Custom Waialae Country Club artwork, made to order — a hand-styled map of the course, a painting-style print of your favorite hole, or a finished photo from your round.
Created from actual data — every tee, fairway, bunker, and green, all in vivid detail.
Seth Raynor never saw Waialae finished. The architect behind some of the era's finest inland courses died in 1926, and it was his associate Charles Banks who completed the routing on former ranch and marsh ground between Honolulu's Kahala neighborhood and the sea — ground once known in Hawaiian as the 'spring water of the mud hen.' The club opened for play on February 1, 1927, backed by a group of Honolulu businessmen and tied, in its earliest years, to the Territorial Hotel Co.'s push to sell the islands as a luxury destination.
What Raynor and Banks left behind was a rarity: a genuine links-style test on a tropical island, laid out low and wide beneath stands of coconut, monkey pod, and kiawe trees, its Bermuda grass fairways and greens built to take the trade winds rather than hide from them. There is no single dramatic hole here so much as a whole round of quiet variety — the par-3 8th, hugging the Pacific for all 186 yards, is generally reckoned the signature hole, and four coconut palms behind the 16th green form a natural 'W' that has become the course's unofficial signature.
Tournament golf arrived in 1965 as the Hawaiian Open, won by Gay Brewer, and Waialae has hosted it every year since — through sponsorships by United Airlines and, since 1999, Sony. Because the course plays firm and true even in January, and because Honolulu is the one stop where players can trade a mainland winter for shirtsleeves, the Sony Open in Hawaii has long opened the PGA Tour's calendar year, its nines reversed for television so the tournament finishes at what members know as their 9th, a reachable par 5.
In July 2026, the PGA Tour announced that after more than six decades as a full Tour stop, the event would move to the PGA Tour Champions circuit in 2027 as the Sony Championship Hawaii — closing one chapter of Waialae's tournament history just as Chris Gotterup opened a new one, winning the Sony Open and, weeks later, the WM Phoenix Open, a rare start-of-year double. Whatever comes next, Waialae remains what it has always been: an easy walk, a hard scorecard, and the most agreeable stretch of championship golf in American winter.
Museum-quality Waialae Country Club map art, traced from real course data — every bunker, green, and fairway. Home to the Sony Open in Hawaii since 1965. Four designs, six sizes, or personalized with your own round photo.
Course data © OpenStreetMap contributors (ODbL)