Hawaii opens the PGA Tour season with ocean air and holiday galleries. The Sentry Tournament of Champions at Kapalua's Plantation Course on Maui—a Coore and Crenshaw routing down a pineapple-plantation slope toward the Pacific—is a winners-only gathering that looks like a postcard and plays like a wind exam. The Sony Open at Waialae Country Club in Honolulu follows on a tighter, more traditional parkland-by-the-sea test. PGA Tour Champions winter at Hualalai on the Big Island. Together they make Hawaii not a novelty stop but a genuine first chapter of the professional year.
Beyond Tour week, the islands offer Mauna Kea on the Big Island, Princeville and Puakea on Kauai, and a dense Oahu public-and-military inventory that locals actually use. Trade winds are the constant; lava-rock deserts on the Kona side play differently from lush windward valleys. Resort golf can be expensive and logistically heavy, but municipal and military courses keep the game accessible for residents who grew up with it as a regular pastime rather than a vacation splurge.
There is no real off-season, only wetter windward winters and hotter leeward summers. Charity scrambles and hotel pro-ams fill visitor calendars; high-school golf is a serious inter-island sport. Hawaii's culture mixes Polynesian hospitality with a practical island rule: play early, respect the wind, and never trust a calm first tee. For traveling golfers, the trip is as much about the setting—whales offshore in winter, volcanic backdrops, turf that never goes dormant—as about any single famous hole.