Spirit of Aloha | Articles | Under the Hula Moon | March/April 2005

Under the Hula Moon
By: JOCELYN FUJIII

Games of Joy

After he moved to Kaua‘i in 1946, my father promptly and unselfconsciously arranged his medical practice around his golf game. For nearly half a century, until just a few years before he died at age 89, he played golf almost every day of his life. He had the same tee time each day for more than 40 of those years and took pride that all this was possible for the sum of $6 to $8 a month at the finest public links course in the state, the Wailua Golf Course.

In the 1950s, playing the 14th hole at Wailua with Bing Crosby, my father was summoned to deliver a baby at Wilcox Memorial Hospital in Lïhu‘e. In an aside to Bing, he promised to return to finish the round by the 16th hole, which he did. Later, asked whether he had delivered a boy or a girl, he confessed that, so eager was he to return to his game, he had forgotten to look.

Golf at Wailua has always been the sport of Everyman—accessible and inexpensive, a rural activity rather than a country club membership with gates. My father was one of many who enjoyed long, full lives at Wailua, then went out swinging. Maxie Mukai played until he was 86, and Anna Sloggett still plays there regularly—at the age of 98. Lefty Hirota collapsed with a massive heart attack on the 11th hole in 1969, but he was immortalized (the 11th is now “Lefty’s Hole”) and envied for dying while doing exactly what he loved. Professional golfers David Ishii and Danny Nishimoto cut their teeth at Wailua. Meanwhile, people like me, who didn’t play golf—or didn’t even like golf—spent our childhoods rolling down Wailua’s well-groomed hills and terrorizing the innocent by speeding around in golf carts long before we could drive cars.

In my early days on Kaua‘i, it seemed as if the world was divided into two parts: those who played golf and those who didn’t. I didn’t and still don’t, and I’ve never managed to overcome my disinterest in all sports. My nature-loving husband, on the other hand, has tuned into just one tournament for years, the Masters, for reasons unrelated to golf.

“Why do you watch the Masters?” I finally asked him one year.

“Have you noticed how quiet the game of golf is?” he replied. “The Masters is always played in the spring, when it’s so fantastic to hear the birds singing.” He watches the Masters to hear the springtime birds of his northeastern childhood, whose songs he can readily identify.

Another quiet sport rooted in the Kaua‘i lifestyle is surfing. I don’t surf either, but I still feel a territorial pride in the knowledge that Andy Irons, the three-time world champion, lives in Hanalei. So does his brother, Bruce, another world-famous shredder. Of course, I would not know these things were it not for Curt Smith, editor and publisher of Nalu Underground, a slick new magazine devoted to the amateur surfer. “With Andy and Bruce coming out of Kaua‘i, we’re definitely on the world map,” he says.

Smith and his twin brother, Mike, publish Nalu Underground in Kalaheo, a tiny town in west Kaua‘i. Good writing, colorful photography and a devotion to an amateur sport helped the magazine sell out its first 20,000 copies in seven weeks. When I recently spoke with Curt, he was on a month-long photo shoot on O‘ahu and in the process of starting a European edition.

The Smiths are committed to encouraging the future surfing heroes of Hawai‘i. The pantheon includes Olympic swimmer and Hawai‘i ambassador Duke Kahanamoku and Eddie Aikau, master of the big surf, who died in 1978 while paddling for help for the capsized voyaging canoe Hokule‘a. Each day we are reminded of them, in Duke’s colorful postage stamps and the “Eddie Would Go” or “Eddie Would Tow” or “Vincent Would Gogh” bumper stickers.

We also have our personal heroes, nameless to all but those who knew them. For me that is my father, a man whose joy in the game of golf, as in all of life, was pure and unrestrained.

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