January 5 - 11, 2009
The Plantation Course • Kapalua Resort, Maui
KAPALUA – The Mercedes-Benz Championship, the 2009 PGA Tour season-opening event, will be held Jan. 5-11 at The Plantation Course in Kapalua.
The Mercedes-Benz Championship is a unique PGA tour event since the playing field contains only those golfers who won a PGA tour event in the previous season. Thus, it always attracts an elite field of the best golfers in the world. The tournament’s purse is another attraction to PGA pros Purse is about $5.5 million, with the winner taking home about $1.1 million. The 2008 Mercedes-Benz Championship winner was Swedish PGA pro Daniel Chopra.
The Plantation Course
This par 73, 7,411-yard course, is the course of the champions; the regular site of the US PGA
Tour's season-opening Mercedes Benz Championship which each January features a field made up only of the previous year's PGA Tour winners.
Over the years the field has included most of the world's greatest golfers, Tiger Woods, Vijay Singh, Ernie Els, Retief Goosen, Stuart Appleby and Davis Love III to name just a few.
The grand scale of the course, designed by Ben Crenshaw and Bill Coore, winds like a brilliant green ribbon across spectacular natural geographic formations and pristine pineapple plantation fields.
This is the 10th consecutive season that the Kapalua Resort's Plantation course on the island
of Maui plays host to the Mercedes Championship.
The previous longest hosting was when the tournament and former Tournament of Champions was annually played at the La Costa Resort in Carlsbad California. |