Jay Hinazumi’s history with Hawaii’s oldest, most iconic golf tournament goes back some 50 years. He was 13 and just starting to play a game that would take over much of his life, in a remarkable way.

Not quite as remarkable as the impact Manoa Cup has had on Hawaii golf since it began in 1907. Its champions crowd the Hawaii Golf Hall of Fame. Its history reaches deep into the hearts and minds of each generation that rises to perpetuate the game.

Hinazumi, who has watched over the Cup 30 years now, knows his mission to keep the Manoa Cup legacy alive now includes finding his own replacement from a new generation.

“He keeps the tradition going,” says Hall of Famer David Ishii, who grew up golfing with Hinazumi. “You need that kind of person to keep amateur stuff continuing, to hold it up. You do it and, like anything else, you get older and somebody has got to take over. We are lucky Jay is still helping and enjoying it.”

He has been since he was chosen to take over more than 30 years ago. “I got shoved into it,” Hinazumi shrugs with a smile.

With an accounting degree, experience managing Hall of Famer Allan Yamamoto’s Golf House shop, work for a golf company he would ultimately acquire and his passion for the game, his background was and is ideal. So is his generous and amiable personality, which draws golfers and pretty much everybody else in the industry to him.

In 1991, he started co-chairing (with host Oahu Country Club) the Manoa Cup — Hawaii’s state amateur match-play championship — and the State Amateur Stroke Play Championship. Since 2008, he has also been president of the Hawaii State Golf Association, in charge of most amateur events.

“For me,” Hinazumi says, “it was just my way of giving back because I benefited throughout my career from the sport.”

The champions at last week’s 112th Manoa Cup paint a vivid picture of Hawaii golf this century. Peter Jung captured the men’s championship three weeks after graduating from Maryknoll. Incoming Moanalua High School junior Ashley Koga is the youngest champion since the Cup added a women’s flight in 2016; there were 31 entrants this year, nearly twice as many as any other. Both beat college players in the finals.

Hinazumi reached the Cup semifinals in 1981. When the four golfers and friends gathered at the first tee, Kalua Makalena told him “maybe we’ll see each other in tomorrow’s final.”

“I looked around and thought, there’s only four people left,” said Hinazumi, “I shouldn’t have woke up.”

Hall of Famer Casey Nakama took him out in the semi. Makalena, whose father Ted won the 1966 Hawaiian Open, claimed the Cup and traditional dunk in the OCC pool.

That tradition and many others live on, in large part because of Hinazumi, OCC’s lush layout and embrace of the event, its match-play format and insistence on golfers walking every hole and, after 112 years, its wondrous history.

It has been a wondrous golf life for Hinazumi, whose career has been happily dictated by the sport.

Yamamoto TOLD him he would leave his part-time college job at GEM department store to manage Golf House. “He said Sunday is your last day at GEM and come around 9 a.m. on Monday, you know where it is,” Hinazumi recalls.

Yamamoto also told him to finish his degree and get back into golf. Hinazumi established a huge network of contacts — and friends — in the game, including the owner of Golf Concepts, which had acquired the E-Z-GO golf cart distributorship along with its equipment and apparel interests. Hinazumi took over the company in 1993.

“That’s how it all began, because I felt so fortunate to be in the right place at the right time,” he says. “I don’t know when I would stop trying to give back. … There’s still a part of me that wants to protect the legacy.

“The tournament just creates all these different feelings — anxiety, happiness, sorrow …. It’s been so much a part of me that until I get to a place where if I go home and I don’t appreciate being here then I’ll stop doing it.

“People ask me when I’ll retire. I worked this hard to develop a reputation, to see all my friends get into good positions. For me it’s not work.

“I guess I can see the fruits of my labor.”