For the past decade, the PGA Tour’s wraparound schedule has taken some of the sting out of the Hawaii swing.
From 1999, when the Tournament of Champions moved to Kapalua to team up with the Sony Open at Waialae Country Club, until 2013, Hawaii represented an official beginning.
Not only was it the beginning of the new year, it was the beginning of the PGA Tour season. Everyone started from scratch. Excitement for a new year abounded. Nobody was way ahead on the FedExCup leaderboard.
That hasn’t been the case for the past decade, as up to nine FedExCup events have been held before a month break prior to Kapalua.
With the PGA Tour going through radical changes in an attempt to combat the formation of Saudi-funded LIV Golf, Hawaii will once again provide the setting to the beginning of both a new year and a season in 2024.
The switch back to an eight-month PGA Tour season beginning with humpback whales breaching off the Kapalua coast should provide a boost to the Sony Open’s status as a competitive, viable PGA tournament despite not being one of the Tour’s “elevated” events.
With Sony’s sponsorship of the tournament at Waialae Country Club extended through 2026 and its position as the second Hawaii tournament to open the season, the Sony Open and the Hawaii swing should remain a viable part of the revamped PGA Tour schedule moving forward.
“I think the changes we’re making will certainly benefit both (Hawaii) events,” PGA Tour commissioner Jay Monahan said during a roundtable with media during the final round of the Sentry Tournament of Champions on Sunday in Kapalua. “I think this time that we have 19 players that are playing this week that are playing next week … (and) I think as you get here next year and we restart and go back to a calendar year, I think you’ll probably see that number only increase. Sony, the players love that golf course and love the back-to-back experience.”
Part of the change on the PGA Tour includes 13 events becoming elevated with larger purses. The Sentry TOC was the first of those tournaments, with Jon Rahm collecting a $2.7 million first-place check out of a prize pool of $15 million.
As a comparison, only four players had won more than Rahm’s first-place check in their entire careers at Kapalua. It took Dustin Johnson 11 appearances to earn just over $4 million in prize money on Maui, and Justin Thomas had to win it twice in his seven appearances to get to $3.9 million.
Thomas, who completed the last sweep of the Hawaii swing, winning both events in 2017, hasn’t been back to Waialae since he missed the cut in 2019.
He is part of the PGA Tour’s Player Impact Program in which more than 20 of the top players are part of a bonus program that forces them to play in the Tour’s 13 elevated events.
The commitment puts them in a position to have to be more selective playing the other tournaments. Media mentions, broadcast exposure and golf fan awareness are some of the criteria in judging the PIP payouts. There’s also only so much golf a player wants to play each season.
“The best golf I’ve ever played in my life was at the Sony in 2017, and it hurts to not go back there, but unfortunately, you have to miss some events that you want to play,” Thomas said after his Pro-Am round at Kapalua last week. “I think at the end of the day, a lot of events aren’t going to change drastically. They may lose one or two people here or there, but I think it’s going to be a great opportunity for a lot of other story lines.”
Eight of the past nine winners at Waialae played on Maui the previous week, and 19 of the 39 players who teed it up last week made the short plane ride over this year.
But only four of the top 20 in the Official World Golf Ranking are playing at Waialae this week after 17 of them did at Kapalua.
That’s the scary prospect for these non-elevated events on Tour, but the move back to starting the season in Hawaii should help the Sony.
“I think you will see players playing more often on the front end, independent of the events that they’re committed to play,” Monahan said. “I think generally the rule of thumb is any time you condense something and you put more emphasis into a shorter period of time, I think we’re just going to have more moments. And we’ve leaned into the difficulty of winning out here every single week and the importance of winning every single week.”
