Coincidentally, when a few golfers decided to resurrect the Oahu Country Club Women’s Invitational five years ago, the trophy was discovered in a clubhouse closet. Now the search for the tournament’s deep roots has become almost as challenging as a downhill putt on one of OCC’s glassy greens.

According to Bill Gee’s "Hawaiian Golf Almanac," written in 1984, the OCC Women’s Invitational started in 1962. That chapter begins "Hawaii’s top female golfers of the last 20 years almost never have won the championship trophy in the popular OCC Women’s Invitational —simply because first prize in the 36-hole tournament goes to the low net scorer."

But a scrapbook found in another one of those clubhouse closets has pictures, labeled in the white crayon of the day, "OCC Invitational – 1953 – July, The First Tournament." There is a picture of Herta Stevens, now 104 and an OCC member, collecting a trophy along with Hawaii Golf Hall of Famer Joan Damon.

There is also talk of a 1952 tournament. And there are more pictures, including one from 1960 that shows a lineup of that year’s champions — Hall of Famer Ethel Kahikina, Esther Kim, Lorna Muller and — in C Flight — future Hall of Famer Beverly (Kong) Kim at age 14.

If that all isn’t confusing enough, the trophy found in 2009 had champions’ names on it, but only from 1971-85.

Kim finished second in the championship flight Tuesday, in the revived tournament’s Stableford format. She remembers the Invitational from the 1950s, when it was dominated by Damon and Jackie Jones.

Judy (Ledesma) Tonda, who coached the Rainbow Wahine golf team, took two titles in the 60s. The first came in 1963, with a "36-hole Eclectic" format — essentially a best-ball competition where a golfer plays two rounds and uses her best score on each hole for the final total.

There were no tournaments in 1965, ’69 or ’70, then Kim and future pros Marga Stubblefield, Brenda Rego, Lynne Winn, Debra Spencer, Jeannette Kerr and Lenore Muraoka dominated the 70s in gross (no handicap) scoring. Muraoka and Kahikina share the tournament stroke-play record at 2-over-par 148 — unless someone in the mysterious and missing ’50s beat it.

Champions in the ’80s included Sharon Goo, Althea Tome and Winn (twice more).

After 1985, there are no records of tournaments being played, until the Invitational made a short-lived return in the late ’90s. Anna Umemura won the low-net (overall) championship in 1999. Two years earlier, she captured all three Hawaii women’s majors (Jennie K., state stroke and match play) in the same year, a feat no one else has accomplished.

But the women’s committee had trouble filling the field in 2000 and so the event was put to rest again.

"Our golf course is severe for ladies who are mid-handicappers," head pro Andrew Feldmann explained last year. "When we used to have the event there were some situations where the ladies really struggled."

In 2009, Feldmann and his crew at the pro shop convinced the women to give it another shot, and offered help. They found the trophy and switched the format to Stableford scoring, with points earned for bogey, par, birdie and better. Not coincidentally — on a course carved beautifully but steeply into Nuuanu Valley — OCC’s Stableford system did not deduct points for big numbers, which come often in hills and valleys.

"We wanted to have a good, solid start to this 10-year revival," co-chair Royce Sonnenberg said in 2009. "Stableford was it."

That year Mid-Pacific Institute graduate Lisa Okazaki, then a University of Portland junior and the youngest in the field at 19, won the gross championship despite not knowing anything about Stableford. Jaye Gray, a 22-handicapper who had joined OCC four months earlier, earned low-net honors in the second Stableford experience of her life. In her first, someone else had to keep her score.

The tournament took another year off in 2010, but has been back three straight years. It has now been around more than 60 years but, like a few folks who play, no one is quite sure exactly how old it really is.