Paka
Meet Paka, a native Hawaiian who didn’t think he’d be alive today.
I was paired up with him at Kahuku Golf Course, and discovered the inspiration to turn his life away from drugs and bad decisions came from an unlikely source.
I sat at the wind-torn picnic tables of this scruffy, seaside nine-holer waiting for someone to play with. That’s when Paka was finishing nine.
“Can I talk you into nine more?” I asked.
“Brother, I was already thinking it. Let’s go,” he said with his patented Hawaiian warmth.
The 35-year-old Oahu native sells tropical fruits at farmers markets on weekends, harvesting during the week. But in spare moments, he’s playing golf—the sport he picked up only a year ago.
However, this life is a far cry from his childhood.
Paka’s mother, in his words, was a crackhead. His father was never around, so by eight he was turned over to his grandparents.
As a teen short on role models but long on bad decisions, Paka headed down the same path as his mother.
“I was doing stupid shit,” he told me as we walked the sun-baked fairways. “Drugs, violence, you name it.”
“It’s really easy to hop on that path. It’s all I knew, I was molded in it. I thought I would’ve been dead by now. Changing is the hard way out.”
So what prompted change?
Right out of high school at 18, Paka got his now-wife pregnant.
“Then my mom, of all people, who said, ‘What are you waiting for, someone to shoot you?’ I either had to clean my shit up or end up dead on the side of the road like my friends.”
Paka chose the hard way out, turned his life around, and is now a father of three.
And a hobby that started as hitting balls into the ocean as an act of aggression has now turned into chasing lower scores, enjoying the zen and peace of the game.
Golf imitates life, for him.
The journey to Hawaii for most is long and expensive, so it’s understandable to fill your time at higher-end resort courses.
But if you want your lens of humanity stretched, go to Kahuku as a single. Maybe you’ll be lucky enough to pair up with a Paka, too.
