This week’s PGA Tour stop is the Sony Open in Hawaii. We look back at 10 of the event’s most memorable moments.
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This week’s PGA Tour stop is the Sony Open in Hawaii. We look back at 10 of the event’s most memorable moments.
Isao Aoki had one of the most distinctive putting styles ever seen, with his hands held low and the toe of the club pointing high. But Aoki didn’t need his putter for his most famous accomplishment – a holed-out wedge for an eagle-3 on the final hole at Waialae Country Club to become the first Japanese player to win on the PGA Tour. For Aoki, who topped the Japan Golf Tour money list five times between 1976 and 1981, it was his only PGA Tour win.
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In 2000, Paul Azinger was seven years removed from a diagnosis of cancer that caused him to miss most of the 1994 season. He hadn’t won since the 1993 PGA Championship. “I had no doubt I was never going to win again, I was playing so bad,” he said of his recovery. “Winning was not an option. I just didn’t see it coming back.” His game started to improve in 1999, though, and he finally returned to the winner’s circle by going wire to wire for a seven-shot margin in Hawaii.
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Ted Makalena became the first Hawaiian-born winner of the Hawaiian Open, shooting a tournament-record 271 to defeat Billy Casper and Gay Brewer by three shots. It was his only PGA Tour win. Two years later, Makalena died at age 34 from injuries suffered in a swimming accident in Waikiki.
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Lee Trevino had won only once on the PGA Tour, but it was a biggie – the 1968 U.S. Open. In November of that year, Trevino won again, taking the Hawaiian Open, the next-to-last event of the season. He took $10,000 of his $25,000 winner’s purse and used it to set up a trust fund for the children of 1966 Hawaiian Open winner Ted Makalena, a close friend who had died two months earlier in a swimming accident.
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Jack Renner was the victim of Isao Aoki’s spectacular finish to the 1983 Hawaiian Open, a hole-out eagle for a one-shot win. A year later, it was as if the golf gods felt like they owed him one. Wayne Levi led for the first 17 holes of the final round, but missed several putts that could have allowed him to coast home. Instead, Renner tied for the lead with a birdie at the 18th, then watched Levi miss a 4-footer for the win. In the playoff, Renner won when Levi three-putted the second extra hole.
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Even though he was only 16 (and barely over 5 feet tall) in 2007, Tadd Fujikawa already had made a name for himself by becoming, in 2006, the youngest player ever to qualify for the U.S. Open (a record that has since been broken). In 2007 Honolulu native Fujikawa, then 16 years and 4 days old, became the second-youngest player to make a 36-hole cut in an official PGA Tour event. He did it in dramatic fashion, too, making a 15-foot eagle putt on his 36th hole.
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Ernie Els became the first player in 13 years to win the first two events of the season, holing a 43-foot birdie putt on the second extra hole to beat Aaron Baddeley. Baddeley, whose 10-foot birdie putt on the 72nd hole had forced the playoff, was playing in his first tournament as a PGA Tour member.
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Hawaii native Michelle Wie was 14 when she received the first of four consecutive sponsor exemptions to her hometown PGA Tour event. The fourth, and youngest, female to play in a PGA Tour event, she shot 72-68—140, missing the cut by just one stroke. (The 68 was the lowest score ever by a female in a PGA Tour event.) Her 140 total would be, by seven shots, her best score in four Sony Open appearances.
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David Ishii, a native Hawaiian of Japanese descent, had already won 10 times on the Japan Golf Tour when he teed it up in the 1990 Hawaiian Open. There, he shot a 9-under 279 to defeat Paul Azinger by one shot and join Ted Makalena as the only Hawaiian-born winners of this event. Afterward, he was almost apologetic. “Every break that could happen for me did happen,” he said. “I didn’t win it. I shot par and everyone else let me have it.”
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Justin Thomas was as hot as a Hawaii volcano in January 2017. In the opening event of the year, the Tournament of Champions, he shot 22 under and won by three. But he was just getting started. The very next week, in the opening round of the Sony Open in Hawaii, he shot 59, becoming the youngest player (23) in PGA Tour history to break the 60 barrier. He opened and closed his historic round with eagles. He didn’t break 60 again that week, but he finished at 27 under, winning by seven shots.
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