Retirements will leave divot in golf’s landscape

Mike Iyoki and Rick Ambrose, two golfers whose game ultimately blurred with their work, retired at the end of last year. Bill Bachran, who barely touched a club but ran the Hawaiian Open media center for more than 40 years, follows them next Thursday.

The retirements create a large void at Leilehua, where Iyoki was U.S. Army Hawaii Director of Golf and Ambrose the head pro, and at one of the longest running PGA Tour events.

Bachran, 86, was still making calls last week to remind folks Valentine’s Day was the 30th anniversary of Isao Aoki’s wondrous wedge shot that rolled into the 72nd hole for eagle to wake up Waialae Country Club like never before. He won by one over a shocked Jack Renner, who was signing his scorecard and wondering if he would win or go to a playoff.

"I heard this huge roar from the 18th green," recalls Bachran, in a cart to go pick up the winner when Aoki made history — and collected the tournament’s first oversized, heart-shaped check. "I had watch it on repeat on the television. Everybody was jumping up and down. It was just incredible. It was Isao’s first PGA Tour win. He had an aura about him in the Japan market like Arnie (Palmer) did in the U.S."

Bachran grew up in New York and got his first look at Hawaii on his honeymoon. He and wife Laurie, a former Mrs. Hawaii, married on King Kamehameha Day in 1949. They met in a college production of "The Mikado" and she had not been home since she left for school.

"I looked once at the nice weather and everything else … and never left," Bachran recalled. "We stayed and the kids just kept coming. Six kids and our 11th great grandchild is due in another month or so. It has been incredible."

Ambrose, 63, grew up in Southern California and came here to surf. He also stayed, working as a chef at Turtle Bay (then Kuilima) initially. Head pro Palmer Lawrence steered him into golf in 1974 and Ambrose worked at Barbers Point and Leilehua, where he and Iyoki "worked together five days a week and golfed the other two" at one of the Army’s most successful courses.

"He must have played 8,000 rounds by now," says Honolulu Country Club general manager Gary Brown, who joined Ambrose often. "Rick is about the most real person you will ever meet. Everything is right there, there is no falseness about him. He is dead honest and the most genuine person you would want to meet."

Ambrose and Iyoki retired just short of 65 with health issues. Now they can golf every chance they get, and their health allows. They have never appreciated it more.

"I’m trying to make memories," Iyoki said at a retirement party. "My first 35 years there are not many. The last 28 years have been all good memories and that was the time I spent in golf. Many of these memories keep me going … this is what I cherish most."

Iyoki played high school golf at Saint Louis. Good friend Andrew Feldmann, Oahu Country Club’s head pro, said Iyoki went into the Air Force with a "(minus) seven or eight handicap and when he got out he was a plus."

Iyoki did much more than golf. He was awarded the bronze star — the military’s fourth-highest award for bravery — after a 20-year career that included serving as a pararescue specialist in Vietnam. He worked at Fort Shafter when he first came home in 1997. Iyoki knew precisely how much of an escape the golf course could be for those in the military.

Feldmann calls Iyoki "the consummate pro." He was the Aloha Section PGA Pro of the Year in 2000, merchandiser of the year in 2002 and senior player in 2005.

"He has a huge passion for golf and the golf business," Feldmann says. "You so very rarely come across a person who loves the game as much as he does. He lives, sleeps and breathes golf. He’s very successful in the golf business because he’s so smart, but it’s just a means to an end to where he could play golf and be around it."

Bachran has never played. His professional career began as a general assignment reporter at the Honolulu Advertiser. He would go on to become public relations director for Pan Am, Hawaiian and United, where he got involved with the Hawaiian Open. He ends his career with 141 Hawaii, which has run the event since it became the Sony Open in Hawaii in 1999.

He accumulated a long list of notable friends, from Arnold Palmer, Lanny Wadkins and Hale Irwin on the golf course to "Bill" Holden, Mario Lanza, Norman Rockwell and Andre Kostelanetz on the tarmacs. The past two years, Bachran served as the Sony "historian" out on the course.

"It is such an old tournament and all these years …nobody could have put that on without a great group of volunteers who came back and back and back," he says. "They really solidified it in the early years. Then Sony came in with the Weinberg family and it was just terrific. We had another million dollar year (in non-profit donations)."

It won’t be the same without them.