{"id":620690,"date":"2026-04-21T05:04:10","date_gmt":"2026-04-21T05:04:10","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/620690\/"},"modified":"2026-04-21T05:04:10","modified_gmt":"2026-04-21T05:04:10","slug":"pga-tour-leaving-hawaii-as-former-tournament-of-champions-and-sony-open-off-schedule-australian-golf-digest","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/620690\/","title":{"rendered":"PGA Tour leaving Hawaii, as former Tournament of Champions and Sony Open off schedule \u2013 Australian Golf Digest"},"content":{"rendered":"

[Photo: J.D. Cuban]<\/p>\n

The PGA Tour has announced it is ending its season-opening Hawaiian swing. Doug Ferguson of the Associated Press was the first to report the story, with the tour subsequently releasing a statement confirming the decision.<\/p>\n

As Golf Digest reported in January<\/a>, the tour\u2019s two Hawaiian stops, The Sentry and the Sony Open, face uncertain futures as the PGA Tour looks to overhaul its schedule beginning in 2027. The Sentry (formerly the Tournament of Champions) has called Hawaii home since 1999, its identity built on rigid exclusivity: only the previous season\u2019s winners need apply. That changed after the pandemic shortened the 2020 campaign, when eligibility expanded to all Tour Championship qualifiers, a stopgap that hardened into policy by 2023.<\/p>\n

The next year brought more change, a corporate rechristening to \u201cThe Sentry\u201d, elevation to signature status, and a qualifying threshold stretched to the top 50 in the FedEx Cup. The Sony Open lacks that star density but has anchored the tour\u2019s schedule since the 1960s and remains the season\u2019s first full-field event.<\/p>\n

RELATED: \u2018We don\u2019t know what\u2019s going on over there\u2019: PGA Tour CEO Brian Rolapp sounds off on LIV Golf news in sports talk show appearance<\/a><\/p>\n

This year\u2019s Sentry was not played, the fallout from a water dispute amid severe drought<\/a> forcing the tour to cancel the event last October rather than play at a browned-out Plantation course at Kapalua. Meanwhile, Sony was in the last year of its sponsorship for the Hawaiian Open. Both tournaments faced structural problems rooted in geography. Their distance from the American mainland creates cascading complications in logistics, operations, and financial. Even with leaner infrastructure than their continental counterparts, multiple sources with knowledge of Tour productions rank the Hawaiian stops among the costliest on the calendar. Maui\u2019s sparse population and Kapalua\u2019s mountainous terrain yield thin galleries and one of the tour\u2019s smallest corporate footprints. Waialae draws respectable crowds from Honolulu\u2019s denser base but has never become a revenue engine.<\/p>\n

There is a chance the Hawaiian Open moves to the PGA Tour Champions. However, the Tour is officially out at Kapalua.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe are grateful to the Plantation course at Kapalua, Kapalua Resort, Maui County and the state of Hawaii for their longtime support of our season-opening PGA Tour event,\u201d the tour said in a statement, \u201cas well as the fans, partners and volunteers across Maui who have supported the event throughout the years.\u201d<\/p>\n

Sentry remains committed to a PGA Tour event through the mid-2030s. Sources have indicated to Golf Digest that the company could sponsor the tour\u2019s event at Torrey Pines, as Farmers Insurance is also in its last year of tournament sponsorship.<\/p>\n

For now, the first event on the PGA Tour\u2019s 2027 schedule is the AmEx, slated to begin in late January. The tour is expected to release its full schedule in the coming weeks.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"[Photo: J.D. Cuban] The PGA Tour has announced it is ending its season-opening Hawaiian swing. Doug Ferguson of…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":620691,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[566],"tags":[300987,4225,64,63,755,1745,183153,300988,300989,44,1747,300990,219501,85,300991],"class_list":{"0":"post-620690","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-golf","8":"tag-2027-pga-tour","9":"tag-article","10":"tag-au","11":"tag-australia","12":"tag-golf","13":"tag-golf-news","14":"tag-golf-schedule","15":"tag-hawaii-golf","16":"tag-kapalua","17":"tag-news","18":"tag-pga-tour","19":"tag-sentry-tournament","20":"tag-sony-open","21":"tag-sports","22":"tag-waialae"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/620690","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=620690"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/620690\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/620691"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=620690"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=620690"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=620690"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}