Taking Dead Aim
Taking Dead Aim
Charity is the real
winner in this golf game
Each June, as the summer solstice approaches, my thoughts turn to the Wailea Resort on Maui and the group of zealots who gather there to play in a charity event called "100 Holes of Golf."That's 100 holes in a single day, which works out to about 450 hurried swings and two tubes of sun block per contestant. The madness begins as the first rays of light appear over Haleakala Crater and doesn't end until the sun slips like a giant orange Titleist into the sea.
This Friday, 100 Holes of Golf will celebrate its 26th anniversary. According to its founder, Bob Herkes, a businessman and former legislator from the Big Island, 100 Holes began on the summer solstice in 1965 when he and three friends played a nine-hole course at the old Kauai Surf Hotel 11 times.
In its early years, the event was held sporadically and at different sites. In 1981, Larry Stubblefield, a former PGA Tour player turned insurance executive, took over the tournament and remade it into a fundraiser for Ka Lima O Maui, a Valley Isle social agency that finds employment for the disabled. He also secured a permanent home for the event --Maui's Wailea Resort --which this week will host the tournament for the 20th straight year.
I have participated in three 100-hole events and have concluded that this tournament is not for everyone. Believe me, you shouldn't try it if you have a suspect back or an aversion to 3:30 a.m. wake-up calls. In the pre-dawn hours, you pry yourself awake with coffee and stretching exercises, and then at first light you head out for the fairways beyond.
The event has few rules. Each of the 28 participants has a cart, and foursomes are required to average two hours per 18-hole round. Standard golf etiquette is abandoned. Everyone hits when ready. No one is allowed to take practice swings, line up putts, or look for lost balls. As Herkes likes to say, "It's basically hit-and-run golf."
Playing 100 holes is a different kind of marathon. Granted it's hardly a physical ordeal -- competitors don't even walk -- but the emphasis is on finishing, not winning, and the pacing is similar.
Typically, you complete the first 36 holes so quickly you begin to fantasize about finishing before lunch. By the start of the fourth round, however, you're moving noticeably slower. It's getting hot, you're concentration is slipping, fatigue is setting in. And then around the 72nd hole, you hit the wall. Your legs and feet feel like lead, your swing has lost its zip.
Around 5:30 in the evening everyone gathers to play the 100th hole, and in a final moment of planned chaos everyone putts out simultaneously on the 100th green.
Altogether, the 28 participants in this event will collect about $60,000 in pledges for Ka Lima O Maui, upping the 20-year total raised at Wailea to more than $800,000.
Almost 95 percent of that money goes toward supporting the disabled.
All of which proves one thing: This madcap tournament has a true social purpose. The real winner is charity.
Grady Timmons has been writing about golf in Hawaii for 25 years and playing it even longer. He can be reached at