the Masters, which is always held at Augusta?
The answers: The first Hawaiian Open champion was Gay Brewer and, no, Waialae isn't but it ranks only behind the Colonial Open at the Colonial Country Club (1946) and the Doral Open's Blue Monster course (1962) in longevity. Anyway, the streak of 33 consecutive years come next February is a long time.
To that, we all owe United Airlines a big aloha for underwriting a costly golf tournament that just simply got too pricey for its corporate needs.