When the Aloha Section PGA celebrates Hawaii golf at the ninth annual Hawaii Golf Hall of Fame and Ho‘olaule‘a Awards banquet in February, Brenda Rego and Hal Okita will be honored for very different accomplishments.
What we will celebrate most, however, is how much they are the same.
Rego, who will be inducted as the Hall of Fame’s 72nd member, was raised on a pineapple camp in Kunia with brothers Art, Darrell and Clyde. All became golf professionals.
Her golf game started with one-club contests against Clyde, who was inducted into the Hall posthumously in 2012.
Those humble — and so local — beginnings led to a dominant amateur career, two years on the LPGA Tour and officiating mini-tour events on the mainland.
Since she came home in 1984, Rego has crafted an admirable career as a PGA professional, ultimately becoming Hawaii’s first female Class A PGA professional and head pro at Wailea Blue.
For all her professional success, what strikes people most about Rego is her kindness and humility. She is soft-spoken and reliable, always more concerned with helping others than herself.
Okita was Ted Makalena’s classmate at Saint Louis. After playing baseball at the University of Dayton, he had a 27-year Army career — “I loved every day” — rising to the rank of colonel.
He spent his first 12 years back as a civilian working at Schofield, in charge of recreational services and oversight of the three Army golf courses. It was just the beginning of the Distinguished Service he will be honored for at Ho‘olaule‘a, which celebrates the champions of the six Hawaii golf associations and the Hawaii Golf Hall of Fame.
Okita helped build Army Golf’s membership up to 2,500, more than any private course in the state. He left to help develop Royal Kunia and served as general manager there and at Mid-Pacific Country Club.
In his self-styled “retirement,” he served as executive director of the Hawaii State Golf Association, which he helped found, and the Aloha Section PGA. Now, at 84, he serves as a rules official.
For all his professional success, what strikes people most about Okita is his kindness and humility. He is soft-spoken, open-minded and upbeat, a man of many talents and always more concerned with helping others than himself.
Rego and Okita richly deserve their honors, and are a little rattled by the attention. It is not why they devoted so much of their lives to golf.
“I liked going to the golf course,” Rego recalled about those days long ago, when her father would drop the kids off at Kunia in the morning and pick them up when he was done with work at night. “I liked playing. I started working at a golf course early, like 14.
“I worked and I played … and I enjoyed that.”
She won a pile of local amateur events — and the 1982 Hawaii State Open as a pro — and was good enough to play for Florida International and in two U.S. Women’s Opens. She qualified for the 1980 LPGA Tour, but hurt her back and played on a medical extension the next year. She came up $129 short on the money list of keeping her card.
Rego followed Art home to work at Mililani in 1984. She moved with him to Waiehu in 1986, then to Wailea in 1998. She became head pro at Wailea Blue 10 years later.
Her best competitive memory comes from her college days. Her career began well, then she “fooled with my swing a little” and the results were not good, until her last big tournament.
“I won the Southern Intercollegiate at the University of Georgia,” Rego recalls vividly. “Nancy Lopez was there and Betsy King and Beth Daniel. That was my big accomplishment.”
Now her work days are dedicated to Wailea Blue and junior golf. She coaches Maui High and goes into elementary schools with special equipment to introduce the basics. She has worked with the Hawaii State Junior Golf Association since 2000.
“I want to try to help grow the game, get kids involved,” Rego says. “Outside of my work I want to do that because golf has become pretty scary. We’re slow, I think everybody is. We need to try and grow the game as professionals. When we were growing up, people helped us get into it at no cost. Now there’s got to be some way to give back part of that.”
Okita helped grow the game at Leilehua, Kalakaua and Ft. Shafter, which has since been renamed Walter J. Nagorski Golf Course because Okita went to Washington D.C. and convinced officials to dedicate the course to its beloved former head pro.
In his 12 years as a civilian with the Department of Defense, Okita saw how wise the Army had been to grandfather in membership for civilians that had helped maintain Hawaii’s courses during the Korean War, and the retirees that followed, along with National Guard, Reserve and current Department of Defense employees.
Those members of the Army Golf Association paid “dirt cheap” monthly dues and enjoyed 45 great golf holes. He and Nagorski spent hours talking about making it 54.
“We talked about another nine holes at Leilehua to make it a 27-hole complex,” Okita recalls. “It would be where the warehouses are now and the river through Wahiawa. We were saying we could have a par-3 across the river, but nothing came of it.”
The banquet will be Feb. 11, at 5 p.m., in the Manoa Grand Ballroom of the Japanese Cultural Center of Hawaii. For more information, contact the Aloha Section PGA (593-2230 or aloha411@pgahq.com).
