The second week of the 2024 season keeps us in Hawaii, this time at Waialae Country Club in Honolulu. This is the season’s first official full-field event, with 144 golfers, including 20 of the top 50 in the Official World Golf Rankings, teeing it up at this week’s Sony Open. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
Looking at past seasons, you can see that the weather, primarily the wind, can have a massive impact on how this event plays out. Waialae is a second-shot course with small, flat Bermuda greens. The fairways here are significantly narrower than the airport runways featured at Kapalua, but hitting the fairways at Waialae isn’t the skeleton key it was in years past. Having the ideal angle for your second shot is paramount, even more so than finding the fairway off the tee. As they were last week at Kapalua, the green complexes here are Bermudagrass this week, but that’s where the parallels end. These greens are firmer, much smaller, and flatter than what the field saw last week.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Handicapping early-season events when we have less relevant form data than we do in the spring and summer is a bit more of a feel thing than I’d like it to be. I prefer to lean on as much data as possible, but we’re all in the same boat, so let’s work with what we have. We do know that course history matters here. According to DataGolf<\/a>, Waialae Country Club trails only Augusta National in terms of predictive course history. According to Justin Ray<\/a>, eight of the last ten winners at the Sony Open played the previous week at The Sentry, and the cut rate for players who played the previous week at Kapalua is around 80% over the past three years. Russell Henley’s 2013 win was the lone debutant winner in the past 18 stops at Waialae. That should help form our high-level thoughts this week as we dig into the field, with 36 golfers teeing it up for the second week in a row.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
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