Collin Morikawa: Sony & Sentry Tournaments Almost Home Games

Collin Morikawa has many family ties to Hawaii which should make him an interesting prospect this week at the Sony Open.

As far as he’s concerned, it’s a wonderful place to start 2021.

“My entire dad’s side was born on Maui,” Morikawa said in his pre-Sony Open press conference. “We’ve got, you know, ten-plus cousins, and he has a bunch. We have so many cousins, I lose count.”

His father’s family used to have a restaurant in Maui called, no surprise, Morikawa Restaurant. It was on Front Street, which is down the road and around the bend from the Kapalua Resort, site of the Sentry Tournament of Champions. Front Street, from Google maps, is a block from the ocean.

Subsequently, Morikawa’s cousins moved to Oahu, which is where this week’s Sony Open is being played.

While most people go to Hawaii for vacations, Morikawa is more focused on regaining the kind of play that won him the PGA in August at TPC Harding Park. He hopes that will translate to victory soon.

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“I wouldn’t say golf has been great the tail end of 2020,” he explained, “but I think I’ve kind of turned it around slowly at the end of December.”

He played in the Race to Dubai which he could enter based on the points he garnered in the shortened 2020 season. Then he did some reassessing.

“I sat down with my coach for a couple days, and we had a really good talk about what I need to do and what we need to do better,” he said. “I thought that good play would just kind of lead over (after the PGA) and that’s never the case.”

Or as some coaches like to say, practice doesn’t make perfect. Perfect practice makes perfect.

One thing Morikawa is not lacking is confidence. He thinks he could have won a professional event while he was still in college. That doesn’t happen often. The last to achieve it were Phil Mickelson and Scott Verplank, both now qualified for PGA Tour Champions play.

“I didn’t come out there to see if my game was good enough,” he said about his first starts on the PGA Tour. “I already thought my game was good enough.”

He thought he was ready because in his first professional tournament, a Web.com tournament in Kansas, he lost in a playoff. It didn’t quite continue that way.

His first PGA Tour events were played while he was still an amateur. He received special exemptions to the Safeway Open in 2016, where he missed the cut, and the Arnold Palmer Invitational in 2018, where he finished T64.

“You learn a lot from missing cuts. You learn a lot from those two days of what you did wrong and what you need to do better,” he said.

The finish at the Arnold Palmer Invitational was a great performance for someone who would not turn professional for another 15 months.

Now as the reigning PGA champion, he can set his schedule for the next five years. He can choose the places he wants to play. For him, that means an emphasis on the beginning of the year, mainly because he was raised in California.

“West Coast Swing means a lot to me,” he said, which is natural since he went to school at Cal where he became No. 1 in the World Amateur Golf Ranking. “I love these events out here.”

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