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Collin Morikawa has pledged to donate $1,000 to Hawaii for every birdie he makes during the finals of the PGA Tour. The money will go towards relief efforts in the archipelago ravaged by fires. The player, who has family on the island of Maui, announced it on his Instagram account during the first of four FedEx Cup playoff tournaments, the St.
Jude Championship, underway in Memphis, Tennessee. “Maui has always held a special place in my heart. My grandfather had a restaurant called The Morikawa Restaurant on Main Street in Lahaina, the city hardest hit by the fires,” Morikawa wrote.
Collin Morikawa, statements
“The people of Hawaii will need all the support we can give them. For the duration of the playoffs, I will donate a thousand dollars for every birdie I make,” he promised. Morikawa's family emigrated from Japan to settle in Hawaii, where his paternal grandparents were born.
Then they settled in California, where the golfer was born in 1997. The American won two Majors, the PGA Championship as a freshman in 2020 and the Open Championship in 2021. Meanwhile, the death toll on the Hawaiian island of Maui has risen to 55, but the numbers could rise further.
Images from the city of Lahina show entire neighborhoods devastated and rubble, even along the famous Front Street, always full of tourists. Thousands of tourists who are fleeing. “The best idea is to try to leave. We set off and as we drove through Lahina, it looked like a war zone.
It really looks like someone came and bombed the whole city. It's completely devastated, all burnt out,” says a Canadian tourist. “We were stuck in our rooms for three days. Without light. Eventually we were escorted out, 1,800 of us.
It was scary because there was no light,” says a California tourist. Fueled by a dry summer and strong winds from a hurricane that remained a long way off Hawaii, the fire took Maui by surprise. It is the deadliest natural disaster in this US state since the 1960 tsunami that killed 61 on the Big Island. .