It is said that golf needs more of this teammate stuff, and for proof fingers promptly point toward the wildly popular Ryder Cup and, to a lesser degree, the Presidents Cup.
Consider that a most circuitous route to introducing a remarkable team – Mark Rolfing and Maui – that graces our golf landscape the first week of January every year. To whet our golf appetite with television glimpses of the iconic Plantation Course at Kapalua is to savor the sultry sounds of Rolfing’s voice and should you suggest they go together beautifully, well, you are onto the gist of their partnership.
A born-and-raised Midwesterner, Rolfing hails from the Chicago area and went to colleges in Indiana (DePauw, undergraduate) and Illinois (Northern Illinois, graduate) so that explains his roots. But his heart? That was defenseless on a 1975 visit to Maui with his girlfriend Debi Pagel, who was equally smitten with our 50th state.
“We had a blast. We were a couple of young kids feeling our way along our new life,” said Rolfing. “Basically, we never left.”
So, yes, they have been in love with Maui for nearly 50 years and the glory of the story is this – Maui has loved them right back.
“This place," he said, "is part of my soul.”
Golf, no surprise, plays a huge part in Rolfing’s love affair with Maui. Partly because as a young kid with pro golf dreams it was the Hawaiian Open on Oahu that first got him to this slice of paradise, but more because he landed in Maui at a time when a new resort was being built at Kapalua, just up the road from Kaanapali, where Debi worked at the Sheraton.
That Rolfing was willing to join the golf staff and wash carts demonstrated his passion to jump-start his new life. That he quickly impressed management and became a marketing director for the resort pretty much served notice that he was clearly genuine and his ties to Maui were only going to stretch deeper and deeper.
“So much fell in place,” said Rolfing.
He and Debi got married in Maui and have lived in the same condo on Kapalua’s Bay Course for about 40 years. Their ties to this island go deeper than their love of warm temperatures, awe-inspiring views of whales breaching, eclectic cuisine, and the Hawaiian culture; they also embrace the First Tee Program and the Mark and Debi Rolfing Charitable Foundation, at the heart of which is their devotion to children’s charities.
Mark and Debi have scripted a loving story of being licensed foster parents and caring for newborn babies until the children can be reunited with their birth mothers. They have also rallied around their faith to get through Mark’s cancer battle, after he was diagnosed with Stage 4 salivary gland cancer in 2015.
Their journey, which started haphazardly enough in 1975, has always been grounded in Maui and it’s here where doors have opened for Mark in most unexpected ways. When in 1985 Rolfing accepted an offer to help ESPN’s production of the Isuzu International at Kapalua, little did he know it would lead to a job offer with NBC two years later or that it would ignite a golf broadcasting career stretching across five decades.
His TV work has taken him to Europe for Ryder Cups and Open Championships, to the annual showcase at The Players Championships, to U.S. Opens and all the elite PGA Tour stops. A consistently comforting presence on hundreds of broadcasts or in The Golf Channel studios, Rolfing still laughs when he’s reminded of his college days as a DePauw teammate of future vice-president Dan Quayle or those post-collegiate years of chasing the pro dream in 1973-74.
“I had a good junior year, I won a few times,” said Rolfing, “and I think I got a false sense of security.”
There were glimmers of serious progress, like in a 1982 Open Championship qualifier when Rolfing opened with a solid 68 and needed a par on the 36th hole to get into the field at Royal Troon. But he bogeyed and missed out.
There were stints of playing in Asia and Europe, runs at the PGA Tour Qualifying Tournament in ’74 and ’75, and a few spots in PGA Tour stops. “But golf took more than I was willing to commit,” Rolfing once told esteemed sportswriter Art Spander, and he never did earn a PGA Tour card.
Ah, but he did have Debi and they surely had Maui, and that is a most incredible blanket of reality given that they didn’t really have a plan when they discovered in 1975 that Paul Theroux was correct when he wrote, “Hawaii is not a state of mind but a state of grace.”
To watch the Sentry Championship from Kapalua and the Sony Open from Honolulu the very next week is to ease into a new golf year in a warm and comforting fashion. What always resonates is Rolfing’s deep knowledge of both courses – the hilly and lengthy Plantation Course on Maui; the cleverly designed, but very flat Waialae CC on Oahu – and a profound love he has for the charm and culture of his adopted home state.
Rolfing concedes that at various points in the journey, he and Debi thought of moving back to the mainland. Then came the tragedy of August 8, 2023, when fires killed 102 people and burned Lahaina to the ground. Saturated in charm and pure Hawaiian character, Lahaina was personally chosen by King Kamehameha II to be the capital of Hawaii and it maintained that distinction until 1845 when that honor went to Honolulu.
But to the citizenry, Lahaina remained a mecca of tourism and it was the heart of West Maui. Though the fires happened 18 months ago, Lahaina still has a long way to go to be what it once was and Rolfing is like so many of his friends, neighbors, and fellow citizens – mournful of the tragedy, but proud of the way the community has rallied.
“We can’t leave now,” said Mark Rolfing. “We absolutely love it here and there’s so much work to be done.”
