Town Rankings / Hawaii

The Best Golf Courses in Poipu

Poipu is Kauai's south shore resort strip, the dry side of a wet island, where the trade winds soften and the beaches run gold. It has two golf courses, and this ranking will not invent a third to look thorough. Two courses, one of them a former stop for the best fields in golf, the other a solid local resort layout a mile inland. That is the whole bench, and honestly it is enough: Poipu's golf works because the top of the list is this strong and the bottom is this close to the hotels.

We score the golf first, then the day, then access. Here the golf settles it early. The argument, such as it is, is about how far apart the two really are.

1Poipu Bay Golf Course

Poipu Bay hosted the PGA Grand Slam of Golf for 12 years, and that fact explains the course better than any description could. The Grand Slam took the year's four major champions and put them on one course in front of television cameras, which means this resort layout had to stand up to the best players on earth at their best, year after year. Phil Mickelson's win in 2006 is still the clubhouse story, the one the staff tell and the one returning guests ask about. Courses that host that event join a small club, and the membership does not expire when the event moves on.

The course itself plays along the south shore cliffs and across the open ground behind them, a Robert Trent Jones Jr. design built on a grand scale for exactly the stage it got. The finishing stretch runs along the ocean bluffs, where the trades and the view arrive together and the round stops being a resort round. The concession is familiar for the genre: resort pricing, resort pace, and a middle stretch that plays more generously than its tournament billing suggests. None of it moves the needle. For 12 years the major champions of the world finished their season here. A two course town with that at the top does not need depth. It has height.

2Kiahuna Golf Club

Kiahuna sits just inland from the shore, the second course of Poipu, and the ranking every visitor actually faces: the famous name costs famous money, so is the other option worth the day? The answer is yes, with expectations set. Kiahuna is a proper full size resort course, not an overflow layout, with enough length and trouble to hold a decent player's interest and a setting in the greener, softer country behind the beach that plays differently from Poipu Bay's bluffs.

Where it loses is ceiling and story, and it loses both by a lot. There is no tournament history here, no finishing stretch on the cliffs, no 2006 champion in the clubhouse lore. What Kiahuna offers instead is availability: tee times when Poipu Bay is full, a friendlier price, and a round that leaves the afternoon free. Second place in a two course town can look like a verdict. Here it is closer to a division of labor. Poipu Bay is the pilgrimage. Kiahuna is the golf.

Late in the day the light flattens out over the south shore and the bluffs at Poipu Bay go the color of old copper. The Grand Slam is gone, the champions play elsewhere now, but the finishing holes have not heard the news.