For nearly 50 years, Mark Rolfing watched West Maui transform from irrigated farmland into a tinderbox. Now, as an NBC analyst and longtime resident, he’s issuing the clearest warning the PGA Tour has received about its Aloha Swing future. The deadline is The Players Championship, scheduled for March 10–15, 2026, and the crisis strangling professional golf in Hawaii isn’t logistical—it’s ecological.

The 2026 Sentry was cancelled due to problems with the water and course at Kapalua, but Rolfing traced the roots of today’s catastrophe back decades, to when sugarcane and pineapple plantations blanketed West Maui’s hillsides keeping the land from catching fire. That agricultural infrastructure vanished when tourism replaced farming, and the irrigation systems that had sustained the region were dismantled rather than repurposed.

“Realistically, Trey, I think it’s the Players Championship, which is the third week in March,” Rolfing stated on the Trey Wingo Golf podcast. “That’s two months from right now. I don’t see how you could plan and really get anything organized if you started later than that.”

“Back then, basically, we irrigated this whole side of the island,” Rolfing explained. “Half of the area between Kapalua and here was sugarcane and half of the area from Kahana all the way out to Lao Point was pineapple. And we were effectively farmers.”

The distinction matters because farmers irrigate, and irrigated land resists fire. “When you’re farmers, you irrigate the land. When you irrigate the land, it’s lush and green. It doesn’t catch on fire nearly as easily.”

Hotels and condos sprouted where crops once grew, but the water systems were never replaced. “As we eliminated those two agricultural staples and started building hotels and condos and all that, that agricultural position wasn’t replaced,” Rolfing said. “We didn’t create alternative agriculture.”

The abandoned farmland was colonized by invasive species, who later became the accelerant for disaster. The consequences of that transformation arrived violently in August 2023.

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Mark Rolfing points to the Lahaina fire as PGA Tour’s unheeded warning

“The Cali grass, it just grows where nothing else was, when nothing’s planted,” Rolfing said. “And that’s been a big part of what was the kindling, for lack of a better term, what happened in August of 2023.”

What happened in August 2023 was the deadliest U.S. wildfire in over a century, killing at least 102 people in Lahaina and causing an estimated $5.5 billion in damage. The fire destroyed over 2,200 buildings, erasing residential structures and historic landmarks that had defined West Maui for generations. Rolfing believes the conditions that produced that disaster remain unaddressed.

“We’re going to have another fire. Get ready for it.”

The economic paradox compounds the ecological one. Critics demanding the removal of tourism to conserve water ignore a brutal calculation: without tourism, the jobs that fund land management disappear, and without land management, fire prevention becomes impossible. “If you don’t have the tourism, all the jobs that people rely on go away,” Rolfing warned. “And that creates even a bigger issue from the people that are upset about things. It’s not going to fix the problem. It’s actually going to make the problem worse.”

The path forward requires restoring what was lost rather than choosing between water and tourism. “We have to find some sustainable agriculture to make this thing work and start irrigating this land again so that we don’t have all this brush that basically catches on fire, you know, by itself.”

The PGA Tour’s 2027 return to Hawaii hinges on three resolutions before mid-March: water access clarity, litigation settlement, and a long-term land management strategy. Without progress on these fronts, planning becomes operationally impossible, and the Aloha Swing may fade from the schedule permanently.

“If there was still total uncertainty as to the water situation and the dates and the schedules and all that,” Rolfing concluded, “I think that would be the writing on the wall.”