About our 2014 “People’s Issue” Cover

Marie and I were contemplating what to do about this year’s (2014) cover.  We knew one thing most denizens don’t get the opportunity to do much is say their piece, speak their mind, tell it like it is. Well, we threw the idea out there to our sponsors, and most of them were reluctantly on-board with the idea. Having written about Maui’s golf courses for the past 18 years, I thought why not let the people who work full-time at these places do some of the selling. Heck, if they can’t do it, who can?

So, we grabbed our camera and went out and videotaped just about everyone (in charge) that we could at our golf courses. On the west side, Mike Jones made himself available for 20 minutes. Marie and I got there and realized the indoor shot I had suggested would be a nightmare,  but changing the game so late was an impossibility, especially given that the trophy we were trying to include weighed about 200 pounds! No way was newly hired Deb Fitts going to have any of that. Well, Mike was very patient as we tried our best with our impossibly weak lights to catch both him and the sunny outdoors. It was a disaster and amplified by me further as I tried in vain to explain why it all went south, so Mike would give us another chance. That was a mistake as I only overwhelmed them all, and so now we have nothing to show you from Kapalua… yet.

I digress. So the idea we came up with for the 2014 issue was to make it the ‘people’s’ issue. We didn’t have the luxury of a big staff to arrange 100s of interviews, but we did fairly well where the courses supported us. Wailea, Elleair, the Dunes, Kaanapali were all very supportive and understood what were trying to do.

Now, we thought, what about this cover. While many of the courses didn’t want a lot of copy written, as they feel most people prefer tweets and that less is better, I found myself penning all of Kapalua, all of Wailea’s ancillary copy, all of Elleair’s ancillary copy, and with the exception of Kaanapali, everyone else’s too! Not exactly the ‘people’ talking. But Marie and I are people too. In fact, nobody spends more of their life trying to cobble together the hui that is the Maui Golf Review more than us.

We’ve done literally almost 100 issues over the years, and never once have we ever gotten much fame out of it all. In fact, the less we are seen (in most circles around here) the better. Well, I was inspired. I has this idea that the two of us would get some cred and still somehow bring the island together somehow. I was thinking Sgt. Pepper’s album cover, baby! Yeah…. The rest, shall we say, is history.