Hawaii Bowl director oversaw UH computerization upgrade

When David A. K. Matlin showed up at the University of Hawaii in 1993 looking for a job, a lot of people weren’t sure what to make of him.

For one thing, here was a guy who had been director of sales for the Houston Astros but wanted to live in Hawaii so much that he was willing to take a student casual hire position at UH for approximately $6 per hour.

For another, he had grown up in Michigan and elsewhere on the mainland with the middle names of Alexander and Kalakaua.

Twenty-two years later, however, few are surprised he is a finalist for the athletic director’s job at UH.

Matlin emerged Tuesday as the recommendation of the eight-member AD search advisory committee. Manoa Chancellor Robert Bley-Vroman is meeting with both Matlin and insurance executive Keith Amemiya before announcing his choice as a successor to Ben Jay.

Matlin, 50, was born into sports, the son of career baseball executive Lew Matlin. At the time of Matlin’s birth, his father was the general manager for the Hawaii Islanders (1963-64). Soon after he followed his father on the baseball path that included Vancouver, Seattle, Milwaukee and Detroit.

He got the middle name of Kalakaua for sharing a birth date with the Merrie Monarch. Alexander was two-fold, both a family name and to honor Alexander Joy Cartwright, the father of modern baseball and Honolulu’s first fire chief. His father has led an annual pilgrimage for local baseball purists to visit the grave in Oahu Cemetery on Cartwright’s birthday.

After graduating from Michigan, David embarked on his own sports career, painstakingly working his way up from an intern with the Astros to the team’s marketing operations manager and director of sales. At age 26 he was the youngest director of sales in MLB.

But Matlin and his wife, the former Dana Hatate of Honolulu, who he met at Michigan, wanted to return to Hawaii. Initially brushed off by UH he persisted and got a position doing event marketing for the school, including the Midnight Ohana, while completing an MBA.

Upon graduation he rose to assistant ticket manager at UH, overseeing a conversion to computerization that dragged the office into the 21st century. In 2002 he became associate director of the inaugural Hawaii Bowl and in 2008 was named executive director of the game for ESPN Events, which owns it. He added the Hawaiian Airlines Diamond Head Classic in 2009.

Friends, ignoring the year-around foundation-laying for the events, joke that Matlin works just four days out of the year. "If that was true, I’d be the smartest guy in Hawaii," Matlin has often said.