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Hayashi, Ishii race There are many ways to go about making a first-round lead stand up in golf.
to Pro-Pro title
The Pearl Country Club duo
wards off all challengers
with a late birdie spreeBy Jerry Campany
jcampany@starbulletin.comYou can play it safe, go for the throat or just do the same things that allowed you to win on the first day.
David Ishii and Kevin Hayashi decided the way to keep a hold on the four-stroke lead they earned in the first round, and in the process win $3,000, was to not change a thing.
"We just wanted to make as many birdies as we can," Hayashi said of his team's strategy.
And it worked, as Ishii and Hayashi teamed up to beat all comers for the second straight day and win the Aloha Section PGA Pro-Pro Championship at the Ko Olina Golf Course yesterday.
They combined to shoot a 65 in the best-ball affair in the final round to card a 127 in the 36-hole contest, five shots better than the second-place teams -- Regan Lee-Beau Yokomoto and Matt Hall-Kevin Carll.
The leaders, clad in matching Pearl Country Club shirts and black caps, did not have as easy a time winning as the final margin would indicate. They started the day with a four-stroke cushion, but watched it drop to two when Jerry Mullen beat the pair twice in the first five holes.
Ishii won one of the strokes back on the next hole, but found out that Mullen and his partner, Mark Takahama, were not his only problem. Because each cart was equipped with a computerized leaderboard that updated continuously, he could see his team's lead was down to three with nine holes to go.
That was when Ishii and Hayashi stopped fooling around. Hayashi birdied the par-5 13th hole and they both birdied the 14th, another par-5. That gave them the momentum they needed to birdie four of their last six holes and watch their competition slip steadily.
"It was pretty close until those par-5s," Ishii said. "We were watching everybody on the screen and we knew that if we didn't make birdie on those two we would be in trouble. It was lucky I had Kevin as my partner, because he is strong enough to drive it to the green."
Though they had never played together before, by the end of the 36 holes they knew each other well enough to disagree on why exactly they were able to take apart the Ko Olina course on successive hot days.
Ishii insists that he was able to play it safe because he knew if Hayashi went for it and took chances, they would be able to post low scores. Hayashi said it was a simple matter of staying out of the legend's way.
"He was the one-man show today," Hayashi said of Ishii, who won the Hawaiian Open in 1990. "I was the jockey, and he was the horse."