PGA Tour Season Opener Faces Unexpected 60-Day Closure

The PGA Tour season opener is facing an unexpected challenge after news broke that the Kapalua Resort golf courses in Maui will shut down for 60 days. The courses, which host The Sentry each January, are dealing with serious turf damage caused by a lack of water, raising concerns about whether the tournament can go ahead as planned in 2026.

Plantation and Bay courses at Kapalua To Close From September 2

The Plantation and Bay courses at Kapalua will close beginning September 2, 2025. The shutdown is expected to last until early November. During this period, grounds crews will focus on restoring the grass by aerating, verticutting, removing dead turf, and applying slow-release fertilizers. Grounds crews take these steps to help the fairways and greens recover in time for the season-opening event. However, this has raised serious concerns that it might not be able to host The Sentry to start the tour’s 2026 season.

The problem started when the courses lost access to irrigation water on July 25, 2025. Without a steady water supply, the grass quickly deteriorated under the Hawaiian sun, leaving the courses in poor condition. The sudden decline at a resort long regarded as one of golf’s premier destinations has alarmed players and organizers.”

“The golf course has been damaged after being without water for months,” the general manager of Kapalua Golf and Tennis, Alex Nakajima, said. “I proposed to the owner that we need to shut down the golf course to increase our chances of saving the golf course and the tournament.”

At the heart of the crisis is a legal dispute over the Honokohau Stream and Ditch System, which has provided water to the Kapalua area for more than a century. Tadashi Yanai, the Japanese businessman who owns the resort and is also the founder of the clothing brand Uniqlo, has filed a lawsuit against Maui Land & Pineapple (MLP). Yanai’s team claims that MLP failed to properly maintain the water delivery system, which led to the shutdown of irrigation.

Kapalua Resort Embroiled In Lawsuit

Water use has long been a sensitive subject on Maui, with agricultural needs, cultural rights, and development interests often clashing. The situation at Kapalua is now another chapter in that bigger story, one that has suddenly spilled onto the PGA Tour calendar.