It’s golf lite at the PGA Tour’s Sony Open in Hawaii this week. That’s because the venue on the southeast coast of Oahu, Hawaii’s most populated island, is a short, comfortable and very receptive layout played in what usually are benign weather conditions.
Waialae Country Club, which sits seven miles east of downtown Honolulu, is itself “architecture lite,” thanks to a circa-1927 design by Seth Raynor that looks and plays as if all of his characteristically rigid, linear design features were ironed out over the years. Actually, they just sit on flat ground, with the rest of Raynor’s typical edginess washed out by lush, wall-to-wall country-club turf cover.