After Andy Okita won the Manoa Cup last year, he dedicated it to his late grandfather George Okita, the man who started him in golf.

It wasn’t the Manoa Cup’s first bit of family history and won’t be its last.

The 110th Manoa Cup is next week at Oahu Country Club. Qualifying for the state amateur match-play championship is Monday, with the final the following Saturday.

Okita is back and so is Evan Kawai, the golfer he beat in last year’s final. Four-time champion Brandan Kop will be in the 36th Manoa Cup of his Hawaii Golf Hall of Fame career. Former champs Matt Ma (2012) and Tyler Ota (2015) are also back.

In its third year, the Manoa Cup’s women’s flight will have a new champion. Mari Nishiura won the first two but is still finishing her sophomore year at Oregon State this week. The field of 11 includes Brittany Fan, fresh off the NCAA Women’s championship, and former pro Anna Murata.

Kop figures his family history at Manoa Cup goes back some 95 years. Grandfather — and fellow Hall of Famer — Guinea Kop caddied for Francis I‘i Brown in the 1920s, when that Hall of Famer won five of his nine Cups.

After Brown completed his unique Triple Crown, capturing the Hawaii, California and Japan Amateur titles, he tipped Guinea Kop $10. “Equivalent,” Brandan recalls, “to what his father made in one month.”

Brandan caddied for his father Danny when he reached the 1971 quarterfinals. Danny lost in the final in 1948 at age 18 — the youngest finalist ever at that point.

That has changed, in a tournament that requires golfers to walk every often-soggy inch of OCC’s hills and valleys in match play.

“That adds to the difficulty of the tournament,” says Ma, who turns 35 this year. “There’s no secret that most of the past winners are under 30.”

Thirty-something Chad Nahale is making his Manoa Cup debut this year. George Nahale Sr., his great-grandfather, won the Cup in 1955 and ’56. Chad’s brother Brandon, now an Aloha Section PGA pro at Waialae Country Club, remembers the trophy case at his grandparents’ house with George’s trophies and Hall of Fame plaque, and all the pictures of George Sr. with a cigar in his mouth.

“I pretty much just always wanted to play in this tournament from when I was a junior golfer,” says Chad, returning to the game after 10 years away. “And when I found out my great grandfather won it back in his day it made me want to play in it that much more.”

Ma’s win in 2012 remains vivid. He went the distance in every match — “no breathers to say the least” — and the players he vanquished included current pros David Fink and Jared Sawada.

“I take a lot of pride in that,” Ma says. “It’s the toughest tournament to win. It’s the longest one and it’s just a grind and test of your patience.”

To say nothing of your talent, on what Kop calls “the toughest 6,000-yard course in the nation.”

“You can make a lot of birdies if you’re playing well,” adds Kop, an OCC member, “but if you are slightly off on your ‘touch,’ bogeys and double-bogeys are very easy to make.”

This year’s tournament will honor Hall of Famer Lance Suzuki, who died at 66 last year. He won the 1973 Manoa Cup, just before turning pro and ultimately capturing 43 local titles. He won at least once for 23 consecutive years and tied Tom Watson for fifth in the 1977 Hawaiian Open.

“He was one of the golfers that all of us looked up to and wanted to emulate,” said Kop, who played in his first Manoa Cup in 1973 at age 12. “I still remember how he shot 66s without you really noticing it. It seemed effortless, he’d hit it in the fairway, hit it on the green 10 feet, make the putt, next hole same thing. When you added up the score at the end he would be 5, 6, 7 under without you knowing it. It seemed so easy.”

Kop still remembers all the advice Suzuki offered him, particularly his “The will to win overcomes any physical deficiencies” mantra.

“A true legend,” says Ma, who wasn’t alive in 1973. “He was a guy that always smiled when I saw him. Never a bad day kind of guy. I know he was very passionate about helping junior golf and teaching the next generation, which is very important. He was a great man on the golf course and even greater off the golf course.”