PGA Tour leaving Hawaii, as former Tournament of Champions and Sony Open off schedule

The PGA Tour announced Monday that 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.

As Golf Digest reported in January, the tour's two Hawaiian stops—The Sentry and the Sony Open—faced uncertain futures as the PGA Tour looked to overhaul its schedule beginning in 2027. The Sentry (formerly the Tournament of Champions) has called Maui home since 1999, its identity built on rigid exclusivity: only the previous season's winners need apply. That changed after the pandemic-shortened 2020 campaign, when eligibility expanded to all Tour Championship qualifiers, a stop gap that hardened into policy by 2023.

The following year brought more change—a corporate rechristening to "The Sentry," elevation to signature status and a qualifying threshold stretched to the top 50 in the FedEx Cup. The Sony Open, held in Honolulu, lacked that star density but had anchored the tour's schedule since the 1960s and held down a spot as the first full-field event of the calendar year.

This year’s Sentry was not played, the fallout from a water dispute amid severe drought forcing the tour in October 2025 to cancel the event rather than play at a browned-out Plantation Course at Kapalua.

Meanwhile, Sony was in the last year of its sponsorship for the former Hawaiian Open. Both tournaments faced structural problems rooted in geography. Their distance from the mainland creates cascading complications—logistical, operational, 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's sparse population and Kapalua's mountainous terrain yield thin galleries and one of the tour's smallest corporate footprints. Waialae draws respectable crowds from Honolulu's denser base but has never become a revenue engine.

The tour acknowledged that there is a chance the Sony Open moves to the PGA Tour Champions in conjunction with the current senior stop, the Mitsubishi Electric Championship at Hualalai. However, the tour is officially out at Kapalua.

“We 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,” the tour said in a statement, “as well as the fans, partners and volunteers across Maui who have supported the event throughout the years.”

While the Maui event might be gone, Sentry remains committed to a PGA Tour tournament through the mid-2030s. Sources have indicated to Golf Digest the company could sponsor the tour’s event at Torrey Pines, as Farmers Insurance just finished the last year of its tournament sponsorship.

For now, the first event on the PGA Tour’s 2027 schedule is the AmEx, slated to begin in late January. The tour is expected to release its full schedule in the upcoming weeks.